Sarah Watt: “I am a fighter. I’ve been fighting my whole life.”

Sarah Watt: “I am a fighter. But I’ve been fighting my whole life.”

Sarah Watt has just turned 39. A boxer by trade. But as she says herself, it’s been a lifetime of fighting. Watt was born in Benalla, Victoria, Australia. In many ways, it’s been a life of swimming against the tide. She has some story. In her own words, this is that story.

“I am a fighter. But I’ve been fighting my whole life,” Watt told me. “And long after I’ve hung up the gloves, I’ll continue to be a fighter because it’s a constant I’ve forever known. I came into this world fighting as a severe asthmatic, and I continued to wage many battles with asthma growing up and I still do now, with too many stints in the hospital to count as a kid. I’ve always been wired a bit differently. My curiosity and desire to pursue things I’m passionate about have far outweighed any need to conform or fit in. In primary school, I remember running hill sprints in my lunch break or after school, while most of the other kids were painting nails or just mucking about. And it continued to manifest throughout my high school years. When most kids were sleeping or heading to hang out at the local shopping centre after school, I was training because that’s where I preferred to be. Even though I had to create these opportunities for myself. Being a kid from the bush and going to high school in a town (Maryborough) almost an hour away. I even started a football (Australian rules football) team because one didn’t exist and I just really wanted to play the game. The fact that I was a girl just seemed irrelevant (I started a boys’ team and put myself on it because girls’ football just didn’t exist back then). I fought people and the system for the right to keep playing through until I was 17 years old. I was just as good as most of the lads, using my speed and tenacity, so I knew I deserved to be there. Today, I joke that as a boxer, I’m a bit different from the other mums at school pick-up, but I’ve always been pretty comfortable chasing my own dreams. Even though it’s pretty consistently been ‘a bit different’ (and before being ‘different’ was seen as being cool).

“As a 10-year-old, I discovered a love for running. The delight I found in being able to push myself harder in order to go faster and pass others, and the fact you needed nothing but your own two legs to do it. I was hooked. For short-term suffering, there seemed to be so much more to be gained. When I was competing in a triathlon as a teen, I remember thinking the people who’d stopped to spew were crazy because spewing was something you could do while you continued to run and they were just undoing all the hard work they’d done.

“At 17, I moved to the big smoke of Brisbane for university in pursuit of a career in sports science. Nobody in my extended family had ever been to university, and in fact, neither of my parents had finished grade 10. But my parents were unreal and brought us kids up to believe that anything was possible if we were prepared to work for it. They didn’t even really need to tell us. They just showed us. And they taught us never to listen to the naysayers. We’d originally lived in county Victoria on a sheep farm, but when the price of wool went to shit, Mum and Dad pulled up stumps, bought a caravan and a car with whatever they could get for the farm and took me and my three siblings (two sisters and a brother) around Australia for almost two years. It was the 90s, and particularly as a family of six, it wasn’t the done thing, so they copped some flack for it. We settled in country Qld and together (they honestly did most of the work, of course) we built a house out of mud bricks. They were resourceful and creative, always finding a way to provide a safe and fun childhood. It never felt like we missed out. My mum was a runner before she had us kids. I found a medal in the bottom of a bag one day and remember vividly marvelling at it and the idea you could win such a thing for being the fastest. It kind of lit a fire for me. That and a lot of time spent watching my old man and his mates (many of whom are like uncles to me) go about their football. These two were a constant painting of grit and determination. I’m pretty grateful it rubbed off on me. And they moved mountains to make my sporting pursuits a reality, running me around the country for athletics and footy, picking me up from athletics training often one and a half hours away from home. Mum coaching me in athletics in the earlier years and Dad coaching my footy team and fighting for me to be allowed to play. I got pretty serious about athletics, competing regularly at state level in the 100m and 200m against the likes of Sally Pearson (who went on to be an Olympic medallist).

“Life at university was tough. With no car, I rarely made it back to see my family and I was well and truly living below the poverty line, despite working multiple jobs, including house painting (a skill I’d learnt from working with my old man) and bartending in a strip club, to try and make ends meet while managing a full-time study load and still trying to pursue sport. The university had a good track program, and women’s AFL was just becoming a thing. But life had other plans. After busting my collarbone at a state carnival 3 weeks prior, I went on to do my ACL in a final I probably shouldn’t have been playing in. After a dodgy surgery (which I only uncovered 5 years and plenty of irreversible damage later), my prospects of being any kind of athlete seemed diminished.

