Hall of Fame boxer shares story with Girls on Fire

Mayor Blanca Pacheco with Hall of Fame boxer Ann Wolfe

DOWNEY - Mayor Blanca Pacheco presented former boxing champion and hall of famer Ann Wolfe with a city tile last weekend, in appreciation of her contribution to this year’s Girl’s on Fire summer program.

Wolfe, 51, is considered to be one of the greatest fighters in women’s boxing history. After transcending above poverty, abuse, prison, and homelessness, Wolfe went 24-1 over a seven-year career that included four world titles across three weight classes.

After retiring, Wolfe would train James Kirkland to prominence and the number 1 middleweight ranking.

Wolfe’s career was only more solidified last year, when she was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame .

Yet if you talk to her, Wolfe puts more emphasis on the impact she can make at a local level.

“I didn’t care if I was inducted [to the hall of fame] or not, because I understood what I had already done,” said Wolfe. “Because it’s on a national level, I wanted to come and show it to the young women who were like me. I was homeless.

“When you get to the national level, you leave out all the little bitties, and that’s what I didn’t want; I wanted to come here, because I knew when I came here and I looked out at the crowd, I knew these young women were like me: they may not have enough to eat, they may be abused, they may be sexually abused, they may be where no one’s taking care of them…’cause they were like me.”

Wolfe says she’s “watering the seed.”

“Everyone puts up this big front like, ‘I’m this, I’m that, I’m this;’ I like grassroots,” said Wolfe. “People ask you, ‘What is grassroots?’ Grassroots is dirt, and you have to water it.”

She said that she was “pro-woman all the way,” adding that “women have been at the forefront of why we still exist.”

“If you go back and look at the Lincoln story, there’s a woman behind him,” said Wolfe. “I think Michelle Obama was the president. She told Barack, and he listened. He was a mild-mannered man enough to listen.”

“It’s okay to put women in the forefront and not think they’re going to crash and burn.”

Wolfe says she intends to continue participating in Girls on Fire in the years to come.

Pacheco said it meant a lot to her to have someone like Wolfe involved with Girls on Fire.

“The purpose of Girls on Fire was just to have the girls meet different people from different walks of life, from different occupations so that they could see, ‘Yes, I can be that; I can be an attorney, be a police officer, I can be a boxer, I can be whatever I want to be,’ and there is no such thing as there being a ‘female profession’, a ‘male profession,’ that they can do anything that they want to do.”