‘Shut up little girl, you don’t look like a fighter’: Boxing champ reveals mind-boggling sexist comments thrown at her
She’s been told she’s too pretty to box, but Taylah Robertson is proving all of her critics wrong. She’s revealed the appalling sexist comments made to her about her decision to get in the ring.
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Hear this. Taylah Robertson, professional boxer, is not too small, too blonde or too sweet. She is not too pretty. She does not fight well for a girl. She just fights well. End of story.
Robertson, 23, of Hamilton, in Brisbane’s north, is a young woman with a fierce determination to cast off the typical reactions to her chosen career.
Yes, she is pretty and blonde and petite and female.
But looking past all that, (and isn’t it time society did?), she has one simple mission – to be undeniably the best in her chosen sport.
When Robertson tells people she is a boxer, their usual reply will go something like this: “Oh, you mean boxercise?’, or “You don’t look like a fighter’’, or “Don’t you worry about your looks?’’.
If she is in a bar watching a fight on TV and expresses an opinion on the bout, she has been chopped down with, “Shut up little girl, what do you know about boxing?”
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
With boxing gloves on and sparring in the training ring, Robertson’s friendly demeanour transforms into one of steely resolve.
Her eyes laser in on her target.
She becomes a fearsome powerhouse of jabs, hooks, uppercuts. Her aim is to destroy, to cause pain, to win.
Robertson is 164cm tall and competes in the sport’s bantamweight division that has a maximum weigh-in of 53.5kg.
After five Australian titles, a Commonwealth Games bronze medal and a swag of medals in international tournaments, Robertson made her professional debut in February last year at the Sleeman Sports Complex at Chandler, in Brisbane’s south, against Brisbane’s Ranee Klinratree.
Robertson won emphatically in 56 seconds in a clinical first-round technical knockout.
On Friday, Robertson will compete in her third professional fight, challenging for the Australian Professional Bantamweight Title against Muay Thai champion Callie Ryan at the Gold Coast Croation Sports Centre, Carrara.
She has a clear ambition – to be the undisputed champion of the world in her weight division. This means holding world titles from all of the major sanctioning organisations, following in the footsteps of the only other Australian to achieve this – former professional boxer Kostya Tszyu.
Any descriptions of her as a “boxing beauty’’ don’t even come close.
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Robertson was born in Townsville but movedto Ipswich with her family – mother Cassandra, 50, father Dean, 52, and sister Brittnee, 25 – when she was a few months old.
The family later moved to Brisbane, following her dad’s army postings.
When she was eight years old, her parents separated and she moved to Bribie Island with her mum and sister to live near her grandmother, Betty, 75. She attended the island’s Banksia Beach State School and later high school at St Columban’s College at Caboolture.
Growing up, Robertson was always tiny for her age. She was head and shoulders smaller than anyone in her grade and didn’t hit puberty until she was 16. Her mum even took her to the doctor to check her development was on track.
With her mum working full-time as a real estate agent, Betty, who minded her granddaughters after school, suggested Robertson take up a sport.
Her mum was thinking along the lines of tennis but Robertson had other ideas.
A self-described tomboy, she grew up attracted to skateboarding and surfing and so when one of the boys down the street took up boxing, she was keen to do the same.
“I was a tomboy and boxing really appealed to me in the sense that I wanted to be able to be stronger,’’ she says.
“I was a really little girl and I thought I was never going to grow.’’
And so at age 11, Robertson began training at the Bribie Island Boxing Club. Betty happily drove her there, watching her thrive with the physical training and discipline of running and bag drills.
She was the only girl in the gym and there was no heavy contact involved because of her size.
But then Robertson, with stars in her eyes from watching boxing legend “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’’ Muhammad Ali, wanted to step up to take on fights.
But her size meant there was no one her height or weight to be fairly matched against.
“I was training with the boys and it was becoming really disappointing,’’ Robertson says.
“So they matched me against boys or girls who were a lot bigger than me and because it was an uneven match, it was classed as an exhibition, there were no winners or losers.
“My first 15 matches were exhibitions. I finally got my first proper fight when I was about 14.’’
And from there, Robertson says she “had to beg’’ her mum and nan to allow her to continue the sport that was only recognised as an Olympic sport for women at the 2012 London games.
“I had to beg them to keep fighting every year. They supported me but, until the end of grade 12, I had to beg,” she says.