“After completing my degree (exercise science at the University of QLD), I won a position at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) for the Beijing Olympic year. If I couldn’t be an athlete, the next best thing to me seemed to be helping others do exactly that. The hours were long, the pay was terrible and the work was tough, sometimes running a heavy camera trolley up and down pool deck for sprinters or triathletes doing a 1km time trial, but I loved the experience and all that came with it. It was a dream job, and I’d come a long way for a kid from rural QLD. But for as much as I loved helping Olympians with sports science, there were already Olympians, so the sense of how much difference I was really making wasn’t great. And I missed working with team sports. Thus, I was drawn back to AFL, going on to work as a high-performance coach for a semi-elite AFL club in Canberra.

“As a female still in a male-dominated industry in a male-dominated sport, it had its challenges, but I was able to prove myself, producing the fittest team with the least amount of injuries to a grand final. Fate came knocking once more. This time for the better. An old AIS colleague reached out to me to let my footballers know they were running a talent draft, looking to convert athletes of alternate sports into combat sports. I rounded up the couple who were interested and took them along to the testing. At the last minute, one of them asked why I wasn’t putting my hat in the ring, too. I was playing football at the time and had actually always wanted to box. As cliche as it is, I’d seen a movie as a teenager, Girl Fight, that absolutely made me want to box. But life kept getting in the way, and maybe this was my shot. Long story short, I jumped into the testing, got invited back to a camp that we who endured it dubbed ‘the hunger games’ and landed one of two female boxing scholarships in Australia through this process.

“I’m an all-in kind of person in the things I pursue so I changed careers to the public service (the hours were much more conducive to my own boxing training) and began training like a woman possessed. The way I saw it, I had no time to waste. Time wasn’t on my side, I had a bad knee, and there were other athletes years ahead of me in this pursuit. I was like a dog with a bone harassing my coach at the time to let me fight. After three months, I wore him down and had my first fight against someone who’d had almost 20 fights. I was excited, chewing at the bit to get in there and see what I could do. I’ve never felt more alive than when I was in that ring. I lost, but it was an epic battle, and I was hungrier than ever. I chased fights all over the country, taking every opportunity that came my way. I went back to beat my first opponent on my third attempt. I racked up TKOs against opponents in Melbourne and Brisbane. The scholarship lasted a couple of years and gave me a leg up in the form of training camps and some funding to support travel for fights and even a training camp in Thailand. I adopted a training routine of two sessions a day, six days a week – a routine I’ve pretty much maintained until this day.

“I fought at Nationals at the end of 2015 and then another twist of fate. I was pregnant. I was so shocked I did a bunch of pregnancy tests and even made my doctor do a blood test (who texted me the next day to tell me I was ‘very pregnant’). After early-stage cervical cancer in 2011, I was told I’d never had kids. It was tough at the time, I gave my partner the option to go (he stayed), then threw myself into boxing. So you can imagine my shock when those two little lines showed up. Shock and sheer joy. For pretty much the next nine months, I’d wake up every day, feel my growing belly, panicking that it was all a dream, and be absolutely delighted to know it was very real. I trained throughout my pregnancy (and the next), with the basic understanding that it’s healthy to keep doing everything you were already doing. There were a few amendments each time, like sparring to the head only (where I was allowed to throw to their body and let me tell you, the lineup for body shots on me post-baby eviction was long) and most core exercises were out. In June 2016, I gave birth to a beautiful (large – 4.5kg) baby boy, Jamison. After five months, I was back in the ring but I was at a bit of a crossroads with boxing. My coach just so happened to coach another elite female in the same weight division, who of course happened to be her daughter, which put him in an increasingly impossible situation. And the gym was on the other side of town, and travelling over there with a Bub a lot of the time (my partner worked away a lot) was proving a challenge. I’d always loved the idea of being a one ‘club/coach’ athlete but based on these factors I parted on good terms, moving to a gym less than ten minutes from home.

“I met some great people at the new gym – both coaches and fellow athletes, some of whom even became fellow mums. They quickly became my boxing family and things were good. I went on to win a few more state titles, represent my state at Nationals four more times and won the Australian Golden Gloves, taking on a tough Kiwi opponent for the win. My Olympic dream that was born when I was only a small child was still alive. But, I fell short at National selection for Beijing and at 36, the writing was on the wall. I had racked up 36 fights over six years as an amateur. Not bad for someone who was told they’d never run again (due to the permanent damage to the knee) and had two kids along the way.

