April 3, 2005. It’s 02:00 in Washington.<\/b><\/p>\n
Stephan Weiler is woken by a “dreaded call”. A voice said: “Is Becky Zerlentes your wife?’<\/p>\n
“I said ‘yes’, and the official from Denver Health Medical Center and Hospital told me I need to get to the airport as quickly as possible. Her condition was deteriorating.”<\/p>\n
Up until that day, a female boxer in the United States had never died in a sanctioned fight.<\/p>\n
In succumbing to that devastating blow, Zerlentes – who three years previously won a regional boxing title – had rewritten history.<\/p>\n
While the tales of fighters like Johnny Owen<\/a> and Jimmy Doyle, external<\/a> are enshrined in history, the impact of Zerlentes’ death on the community in Denver and on those who loved her has remained private.<\/p>\n Zerlentes’ love affair with combat sports defined her life, an overwhelming rush every time she stepped inside the confines of a boxing ring or MMA cage.<\/p>\n Like most amateur fighters, 34-year-old Zerlentes embraced a career away from the ropes, working as a geography and economics professor at Front Range Community College’s Larimer County campus, earning a master’s and PhD.<\/p>\n The buzz she enjoyed inside the classroom was complemented by her love of sport, especially in combat.<\/p>\n On that fight night, Weiler remained in the capital of the US, continuing his three-year stay at the Federal Reserve, the country’s central banking system.<\/p>\n He had constantly been asked by Zerlentes to return to Fort Collins, the former military outpost nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and promised he soon would.<\/p>\n Facing Heather Schmitz, Zerlentes was taking part in the Colorado State Boxing Senior Female Championships at the Denver Coliseum in Colorado, a venue that has crammed more than 10,000 people in when the Rolling Stones or Rage Against the Machine have been in town. Both women wore protective headgear. <\/p>\n For two rounds Zerlentes worked, trading punches with Schmitz until the third.<\/p>\n With a blow to the head, just above her left eye, Zerlentes staggered forward, struck the canvas and fell unconscious – a state she would remain in until her death the following morning.<\/p>\n “The doctor in the ring said her pupils were fixed and dilated when he saw her first and already there was a chance that brain damage had occurred,” Weiler, now a professor, said.<\/p>\n By 06:30 Weiler was on a flight to Denver and immediately made his way to the hospital. There he saw Zerlentes.<\/p>\n “The amount of damage to Becky’s brain was remarkable given that it was a fairly glancing blow,” he said.<\/p>\n “It was not a hard hit… but the brain had become bruised to such an extent that it could no longer operate.”<\/p>\n The life support Zerlentes had been placed on was beginning to fail, and that “clinically she was probably already dead in the ring”, Weiler recalled.<\/p>\n And then he had to make a choice.<\/p>\n “At about noon that morning, the decision was made, knowing that her condition was deteriorating, I made the choice that it was time,” he said.<\/p>\n The reaction to her death was immediate.<\/p>\n Tributes flooded in across Denver. Colleagues, students and others who knew Zerlentes described the warmth and tenacity of one of the college and community’s pillars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April 3, 2005. It’s 02:00 in Washington. Stephan Weiler is woken by a “dreaded call”. A voice said:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-308537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114952058134156217","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}