Alycia Baumgardner: ‘Every fight, I have a chip on my shoulder’

You’ll have to forgive Alycia Baumgardner if, many years from now, she doesn’t look back on the stretch from August 2023 to September 2024 as the happiest time in her life.

She’s a boxer who hasn’t been able to box. She tested positive for banned substances and spent about half a year fighting to clear her name (and knows the fight for her reputation may go on the rest of her career). In April, her father, Mario Guzman, the man who first introduced her to boxing, died at just 56. And she continued to deal with the threat and distraction presented by a man accused of stalking her until he was finally sentenced in July — for a second time, because the stalking resumed following his initial release from prison.

Baumgardner last fought on July 15, 2023, when she convincingly outpointed Christina Linardatou (with PED controversy attached after the fact) to avenge the lone defeat of her career. One year, two months, and 12 days later, she’ll return to the ring on September 27 in defense of one of her junior lightweight belts against Delfine Persoon.

It’s safe to say Baumgardner, who crossed from her 20s into her 30s during the layoff, has a lot of pent-up frustration to take out on the Belgian veteran.

“I’ve been through so much,” Baumgardner told Boxing Scene. “There’s so much back story to this win, and I know what that win’s going to look like. I have a lot of things to fight for. It’s all giving me flashbacks to how I was feeling in the moment when I became world champion against Terri Harper. And you know how that ended.”

(In case anyone reading doesn’t know: violently, with a fourth-round right hand freezing Harper and knocking her out on her feet.)

So, given all she’s been through — the mourning, the stress, the criticism, the inactivity — is Baumgardner going to be fighting with the proverbial chip on her shoulder on September 27?

“Yeah, well … every fight, I have a chip on my shoulder,” she answered. “It seems like every fight, I go in there with something to prove.”

The only time in her career Baumgardner, 15-1 (7 KOs), has gone longer without a fight was a 20-month inactive stretch between December 2019 and August 2021, due to a combination of an ACL surgery and a certain global pandemic that interrupted everyone’s plans. But she isn’t worried about this 14-month layoff affecting her. She stays in the gym year-round and expects to be plenty sharp against Persoon.

She does acknowledge, though, that the reason for the layoff — the PED controversy — blunted her momentum and damaged her reputation.

A refresher: She tested positive for metabolites of mesterolone and methenolone ahead of her win over Linardatou, and the test results came out a month later. The test was administered by Drug Free Sport, a voluntary third-party agency, and Baumgardner consistently professed her innocence — which may or may not mean anything, as most boxers who test positive go on to deny the result. The WBC, whose belt she will defend at the end of this month, investigated and reached the conclusion that Baumgardner was “not guilty of intentional ingestion or consumption of a banned substance for performance enhancement purposes.”

She received a year’s probation from the alphabet group back-dated to July 2023, the Association of Boxing Commissions lifted her suspension, and here we are. The Linardatou triumph remained a triumph. The positive test has been scrubbed from the record.

But it can’t be scrubbed from everyone’s minds.

“I know that it’s a blemish, for sure,” Baumgardner said. “Obviously, I don’t like it, but it is what it is and I can only move forward and just keep proving who I am, advocating for a clean sport, and advocating for fairness in being heard. Boxing is one of those sports where some people don’t have those opportunities to be heard, and I was fortunate enough to be able to be heard and show everything that I needed to show to be found innocent. I know the truth. I know who I am and the integrity I have as an athlete. I can only continue on my own path to keep showing up in my authentic way.”

Her path now runs through Persoon, who is no easy mark. The only losses on her record of 49-3 (19 KOs) are a TKO defeat suffered way back on the day before the midterm elections in Barack Obama’s first presidential term and two extremely close decisions — one of them highly debatable — to Katie Taylor. She’s beaten the best of the rest of what the 130- and 135-pound divisions have had to offer the past decade or so, including Linardatou, Maiva Hamadouche, and Elhem Mekhaled, all handed their first career defeats by Persoon.

She’s probably not quite in her prime at 39 years old, but she’s nevertheless undefeated over the last four years.

“I think a lot of people are maybe overlooking the fight, but I have a great opponent in front of me and I love this fight,” Baumgardner said. “It’s not like I came back and I’m just picking Joe Schmoe off the street to fight. I have somebody in front of me who’s coming to fight. And when I win big, I’ll show that I can do what Katie Taylor couldn’t do with Delfine.”

Baumgardner will be trying to do so while in a transition phase on several fronts. She has a new training team, as Tony Harrison is out and Ramon Carlos Matthews is now the primary voice in the gym and in her corner. Also, this is “The Bomb’s” last fight of her Matchroom contract, and she has started her own promotional company, Baumgardner Promotions, before she becomes a free agent.

“I think it’s important as a fighter to know the business side of boxing,” she explained. “When I first started, I knew that eventually I wanted to be my own boss. Having Baumgardner Promotions, it’s a lot of extra work, but I’m willing to do it. I don’t know everything. I’m learning on the job. But it is so important that athletes know the business and that they’re able to negotiate for themselves.”

The launching of Baumgardner Promotions isn’t the only way in which she’s dabbling in something new. This whole card, an all-female event taking place on the Lux Stage at Trilith Studios in Atlanta, is full of experiments. It’s being billed as the first fight card in “an immersive world environment,” taking place on an LED stage with graphic designers building a virtual backdrop.

Also, it’s airing/streaming free on Brinx.TV and Fubo Sports, outlets that are dabbling in boxing for the first time. Publicist Josh Weissman connected the team at Global Combat Collective (which won the purse bid for the mandatory fight with a $500,000 bid) with Brinx.TV, while Global Combat Collective CEO Nelson Lopez Jr. had a connection with Fubo, and they decided to make deals with both carriers.

Making the fight free was of particular importance to Baumgardner.

“All eyes are good eyes when it comes to the sport of boxing,” she said.

Interestingly, Baumgardner is not such a fan of the promotional tagline for the event, “Hit Like a Girl, Fight Like a Champion.” She isn’t crazy about the use of the word “girl” when the competitors on the card are all grown women, and she also wishes the emphasis was on the quality of the fights, not the gender of the fighters.

“Look, I understand why they’re using that line,” she said. “But it’s a little cliché to me. And I want it to be that when we talk about a sport, we just talk about the sport. I want to change the notion of always including that it’s women’s boxing. And these aren’t young girls on the card. We’re all women, adults, fighting on the card. So, nothing against the saying, but I have to be honest: I don’t like it.”

Let’s focus on the latter part of the tagline. Let’s assume Baumgardner fights like a champion. Let’s assume she defeats Persoon. Where does she go from there?

“When I win this fight,” she said, with emphasis on it not being an “if” situation, “it’s going to pole vault me into the superfights that we’ve been wanting for some time now. I think the fight with Katie Taylor makes sense. I want to face Katie, I want to face Amanda [Serrano]. People want to see that. I want to see it. I want to know where I am in my career and with my skill set. These are superfights. We want the superfights. We want the big fights. I’m undisputed at 130, and moving up is not a problem.”

Taylor and Serrano are scheduled for a rematch November 15 on Netflix underneath the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson bout. So if Baumgardner wins on September 27 — pardon me, when she wins on September 27 — don’t be surprised to see her in Arlington, Texas, a month and a half later, calling out the winner in person.

By then she will presumably have taken out much of her pent-up frustration on Persoon. But Baumgardner is one fighter who always seems to have some left over for whoever’s next.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].