“Through high school I had a little bit of a plan to go to uni to do media studies. But when it came down to it, I just wanted to box.
“We had some arguments because mum wanted me to go to university, she wanted me to do well for myself.
“But my heart just wasn’t in media, it was in boxing. I just didn’t want to give it up.’’
After school, Robertson moved out of home to Cooroy, west of Noosa on the Sunshine Coast, where she trained at the town’s Impact Boxing under coach Mark Evans.
At 19, she was selected in the Coast Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games team and came home with a bronze medal.
Robertson has also competed for Australia in a variety of international tournaments in Poland, Ireland, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Indonesia and Russia.
For a while, she fell into the habit of getting a tattoo before her fights in each country (her first was in Poland at age 17).
She would then go on to win, creating something of a good luck superstition. But she has stopped at eight tattoos “otherwise I’d have 50 by now’’.
She is saving the next one for her first world title.
A goal was to compete at the Tokyo Olympic Games but, with a busy international schedule, she didn’t compete in the first qualifying Olympic tournament and then COVID caused other qualifying events to be cancelled.
With Robertson’s decision to turn professional, she will then also be ineligible for the 2024 Games because, by then, she plans to have more than 10 professional bouts to her name (Olympic boxing athletes must have fewer than 10 to be eligible).
But there are other fish to fry.
“I want to be the undisputed world champion – to own all the world titles in my weight division. To beat everyone in front of me,’’ Robertson says.
“I’d like to become a household name, to leave a mark on the sport. I want my platform to be bigger so other girls can follow.
“And I just want to be so undeniably good that people can’t say anything. When people watch me, I want them to know I can fight.’’
For the past two months, Robertson has been coached by former soldier Glenn Azar who owns Project 180 gym at Newstead.
Azar spent 17 years in the Australian Army, mostly as an aeromedical evacuation medic.
After discharging from the military in 2010, he began his own adventure company, Adventure Professionals, and in 2016 he founded The Building Better Humans Project podcast.
He is a qualified registered nurse and life coach and is studying a psychology degree. A healthy mindset is one of his four pillars of the Building Better Human project (the others are planning, fitness and adventure).
And Azar knows something about having a strong mindset. In 2016, his daughter Alyssa became the youngest Australian, at age 19, to summit the world’s highest peak, Mt Everest. She did it again in 2018, making her the youngest woman in the world to summit from both the north and south routes.
Azar and Robertson met last year when Robertson, with no fights available to her due to COVID, was busying herself with a YouTube series called Unchartered Waters.
In this, she challenged herself to train with other elite athletes and, in turn, challenged them to get in the boxing ring.
Episodes include her having a go at rugby union (with Quade Cooper, Lolo Fakaosilea and Ziah Faasee), extreme cliff diving (with athlete Xantheia Pennisi), bodybuilding (with trainer Jackson Johnson) and motorbike stunt riding (with Nitro Circus where Robertson scored her first facial scar from whacking her head on the bike on a landing).
Faasee, who works with Azar at his gym, was the link between Azar and Robertson.
Azar, 48, who is also a former boxer, started working with Robertson to develop a stronger mindset and employed her at his gym teaching boxing to corporate clients. About two months ago, he began as her coach.
Robertson trains two to three times a day, six days a week with a combination of sparring, strength training, cardio and mindset development.
“I’ve trained amateur and professional fighters and fought myself my whole life,’’ Azar says.
“When I met Tay, I didn’t see her as a 53kg girl, I saw her as a fighter who says she wants to be world champion. Her weight division, her age, her gender is irrelevant.
“She has this real intensity about her, particularly when she talks about fighting. I thought, she’s going to go somewhere.
“I’ve got three daughters and I just believe, as with Alyssa, that women can do anything. But they do need to be supported in that process.’’
Azar says he believes Robertson has what it takes to be an undisputed world champion and that her determination is palpable.
“Tay doesn’t muck around. She is a different animal when she gets inside a ring,’’ he says.
“You can see a whole change in her demeanour – the steely look on her face like she is literally going into battle. You can hear the power, you can feel the difference. She looks scary.
“Boxing is a tough game. Sometimes you get into dark places in fights. If you get to the last two rounds of a fight and the other girl just wants it more and you are fatigued, are you willing to dig in? But she is relentless. She is absolutely relentless.’’