“In October of 2020, in the midst of Covid, we had a little girl, Darcy. At the time, a teammate was about to turn pro, and I decided to give that a crack too. With the Covid lockdown still threatening and fight opportunities scarce, I took the first fight we could land, a mere four weight divisions higher than I’d ever fought in the amateurs (featherweight). I didn’t really care. I just craved the opportunity to fight again and I’d beaten this opponent as an amateur. But it wasn’t to be I debuted with a loss (I did gain a good mate though, I’m going to this opponent’s wedding in a few weeks). The next few fights were along the same lines, slowly creeping back towards my weight division. After three defeats, I took on a tough Mexican opponent for the NSW State Bantamweight title. I quickly learnt that in a close fight as the B side needs to be convincing, with the fight being called a draw. I was now more determined than ever and went back to get the job done a few weeks later. Things weren’t in a good spot in the gym, however, with my coach preparing to move interstate and pulling out the day before the fight. The new coach earmarked to take over was green as hell, having only been coaching a few months, and didn’t know how to wrap hands. I’ve built a pretty good network in the boxing world over the years and was able to track someone down to wrap my hands the next night. As fate would have it, this bloke had his hands full with fighters on the night, and I stumbled upon another coach I knew of, Nudge Mieli, and bailed him up to help me out.

“Nudge politely wrapped my hands and went about his business, busy with his own fighters as always. However, after one round, this bloke, who I honestly believe was given the gift of an eye for boxing as a coach, could see what I needed to do to change the way this fight was going and jumped up onto the apron to assist my teammate and our care-taker coach. To this day, I am extremely grateful, because he didn’t have to. This is a guy who’s seen this in thousands of fights. But for some reason, he decided to help us out. And the rest is history. It became very apparent to me that having this bloke as part of my team (despite him living 3-hours away in Wollongong) was going to be a big asset to my boxing, and could really help the new coach develop too. He agreed to help me out, and we went on to fight Ash Sims, wife to an NRL player who had just come off a draw for what went on to be the fight of the year.

“I’ve been the underdog most of my life, so I wasn’t foreign to this situation, in fact, I thrived off it. And when she turned up to weigh in long after the television crew had left and still missed weight, it only fuelled my fire more. I was wheeled in there as the significantly smaller nobody to get Sim’s career back on track. But I’ve always gone to the beat of my own drum, and had other plans, winning by unanimous decision on the undercard of Australia’s first boxing festival in Newcastle (frontline by Nikita Tsyzu and Dennis Hogan).

“But as life often goes when you seem to be going along too nicely, things turned ugly. The tension brewing from the coach who couldn’t see Nudge’s involvement as an opportunity but only as a threat kicked me out of our community gym (PCYC), despite breaking no rules (I’m still waiting on a response from their CEO actually, it’s been a couple years now), all on the Monday of fight week. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I lost my gym, but more importantly, I lost my community. The people I had trained alongside, my babies had grown up alongside – it was devastating. I lost the fight. I didn’t fight well, and it was against a kickboxer on a kickboxing promotion.

“I regrouped and found a new place to train under a bloke who reminded me of people from back home in Qld, I felt really at home. More importantly, he understood that I wanted Nudge on my team to continue guiding me as one of the best boxing coaches in the country. At the new gym, we trained like banshees and got plenty of volume. So it felt like a good balance of volume here and technical and tactical guidance from Nudge. We fought for the Australian title in the Gold Coast in November 2023. History has a way of repeating itself. I couldn’t believe it. Another draw to the hometown favourite. I thought about nothing but another shot for that title every day until the opportunity came again.

“In the meantime, though, I was presented an opportunity to fight the then-world champion, Jazzy Parr. Daughter of Australian fighting royalty, John Wayne Parr. The notice was short as always (when you’re on the B side), but I’ve never shied away from a challenge and the chance to test myself against a world champion was too good to turn down. But determination and relentlessness can work against you when they’re overdone strengths. Everything went to shit. I tore my rotation cuff, and then the new coach dropped an absolute bombshell, he didn’t want Nudge on my team anymore, instead, he wanted to bring on his own guy (the local promoter) to manage me. I pleaded, bargained, and tried everything. But I was silenced, and all of a sudden, I felt like I had no say in what didn’t even feel like my team anymore.

