Zimbabwe's First Lady of Boxing
Zimbabwe’s First Lady of Boxing
When Lorraine Muringi received the distinction of being honoured as the World Boxing Council’s (WBC) “Boxing Lady Of The Year, 1992, in solidarity with the United Nation’s “Year Of The Women”, she had officially broken the 30 year stranglehold which men had on that international organisation. Seven years earlier, Lorraine had been breaking down barriers in the administration of professional boxing, known as a man’s domain, on the continent of Africa. She is the only woman in Zimbabwe to hold a Professional Boxing Promoter’s license, which allows her to promote local boxing tournaments. In order to broaden the field of opportunity for her boxers, Lorraine went on to obtain a Promoter’s license from the continental body, the then African Boxing Union (ABU) which enables her to promote professional boxing in any African country.
Lorraine, an African - American, who married a Zimbabwean, Robson Muringi, in New York in 1972, came to Zimbabwe with her husband and their four children in 1981, after Zimbabwe’s war of liberation was won. Lorraine arrived on this continent with a peripheral knowledge of the sport of boxing which she had gained in childhood when her younger brother, Saoul Mamby, made boxing his career and went on to become the WBC’s Super Lightweight Champion from 1980 - 1982.
Lorraine did not choose promoting boxing as a career move, she already had a career as an accountant, but rather the sport of boxing choose her. The opportunity came when she read in the local Zimbabwean press that a boxer, Kilimanjaro, had just participated in a tournament, which had not been well organised. Speaking to her husband Robson, she said, “I could organise a tournament better than that!” Robson, challenged her by responding, “Why don’t you, you‘re good at organising”. Lorraine immediately took up the challenge and sought a license. When she asked the clerk at the licensing department, “How does one get a boxing promoter’s license?’’ he looked at the slim, diminutive woman in front of him and laughed heartily. Her response to him was, “You’re going to read about me some day”. Read about her he certainly did because what was to follow is still making history.
On 17th October 1984, Lorraine was invited to attend a meeting of the Zimbabwe National Boxing and Wrestling Board of Control. Her husband escorted her to the meeting and members of the Board for having brought his wife to do a man’s job jokingly chided him. They were good-naturedly pointing out an irony and their levity only masked their respect for the way she held her own during the interview. The license was granted and Lorraine was eligible to promote professional boxing in Zimbabwe as of December 1984.
Lorraine then founded Ring Promotions and her first effort was to host a boxing convention which was held in May 1985, where she invited the then boxing fraternity and the sports writers in Zimbabwe to discuss the problems facing the sport to find out what could be done about them. In short, she was letting the public know that the new female professional boxing promoter was on the scene, and working to rectify those problems. The following year in May, Lorraine, promoted her first boxing tournament and another boxing convention in November. She soon realised that the leading sport in Zimbabwe was soccer and that boxing as a sport had a very small spectator audience by comparison. She resolved that if people were unwilling to come to see boxing she would have to bring boxing to them. Two hundred people could not fill a stadium, but that same number could fill a room at a five star hotel, so why not offer them a Dinner Boxing Show. Lorraine gave her diners a Las-Vegas-style show that also included, at least three boxing bouts to end the evening’s entertainment. This format was winning over new spectators to the sport and exposing boxers to an audience who would not ordinarily have gone to a stadium to enjoy boxing. To expand her knowledge in boxing to its fullest, Lorraine started attending International Boxing Conventions. The up-to-date information she acquired there was brought back to Zimbabwe to help the local boxers improve their awareness of the changing rules and regulations in the sport. She also made contacts with international promoters and managers in order that she could expose her boxers outside of their own boundaries. For instance, Ray Akway left Zimbabwe in 1987 to challenge Tyrone Downs in Trinidad and Morgan Maphosa met Ray Minus Jr. in 1988 in the Bahamas, both for Commonwealth Titles bouts.
By 1987, Lorraine had established the Mamby Amateur Boxing Club. By 1988, she had set up the first boxing clinic ever to be held in Zimbabwe. An American boxer and his trainer had read Lorraine’s pleading in a boxing magazine for help in upgrading the boxing skills of Zimbabwean boxers. The Brunette brothers from Minnesota, who were world-class professionals, answered the call by coming to conduct the clinic. As an outgrowth of this clinic, Ndaba Dube an amateur boxer was able to attend the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games where he fared well for Zimbabwe.
The Ring Promotions Boxer Of The Year Award Night was instituted by Lorraine in 1991, when she noticed that the annual Sports Person of The Year Award, hosted by a local daily paper recognised a boxer only once. Ring Promotions, which got its title by taking the “ring” out of Muringi fulfilled this lack of recognition for the sport by hosting an Award Night Dinner annually to present a Best Boxer, a Best Sports Writer in boxing, and an outstanding Donor-to-the-Sport award. Her involvement in these international conventions gave her extensive knowledge, which made her realise that judges and referees in the sport lacked skills in their respective aspects of the sport. She, therefore, established workshops to upgrade their skills in 1995. As a consequence of her efforts to fill the vacua of the sport, more Zimbabweans are skilled as trainers, referees, and judges.
Throughout the past twelve years, try to conceptualise with Lorraine the obstacles to be overcome, the barriers to be knocked down, the ridicule to be ignored and the professional envy to be deflected. However, she has dismissed those problems as inconsequential as she focuses on the number of people brought into the sport, the number of boxers trained, the awards presented, the amount of current information disseminated, and the array of skills brought into the lives of young people. Lorraine’s thoughts are only of her successes. There is the story of Joseph who attended his first clinic barefoot, and won the “tough guy” award at the end of the clinic and went on to join the Air Force of Zimbabwe’s Boxing Team where he is being groomed in the sport and serving his country. She boasts of the boxer who was able to build his house in the rural area because of his boxing earnings outside the country. She, in turn, earns the gratitude of the boxer’s wives who thank her for getting their husbands out of the beer halls and into a worthwhile sport.
Lorraine Muringi’s name has been fixed
in history on all of the various occasions when she pursued licenses and
activities, which demonstrates that the business of boxing administration is
not the exclusive preserve of men. Of even greater significance, is the
fact that an African - American women could migrate to her husband’s place of
birth and become so much a part of her adopted home that she would engage in a
very unique aspect of that society’s development. Zimbabweans are,
indeed, proud of her. Lorraine is affectionately called Zimbabwe’s First
Lady of Boxing.