In 2019, Robertson was bestowed the name “The Matador’’ by renowned boxing trainer Johnny Lewis OAM who has trained the likes of Jeff Fenech, Kostyu Tszyu and Jeff Harding.
He gave her the moniker because of her style of fighting – she can be right there in front of her opponent but they still can’t hit her. She says she has not suffered any major boxing injury, not even a cut eye or blood nose.
And she has thoroughly embraced the nickname, wearing the colour red in the tradition of bullfighters’ capes and a mouthguard that is emblazoned with the name.
If Robertson does cop a punch, she says she “sees red’’.
“I have respect for my opponents outside the ring but, inside, it’s a different story,’’ she says.
“The second the bell goes, it changes for me. My focus is to hurt them. I have a really big will to win. And if I do get hit, I think, ‘how dare you?’, it makes me see red.’’
The comments about Robertson’s appearance and her chosen sport started in earnest when she was about 17 and making national teams and winning Australian titles.
“I think people expect girls who box to look a certain way, to be butch, almost manly. Everyone writes me off straight away,’’ she says.
“Lots of people have doubted me. Mostly older men are the worst for it. They say, ‘aren’t you worried about messing your face up?’ or they assume I mean boxercise.
“But then, also, if you are really good, they say ‘she fights like a man’.’’
Azar says there are long-embedded, persisting ideals in society where women are the “pretty little side piece to our lives and that’s where they belong, or worse, where they should aim to stay’’.
“As Tim Tszyu (Kostya’s boxer son) has risen to prominence, we have never heard anyone question him as to why he does this,’’ he says.
“No one has asked that hard-hitting, deep question of, ‘aren’t you worried about your looks?’.
“With Tay, I’ve heard it over and over … people say, ‘she’s pretty good, for a girl’. They just have to add that bit in.’’
Issues of gender don’t stop there. There are also vast pay imbalances between male and female boxers.
Azar says, simply, “there is a massive pay disparity’’. But he believes Robertson has the potential to be Australia’s “first million dollar female fighter”.
He says Irish fighter Katie Taylor is the highest paid female boxer and the first to earn $1m in a fight.
“America’s Claressa Shields is considered the best female boxer in history. She has had nine world title fights and owns all of the titles in her division and her earnings for her last world title defence was $60,000,’’ Azar says.
“To give that context, the champion is usually paid more than the challenger.
“George Kambosos (Jr) is an Australian challenger for the upcoming world title. He has never held a world title nor fought for one and he is about to be paid $2.1m for his fight.
“Katie Taylor is also an undisputed world champion in her division with 13 world title fights – so Kambosos is being paid more than both Claressa and Katie combined in their
last fights.
“In Australia, Shannon O’Connell is a three-time world champion and is paid $8,000 to $12,000 per fight. Tim Tszyu has never fought for a world title and is currently paid between $500,000 and $1,000,000 per fight. Jeff Horn was earning around $2 million per fight as champion.
“So the pay disparity is quite stark but I believe Taylah is a trailblazer. She has huge potential.’’
Robertson’s mum Cassandra and nan Betty have been spectators at almost all of her Australian fights and plan to attend her challenge for the bantamweight title – her first step working her way up the ladder towards claiming a world title.
There’s a good chance, however, Betty will have her eyes covered for some of the action.
“Yeah, nan is a bit squeamish sometimes,’’ Robertson says.
“Mum is my biggest supporter now and I can hear her yelling out during the fights.’’
Also in her corner, is her father Dean, her stepfather Cameron Gray, 52, her step siblings Blake, 24, and Jorgia, 20, and her girlfriend of two months Anna Tracey, 21, who works in childcare and who has never been around boxing before.
The couple met at a Brisbane music festival in April.
“Anna’s really sensitive and doesn’t like violence. She can’t even watch scary films,’’ Robertson laughs.
Azar counts himself as fortunate to have met and be coaching Robertson.
“For me, how many people run into two humans like Alyssa and Tay?’’ he says.
“With Alyssa, I was told for years, ‘Why is she doing that, why would you let her do that, what if something happens to her?’
“When I met Tay, I’d already heard all that. And I can see that if you just give them the tools to be whatever they want to be, they stand on top of the world.
“I wouldn’t care if my kids wanted to be hairdressers, doctors, boxers or to climb Mt Everest. What matters is that we give them the tools to be whatever they want to be.
“Yes, Tay is a little girl but you wait until you see her fight.’’
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