COHASSET - It's five years since Wendy Sprowl, a.k.a. "The Queen of Thunder," retired from professional boxing, but her chiseled arms and washboard abs are reminders of her reign as flyweight champion of the Americas and her place in local boxing lore as the first Bay State woman to win an international title.
These days Sprowl passes along her workout tips in a class she calls "Sweatin' Bullets" and in a DVD of the same name.
One recent evening, eight students - the youngest a 26-year-old law firm recruiter and the oldest a 59-year-old marketing consultant - gather in the upstairs studio of Phil's Fitness First here for Sprowl's boot-camp style class. Sprowl, a compact 5-foot-2-inches and 130 pounds, is dressed, fittingly enough, in camouflage pants and a sleeveless T-shirt that shows off her muscles. She's tucked her hair under an Army cap festooned with a homemade "Sweatin' Bullets" logo that she ironed on.
Sprowl, 39, comes to her you-can-do-it attitude as a single mother of two who's seesawed from obesity to anorexia and as a jilted lover who began boxing in 1998 to mend a heart that broke when her fiance left her six weeks before the wedding. Her toughness comes courtesy of the boxing ring and seven years digging drainage ditches as a union laborer. She quit construction and took up fitness training four years ago, after an errant 35-pound, swinging steel ring hit her in the face and fractured her nose.
"I wasn't going to get into the training part. I was afraid of people. I didn't really socialize. It was my kids, work, boxing," Sprowl says. "Now I don't want to give up the training," she continues. "My father passed away this past April due to diabetes and being obese. That's one reason I have more of a passion."
Sprowl starts her class with a short warm-up of jabs and jumps, then moves them through a series of stations - lunges, shoulder rotations, push-ups, crunches - using hand weights and stability balls. To the bell of a boxing timer, they switch stations every two minutes, with a 60-second break between each one. "It's the best workout I've ever had," says Jim Ahlstedt, a 40-year-old flight paramedic from Cohasset.
Sprowl's message is simple. If she can turn her life around through fitness, so can her students. She rejected an offer to produce the DVD employing professional models and opted instead to use her own students, who range in age from 25 to 61 and in body type from lean to overweight to eight months pregnant. Diana Michaelides, the legal recruiter, talks on camera about feeling more comfortable in tank tops and bikinis since starting Sprowl's class, and a middle-age woman named Kelly boasts of being able to carry a potted lemon tree from house to yard without her husband's help.
"I couldn't put out to women what I want if I used models," Sprowl says. "I wanted to put in real people."
Sprowl herself ballooned to 220 pounds after her daughter, now 20, was born. "Every sham diet they reported on the news, I tried," she says. She dropped to 100 pounds. "The doctor told me eat or die," she says. "It took me years just to accept my body."
A decade ago, Sprowl, divorced once, had already sent invitations for her second wedding when her boyfriend of nine years left. Her daughter was 10, her son 6. "I knew I had to find something for myself. Everything else was always first. I never felt I was part of anything," Sprowl recalls. So she started boxing. "Even if I never got in the ring, just having the self-esteem empowered me."
Sprowl was already strong from construction work. "I could shovel for eight hours and go to the gym," she says. She knew how to survive in a male-dominated environment. "In construction I had to prove myself," she says. "My first two years I must have gone home crying daily. Every job I was the only woman on the construction site."
Her first fight was a Golden Gloves amateur bout in Lowell in 1999, six years after women's amateur boxing became a sanctioned sport in the United States. Her opponent was a Junior Olympic champion. Sprowl was afraid.
"I'm, 'Wait a minute. I'm a mother of two. What am I doing here?' " Sprowl recalls. "The bell rang, and she hit me. Something snapped. I chased her around the ring and hit her 18 times in 18 seconds." With that first knockout came Sprowl's first victory.
"Wendy showed lots of dedication. Lots of heart," says Bobby Bower, one of her first trainers. "She was respectful from day one. Never had a big ego like a lot of fighters do. Once they get to a certain level they get this image that they're bigger than the sport itself. It's all about them. Wendy never did that."
Sprowl turned professional in 2000. "I taught her footwork and finesse," says Derek Barnes, her latest trainer. "She started learning her angles and how to split, and with her punching power she was incredible."
In January 2001, Sprowl was ready for a title bout. Her nom de guerre, the Queen of Thunder, was the stage name she'd used drumming for a heavy metal band called the Lab Rats. Originally scheduled to fight at 120 pounds, she switched to a lighter class when her opponent was injured in an automobile accident.
Ten days later, and 14 pounds lighter, Sprowl stepped into the ring. She was the first woman in Massachusetts to contend for a world champion belt, and most local television stations had interviewed her. The bout was sold out. Sprowl was so weak and dehydrated that she collapsed after four rounds.
"I was devastated," Sprowl says. "I went into hibernation for three months." In August of 2001, fighting at 112 pounds with no advance fanfare, Sprowl captured her title.
"It was such a novelty. I was the first woman ever to win a title in Massachusetts. They thought there would be endorsements," Sprowl recalls. There weren't. "What was amazing was the journey. It was kind of a letdown winning it. The quest was over."
Now, in a gym in Cohasset, Sprowl puts large focus mitts on her hands and blocks her students' punches. In addition to teaching this class, Sprowl works as a personal trainer and picks up jobs landscaping and staining decks. She still gets calls about returning to the ring.
"Now that I've gotten older, I'd be going in with 20-year-olds. A big part of boxing is how hungry are you. They have something to prove," she says. A few minutes pass. "If the price was right would I fight again? Absolutely."
