Crystina Poncher: “MVP have done so much for women’s boxing. It’s unprecedented in our sport.”

Crystina Poncher: “MVP have done so much for women’s boxing. It’s unprecedented in our sport.”

Crystina Poncher has been at the forefront in the rise of women’s boxing over the last decade or so. As a long-standing member of the Top Rank/ESPN broadcasting family, Poncher has been an ever-present at ringside, and when Bob Arum signed Mikaela Mayer and Seniesa Estrada to his promotional company, new ground was broken. Poncher, in many ways, helped tell their story.

Poncher also made history when she formed the first all-female broadcast team with Mayer. A moment that Poncher rates as one of the proudest moments of her career. “When you do something that nobody has ever done before, those things stand out because that can never be erased.”

Now aligned with Jake Paul and his Most Valuable Promotions, Poncher is now part of a movement that is taking the female side of the sport to even greater heights. An ever-expanding roster of elite female talent. A stable that has just been given even greater depth with the addition of Mikaela Mayer. Poncher and Mayer reunited once again. How it started is how it will finish.

“MVP have done so much for women’s boxing,” Poncher told me over Zoom. “It’s unprecedented in our sport. We haven’t seen a time like this where so many women are not only professionals, but also to a level where so many people know who they are. It’s almost an exclusive women’s product. It used to be so hard for the women to get TV fights, and now they have a roster of so many female fighters on a television network in the United States.”

MVP have signed virtually everyone of note in recent months. Alycia Baumgardner, Caroline Dubois, Terri Harper, Chantelle Cameron, Savannah Marshall and many more have joined the party. What started with Amanda Serrano a few years ago has morphed into something more. Much more. An almost complete domination of women’s boxing. Poncher understands what MVP are doing. “You look at what Dane White is trying to do in boxing with this league and everything under one umbrella, which I don’t necessarily agree with for the men. But when you look at what MVP are doing on the women’s side in that situation with MVPW, it makes sense.”

The rise of women’s boxing is still somewhat in its embryonic stages. When Katie Taylor turned professional in 2016, slowly but surely, things began to move in the right direction. “It has changed a lot,” Poncher says of the recent upturn in perception and promotion. “The only female fight before Mikaela got signed to Top Rank was a Christy Martin fight that I worked on that was on the undercard of Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.’s fight against Sebastian Zbik in 2011 at the Staples Centre in Las Vegas. Christy Martin was on that card. I wasn’t even commentating back then; I was just reporting, and Top Rank was covering that card. I never covered another female fight until Mikaela signed her deal with Top Rank.”

We have seen so many great female fights over the last few years. Poncher thinks two stand out from the pack. “The first Katie Taylor Amanda Serrano fight was just amazing. That might just be the greatest female fight of all time. Also, the Mikaela Mayer and Maiva Hamadouche fight. I felt like an auctioneer calling that one. I could not keep up with the pace of that fight.” 

Despite that progress, there is every hope that we are just at the beginning. Jake Paul might have his critics for the way his own boxing career has gone. But for what he has done for women’s boxing, there can be no criticism. None. Paul and MVP have almost certainly guaranteed that the future of the female side of the sport will be a whole lot brighter. Women boxing has an awful lot to thank him for.