Vonda Ward, Women's Heavyweight Champ, Retires

After a decade-long reign as women's heavyweight champion, Vonda Ward has decided to hang up her gloves.

Ward retires with a 23-1 record and 17 Kos, while holding the WBC and IBA World Heavyweight Champion belts. She is also the IBA Cruiserweight World Champion.

Her reason for leaving the sport she helped build? She found herself at 37 with no challengers left.

"It just got too hard to find fights, because I've beaten everyone in those classes right now," says the Northfield native.

Ed King, her manager, believes the timing was right for several reasons. Primarily, promoters were not offering purses that made it worthwhile for Ward to take off two months from her business to train for a match.

"She accomplished everything we set out to do except the big fight with [former super middleweight champion] Laila Ali," says King, owner of King's Gym in Bedford Heights. "Laila just refused to sign the deal with us, and since her retirement, women's boxing in the US has diminished."

King adds that they have leveraged the notoriety that Ward gained from her boxing career to build a business. She works as a personal trainer at King's Gym and teaches boxing as a fitness regimen.

"We now have one of the most successful boxing gyms in Ohio as well as a center for personal training," King says.

Moreover, the average weight for women boxers typically falls in the 120- to 140-pound range. At 6'6," 190 pounds, Ward, a former basketball star at the University of Tennessee, had few equals as an athlete who remains in impeccable condition.

Her one loss came to Ann Wolfe (5'9," 172 pounds) on May 8, 2004 at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi, Mississippi. Ward had lost 20 pounds to make weight with her smaller opponent. Wolfe walked away with the vacant IBA Light Heavyweight Title. Ward went home with a slight concussion, but went on to win five more fights before running out of opponents.

While men's boxing is also floundering to remain popular, especially with the emergence of Mixed Martial Arts as a fan favorite, women's boxing has long struggled to gain a popular following.

"Part of the problem with women's boxing is they don't get paid a lot," confirms Mary Ann Lurie Owen, a boxing photojournalist in Las Vegas, and author of Extraordinary Women of the Ring. "Some of the promoters are still in the dark ages, too, because they just don't want to put them on any major undercards or on HBO."

Ward thinks the addition of women's boxing as an Olympic sport for the 2012 Summer Games in London may help revive the sport by adding a more vibrant amateur element. The rules forbid the participation of professional boxers.

"I feel so fortunate that I was boxing over the last ten years, because I was in it at the peak," says Ward, who adds that she would come out of retirement to represent her country, should the IOC change the rules.