Edith Buna Rogers: “Boxing gave me the confidence that I have now.”

Edith Buna Rogers: “Boxing gave me the confidence that I have now.”

I have been lucky to tell many great stories over the last ten years. To shine a light on the endless inspiring women behind those stories. Edith Buna Rogers is another to add to that ever-increasing list. The struggles of her life have given way to a desire to help others. Along the way, she had a little fighting career of her own. This is the story of Edith Buna Rogers.

“I was born in New Zealand. But my background is half-Fiji and half-English,” Rogers told me over Zoom. “We lived on a small farm just north of Auckland. My mum was a single parent, and she raised me and three other siblings because my dad passed away when I was just eight months old. We had a bit of a struggle growing up, but at that time, I thought life was great. We had a really good childhood. But we did have a bit of domestic violence in the household with other parties. It has kind of shaped me to where I am right now. I have learned a lot from what my mum has taught me and the strength that has come from all those traumatic experiences.”

Boxing enters a life for a multitude of different reasons. For Rogers, it came as she was losing her way somewhat in her teenage years, and boxing was something that gave her structure, discipline, and more.

“I finished school, and I moved out from home at a very young age. I started hanging out with the wrong crowd. Partying all the time, as you do when you are younger. I got up to a bit of trouble. He wasn’t my coach at the time, but after a bad relationship that I was in had ended, he told me to take up boxing, and he took me to some boxing fights. He must have seen something in me that I needed empowering and getting some confidence back because that’s what boxing does. I saw the fights, and I thought I could do that.

“I signed up for a Charity Cancer Fight Night with a friend, and she asked if I wanted to fight, and I said sure. I ended up beating a girl who had had four fights. My coach said I was really good and that I should keep going. I kept going and ended up having fifteen fights. I had two fights in New Zealand, and then I moved to Sydney so I could make a fresh start. I won state titles for New South Wales at my weight. I was actually pretty good.”

There were ambitions of competing at a high level as an amateur, but certain restrictions derailed her dreams and ultimately resulted in her fighting days ending.

“I wanted to do the Commonwealth Games, but I couldn’t because I wasn’t an Australian citizen,” Rogers relayed to FightPost. “I would have had to go back to New Zealand, so that demotivated me a lot. I was working a full-time job, so there was no way I was going back to New Zealand. So the question was, was I going to go pro? What were the next steps? But around that time, I tore my labrum in my left shoulder. At that stage, I really didn’t know if I wanted to box anymore. There isn’t much money in pro boxing. So there was quite a lot of debate in myself, if I should still pursue my boxing career. I kept saying that I would fight again one day. But last year, I just said that’s it, and I said it out loud to everyone that I was done with fighting. So I stepped into coaching and doing the foundation, which I am doing now.”

“I am so happy with how it went,” Rogers says when I ask her if she has any regrets about her boxing career. “I got so much from my journey in boxing. I didn’t want to be a world champion. That was never my ambition. It was more about my ego, thinking I could beat everyone. But once I took that out of the picture, it was, why am I still fighting? Is it to prove something to everybody else? Or was it something I really wanted deep down inside?

“Boxing gave me the confidence that I have now. The fact that I can have a fight has told me that I can do anything else that I put my mind to. It has given me the very strong mindset that I have today.”

Once the competitive gloves were hung up, Rogers took her knowledge and experience to another side of the sport. It was, in many ways, a catalyst to help others.

“I was the manager of the Legends Gym in Kensington, which was the boxing gym I was fighting and coaching out of when I was in Sydney. At the gym, we used to get a lot of kids coming in, and they couldn’t afford their membership, and we would let them train for free. The gym was basically like a charity, giving everyone gloves, wraps, headgear, shoes, and shorts. So the gym has never made any money ever since it started twelve years ago. I wanted to create a foundation so we can put the structures in place so we could get the funding and be able to get the youth off the streets. So, I started the foundation so we could pay for the memberships and registration fees because we had a lot of professional fighters who couldn’t afford to pay for all their costs. That is what kind of sparked the idea of Legends Life Foundation so we could change lives.”

With the help of Eddie Hearn and his Matchroom in the Community project and the increased exposure that brings, Rogers is taking her passion further afield.

“We are now launching in other gyms around Sydney. We now have five locations where we are funding memberships, registration fees, and medical costs. It doesn’t feel like work; it feels like I can make a difference. We just want to remove some of the barriers that they might face and that I faced growing up. It’s very rewarding.”

The deeper you delve into boxing’s dark waters, the more you begin to realise what a dirty sport it really is. You see the exploitation of the fighters. You question why you are so deeply involved in it. The guiding light is those fighters. They all have a story. They all inspire. Edith Buna Rogers is another fighter that you can’t help but be inspired by. You see her past. You see her future. Boxing might have saved her. It most certainly made her. But perhaps the most impressive thing about Rogers is what she wants to give back. There are plenty of aspiring fighters who will have better lives because of Edith Buna Rogers.