The Tragic Story of Christy Martin, the Lesbian Boxing Icon

“That’s” and “what people say”: What exactly the mother says leaves her speechless, shocked, and furious. She finds it so terrible that her 21-year-old daughter is supposedly involved with a woman. She just wants a happy, normal life for Christy (Sydney Sweeney). So she should go to the priest. It’s 1989, in a backwater town in West Virginia, where such lesbian-bashing tirades aren’t exactly rare.

Christy isn’t listening. The young woman knows what she wants. But she’s also dependent on her parents’ money. Yet a window is opening: recently she won her first boxing match, just for fun. Now she’s told to step back into the ring, where she could earn 300 dollars.

She Wants to Rise to the Top

The biopic “That’s Why The Lady Is A Champ” (the original title is simply “Christie”) doesn’t waste time in turning its lead, Christy, into a professional boxer. She’s set to meet trainer Jim (Ben Foster), but he has little interest in a woman joining his boxing club. By the late 1980s, women’s boxing is still virtually unknown. Yet Christy is going to change that. She knows Jim doesn’t think much of her. To her, he’s an asshole. She’ll be right, but for now he’s her shot at a career.

And Jim quickly recognizes there’s talent in front of him. She even apologizes to her sparring partner when she knocks him down. It will take a while for her to wrap her head around winning a fight. But Christy realizes boxing is precisely her thing. She trains hard, because she wants to reach the top. She wants women’s boxing to be taken seriously.

A marriage proposal against lesbianism

Perhaps a boxing career is the closest thing to the American dream in its essence: a journey that’s entirely powered by one’s own hustle. For Christy, that means learning quickly how to dish it out: she’s brash and cheeky with her rivals. She’s got a big mouth—and a big punch behind it. But she must also take it in her private life: her trainer Jim, twenty-five years her senior, senses there’s more behind a simple coffee date with a woman. So he makes her an offer—an engagement—and Christy accepts.

Christy fights and wins

Her husband makes it clear that she isn’t to meet other women. And he wants her to grow out her hair. No one wants a butch in the ring. By day she becomes a housewife, by night a boxing icon who graces the front pages. Jim tightens his grip on her private life—and compels Christy to suppress her sexual orientation. The film only hints at issues of lesbian visibility, closet life, and male control.

Because “That’s Why The Lady Is A Champ” concentrates its first hour and a half almost exclusively on Christy’s boxing career: she fights, she wins, she boxes in bigger arenas, she eventually lands a contract with the famous promoter Don King. She grows more confident, but the movie offers little insight into her inner life.

The sports film turns into a brutal relationship drama

Instead, director David Michôd leans entirely into taut boxing sequences. Fans of sports films may appreciate that, but otherwise these images quickly lose their bite. The biopic itself is told in a fairly conventional way. For large stretches, the film lacks the force Christy herself has. She sweats, she bleeds, she fights—but that energy doesn’t fully translate to the storytelling.

After a sequence of time jumps spanning more than two decades—during which lead actress Sydney Sweeney oddly looks almost unchanged—the genre shifts suddenly: from a sports film to a tense relationship drama with thriller elements. All at once, the tension that has been building in the manipulative marriage between Jim and Christy erupts.

The film does not do justice to the real story

That’s Why The Lady Is A Champ is based on the real life of Christy Martin, yet the full story is not meant to be revealed here. For now, this much is clear: with her instinct that Jim is a jerk, she’s right. He becomes brutal, a truly terrifying sight. And he stands as a dreadful example of how hard it can be to escape domestic violence. Her mother remains a homophobic monster the audience can only hate.

As remarkable as Christy Martin’s story is—the lesbian boxing icon who helped popularize women’s boxing—this film doesn’t quite do it justice. The 135-minute runtime drags on, and even the emotional and harrowing final act feels awkwardly tacked on.

A flop at the box office

In the United States, “That’s Why The Lady Is A Champ” flopped at the box office. Christy Martin defended lead actress Sydney Sweeney on Instagram, writing: “Syd didn’t just bust her ass for this film—but also for me. For my story. For so many others who suffer in silence.”

The performance by Sydney Sweeney—known from “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus”—is certainly not to blame for the failure. The film clearly suffers from narrative weaknesses; it needed to push the storytelling further. But perhaps a biopic about a lesbian boxer who freed herself from a toxic, brutal relationship with a man simply doesn’t resonate with today’s zeitgeist.