“The dynamic was awful. And no surprises, I fought like the feeble girl I was made to feel like, with a stoppage in the 5th. I was devastated. I didn’t sleep for four days. It was almost unbearable. Not so much the result itself, but the fact that I wasn’t able to perform anywhere close to what I was capable of and for the circumstances under which I fought. I decided I’d rather never fight again than fight under those circumstances. So I cut ties with the local coach, even though I had no idea where I was going to go, I just knew I couldn’t stay there after that.

“It took me a long time to forgive myself for pressing ahead with that fight. My tunnel vision for pursuing excellence meant I fought when I shouldn’t have, for so many reasons. In my stubbornness to not allow the greed and power of men to cost me a fight I was desperate for, I robbed myself of a proper chance to test myself. But I had unfinished business and had to find a way to chase the Australian Title. I was doing some coaching at a local MMA gym, Progression MMA, where an old teammate, Beau Hartas, had taken on the role of head boxing coach. I’d always enjoyed training with Beau and admired him as a fighter, and we had a pretty similar style. Beau agreed to take me on, with the added bonus that he was wrapped to work with Nudge, seeing it as a great opportunity to learn from someone he also regards highly in the business. I was able to control my training a lot more from here on in, applying my years of experience and my sports science to my advantage. I’d started working with an awesome S&C coach alongside some of my old teammates, doing boxing-specific S&C once a week, then taking care of the rest of my programming myself, with Beau and Nudge taking care of the boxing side. Things had somehow come together nicely.

“At around the 12-month mark, we started to realise that something wasn’t right for our little boy. He was significantly delayed in his development and had some medical issues. A few months later, he was diagnosed with a rare disease – a genetic deletion, some of which we later came to understand with the discovery of ODLURO syndrome (which accounted for part of the genetic deletion, whilst the other part remains unknown, with no others suffering the same deletion known in the world at this time). So far, we know this means Jamison has moderate to severe intellectual disability, is predominately non-verbal, and has a range of medical issues. We learnt to live with the uncertainty that comes with this and continue to learn how to best support our little boy. His problem-solving skills and persistence never cease to amaze me, and he’s been a massive fuel to my motivation over the years.”

Later this month Watt returns to the ring to face the highly-touted prospect Mai Soliman. “She’s a tough and skilled boxer, and yep, there’s plenty of hype. I think we do whatever we need to in order to survive in this world as a female boxer, and she does a good job of creating that hype. But when we get in the ring, it’s just me vs. her, and that’s one of the things I love about this sport. I’ve always been a fierce competitor, and boxing provides the perfect outlet. To me, boxing is the sweet science in every essence of the phrase. It is complete vulnerability, no excuses and just an opportunity for two athletes to go head to head in physicality, tactical strategy and heart. The Australian or Australasian title has been a huge goal since I started my pro career; I’m not greedy, for me, one of those titles is about as good as it gets, and in many ways, would mean more to me than a world title. I’ve had a few cracks at it, but as the saying goes, if at first, you don’t succeed, try and try again.

“Discipline has always been one of my greatest attributes. Only recently have I even allowed myself to acknowledge that I’ve done it harder than most when it comes to being able to pursue my dreams. Be it asthma, the knee injury, commitments as a mum, or work, I’ve never allowed those things to be reasons to cut corners or take handouts or an easier road. I pride myself on being the hardest worker in the gym, because the lengths I’ve often had to go to just be able to be there, the sacrifices I ask of my little family, means I am acutely aware of the privilege it is to be there. Every minute is precious and not to be wasted, I make them all count. Even on the days I’ve had two hours of sleep, I’m juggling specialist and therapy appointments for my son, breastfeeding my daughter and working a job. Those days have been hard, for sure, but every day, has been a privilege.

“Boxing has given me more than I could have ever imagined – a second chance at being an athlete and it has made sure I show up as a better version of myself across every aspect of my life, a better mum, partner, friend and colleague. My pro career has been far from glamorous – there have been times when I probably would’ve given up if I wasn’t so stubborn. But I’ve always done things on my own terms – I refuse to quit or make excuses and when I look back on my career when it’s all said and done – I’ll be content knowing I took the hard fights, fought through plenty of adversity and left no stone unturned.”