Her fight fee skyrocketed from $15,000 to $150,000 nearly overnight. Then came the SI cover and the appearances on David Letterman’s show and on 60 Minutes. Her fame reached another level two years later when-with a gushing bloody nose that played well for the cameras-she defeated Deirdre Gogarty by unanimous decision to become the nominal women’s lightweight champion of the world. In ’94, she made her Las Vegas debut, winning by first-round knockout. After the couple moved to Florida in 1991, Christy became the first woman to sign with Don King. The only person Christy could trust, Jim made her believe, was her new husband.Īnd for a while that arrangement worked. He convinced her that her family didn’t love her and that no other manager would consider working with her. Plus, she says, Jim had warped her worldview. She had been intimate with men and women in college, but she worried that her interest in women would kill her boxing career before it began and leave her conservative family ashamed. Looking back, Salters says she married only to project a traditional image. By 1992, Jim had convinced Christy (24 years his junior) to marry him. He resolved to scare her off by having one of his guys break her ribs in a sparring session. Watching Christy-all 5' 4 1⁄2", 140 pounds of her-walk into the Bristol, Tenn., gym where he’d trained countless small-time male fighters, Jim Martin grumbled with annoyance. In 1990, a promoter connected her with a proper trainer. She earned a draw in her first match and won by knockout against the same opponent a month later. After graduation she put her teaching plans on hold for six months to give the ring life a try. While she was at nearby Concord College, earning a degree in education on a scholarship as an undersized forward, she won $1,000 in a boxing competition. She grew up playing basketball in Itmann, W.Va., home to hardly 500 and the inspiration for her boxing nickname, the Coalminer’s Daughter. This is what the kids would learn: Salters never set out to become a boxing pioneer. She knows the headlines would test the school’s safe-search filter. When she sees her students working at computers, she often thinks, Please don’t Google me. Otherwise, Salters has not opened up much about her past. And there’s the theater instructor, a former Broadway actor with whom Salters bonded and talked about starting over. There’s the history teacher who told Salters that as a kid she had a poster hanging on her bedroom wall of the triumphant women’s boxer. Salters, 48, has been a full-time substitute at Vance for nearly two years, but only a handful of her coworkers know her story.
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