MYSPACE RING QUEENS GETTING THE 411 OUT TO THEIR PEEPS
The MySpace Queens of Boxing
by EDDIE GOLDMAN

At many of the boxing media conferences held in New York, often seated between the rows of rumpled men who look like they down shots and eat steam table food every day beginning at noon, are two attractive African-American women in their late 20's.

They are not someone's party girls or, as some members of a misguided generation prefer to say, biatches. They are there to cover the fights and speak with the fighters, and have actually succeeded in bonding with many of them, especially young up-and-comers, much faster and better than their older, usually whiter, and rarely wiser colleagues.

You may not know their names, but you will now. They are Katrina Walters, 29, and Bernadette Robinson, 27, and they just may be on their way to becoming two of the most important women in boxing today.

Katrina, who lives in Queens, NY, is a boxing writer, a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, a single mom of three, and also a licensed cosmetologist. She has written for several boxing web sites and has recently started her own site, HeavyHitter.org (http://heavyhitter.org/).

Bernadette, who lives in Harlem, is a social service worker who works with people who are living with HIV/AIDS, and has a weekly interview segment on the boxing Internet radio show 'Fight to the Finish'.

Both are active participants on the wildly popular and exponentially growing social networking site MySpace.com (http://www.myspace.com/). And both have positioned themselves to network directly with many fighters and fight fans alike.

Katrina has dubbed herself 'THE FIRST LADY OF BOXING!!!!!' and has her MySpace profile at http://www.myspace.com/queenofboxing.

Bernadette also calls herself the 'Boxing Queen of MySpace' and has her profile at http://www.myspace.com/bernapril20.

Two queens of boxing? Hey, if we can have four heavyweight world champions, we can have two Internet boxing queens.

Despite these regal designations, they hardly regard boxers as subjects or servants or as members of a lower class. On the contrary, they both use their MySpace accounts regularly to send out bulletins and information they received directly from fighters about their upcoming fights, training, news, and more. They are using this site to spread the news about the fighters directly to fight fans who have opted in on MySpace to become their 'friends' (a MySpace term meaning someone with whom you include in your circle and thus communicate directly through posts which are called bulletins and sent to all of them).

You couldn't ask for a better target marketing tool. And the price is right, too  it is free as a bird!

For those still scouring apartment sales and dumpster-diving for correction tape, MySpace has become, according to a report issued earlier this week by the Internet traffic measurement firm Hitwise, the single most-visited U.S. Web site. While Yahoo disputes this report's methodology, since its total network of sites has more hits, nonetheless MySpace has emerged as either the number one or two site on the entire Internet in the U.S.

While this development has been almost totally lost on boxing's establishment (as most things regarding technology, the Internet, and marketing, especially to younger people, have been), many fighters have not only taken notice, but have begun to use MySpace themselves.

There are many profiles listed under fighters names, and some obviously have not been set up by the fighters on their own, most notably the multiple profiles for Mike Tyson. There are others whose origins are murkier, but here are some of the professional fighters that between Katrina, Bernadette, and myself we believe have set up their own profiles:

Vanes Martirosyan
Jerson Ravelo
Pete 'Kid Chocolate' Quillin
Frankie Figueroa
Edgar Santana
Travis Kauffman
Andre Berto
Demetrius Hopkins
Sechew Powell
Maureen Shea
Roberto Benitez
Edner Cherry
Eleazar Renteria

That list is no doubt much longer, and will continue to grow.

When you speak to both Katrina and Bernadette, even though they are both approaching what they are doing on MySpace from different angles, their passion for the fighters stands out.

'I'm helping the fighters through my writing, articles, and interviews the best way I can,' stated Katrina. 'Each of them is a flavor of the gumbo called boxing'. She added that 'she wants to help them One fighter at a time, one pro at a time, one amateur at a time, one female at a time, one male at a time.'

As she explained, she sees each of them Not just as a fighter, but as a person. 'These fighters are not just athletes. Many others,' she said, 'judge them only on whether they won or they lost. And many of these fighters have had to overcome numerous obstacles and detours in their lives: Addictions, drugs, gambling, women.'

So who are these fighters? 'These are everyday people,' she stated. And her role is, 'I talk to these fighters, get inside their heads, pick their brains.'

MySpace, as well as her other writing, allows her to try to connect the fighters directly to the fans. 'I'm bridging that gap,' she said.

Katrina also believes that many fighters fail because of 'Fear of success.' She argued, 'If they get past it, they can be successful. They almost set themselves up for failure. Many have potential to become top fighters, but,' she said, 'they just drop off or bomb. The reason: It wasn't physical, it was mental. And she sees her role as aiding those fighters with the mental aspects.'

Bernadette spoke in a similar vein, noting that 'MySpace is a great place to network with up-and-coming fighters.' She also stressed that 'MySpace gives a personal touch to them.' The fighters, and their supporters, can and have used it so They'll have a strong fan support base.

When Bernadette first signed up for MySpace, it was not her intention to use it to network with boxers. 'I first started last year,' she said. 'I just had no direction.'

Then earlier this year she attended a boxing show at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, and met fighter Maureen Shea and several other fighters, including Frankie Figueroa. She later met Edgar Santana at one of Lou DiBella's shows at the Manhattan Center in New York, and later also Jerson Ravelo.

'Now I know a celebrity,' she said was how she first felt. 'Then this networking began to develop into something more.'

'It's something I love, she said of the sport of boxing and the boxers. I want to communicate with people about it. I want to support them as much as possible.'

She soon began using MySpace to attract other fans to come to the fights. Thus, before Jerson Ravelo fought in May in North Bergen, NJ, she said, 'Jerson had put a bulletin out for all his friends to come to the fight. She reposted that. At that fight were at least ten people I met and others I didn't know that were on MySpace. And, she added, That was cool.'

Now, while many people on MySpace use their bulletins to circulate silly surveys, preposterous hoaxes, and false rumors, Bernadette regularly sends out news about boxing and the boxers.

'We want to get people to go to see the fighters, ' she emphasized. And, echoing Katrina's sentiments perfectly, 'she wants to show that boxers are real people and expose them to people.'

Towards those ends, Katrina, Bernadette, and myself, along with boxing writer Tom Luffman (http://www.myspace.com/tomluffman), who runs the largest boxing forum on MySpace, at http://groups.myspace.com/boxing, with over 3,800 members, are working on a project to develop a text template with a set of categories which fighters can fill out to describe themselves to the world. It then can be pasted into their MySpace profiles, thus assisting them in getting their stories out to the public.

So far here is the draft of this template:

Name:
Nickname (if any):
Sex (male or female):
Nationality:
Birthplace:
Residence:
Birth date:
Stance (orthodox or southpaw):
Height:
Weight class(es):
Trainer:
Manager (if any):
Promoter (if any):
Titles won (if any):
Other comments (if any):

Yes, some of it is roughly borrowed from what appears on boxrec.com. The fighters must also update their own records, or place a link to their record on boxrec.com. It is obviously a work in progress.

But the task of fighters using MySpace to communicate directly with the fans has long since begun, however much in the dark the promoters, networks, and media may remain. The MySpace revolution is here, and all for the better for the fighters in this hidebound boxing racket.

(My profile on MySpace, by the way, is at http://myspace.com/nhbnews. If you look at my photo on that page, I'm the one with the glasses.)

No Holds Barred blog http://nhbnews.blogspot.com/
No Holds Barred podcast http://nhbnews.podomatic.com/
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http://www.myspace.com/nhbnews
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