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Augustine Hwata Senior Sports Reporter
IT’S a quarter of a century since Lorraine Muringi was last involved in mainstream professional boxing administration but now Zimbabwe boxing’s “Iron Lady” has truly bounced back.Muringi, a former boxing promoter with Ring Boxing Promotions, is now the vice-president of the new Zimbabwe Boxing Control Board led by Paul Nenjarama. She was one of the prominent promoters in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s and 1990s and her last show was in 1997, although she had been contemplating making a comeback since then.
Coming back, she has done, but she is no longer a promoter but an administrator who still carries the zeal and passionate for the sport.
Recently, The Herald Sports caught up with Muringi, nee Mamby, as she opened up on how she became involved in the male-dominated sport.
“I will go back all the way in to 1983, when there was the late Proud ‘Kilimanjaro’ Chinembiri and I had come here to Zimbabwe as a new muroora (daughter-in-law).
“When I had left home in the United States, I had a brother Saoul Mamby, who was a heavily involved in boxing, so boxing was very close to my heart when I moved from New York to Zimbabwe,” said Muringi.
Mamby was a WBC super-welterwight champion while Lorraine has never attempted to box in her life. As she tried to follow the sport in newly-independent Zimbabwe, Muringi found some grey areas and decided to play a part.
“I tried to look around what was happening in boxing here in Zimbabwe and thought that it needed a little help.
“From the small experience I had of having a brother in boxing, I knew that I could do something and that’s how I entered the Zimbabwean boxing arena,” she said.
From her name Muringi, Lorraine took on the RING part and adopted it as her trademark.
“I approached the boxing board and we had Tobaiwa Mudede then, who said ‘let’s give this woman a chance’. He allowed me to have my licence in 1983.
“Now that I was holding the licence, I had to prove that despite being a lady, I could also do something. I started promoting and formed Ring Promotion and was actually not looking at the boxing ring but from my name Muringi.
“What I noticed was that boxing was mainly held in the stadiums and was not pulling out enough finances for promoters to keep going.
“I had come from a background where boxing was staged at five-star hotels and I said let me approach hotels and see. At that time the Monomotapa (Hotel) allowed us to come in.
“They gave us the first venue and we started having dinner boxing shows. This opened up boxing to different people and corporations who bought tables as sponsorship,” Muringi said.
Because of the new trends she had created, Muringi ran out of space at hotels but had done enough to woo people back to the stadiums.
“The hotels could only accommodate around 200 people so I decided to go back to the stadiums now with all the following.
“I stayed in the sport for 13 years and then left for other promoters who were coming up,” she said.
The period during in which Muringi was a promoter is viewed as the golden era in Zimbabwean boxing as the country had international champions like Kilimanjaro, Stix Macloud, Langton “Schoolboy” Tinago and Kidd “Power” Mutambisi.
Having retired from promoting boxing in 1997, Muringi then turned to another of her passions — art.
“I started running an art gallery where I promoted the art world and I did that for about seven years before retiring at home,” she said.
A mother of three and a grandmother of two, none who are into boxing, Muringi spends most of her time at her Borrowdale home but she still follows the sport.
“I enjoy my grandchildren and I keep my ear and eye for boxing. I even watched the fight involving (Floyd) Mayweather recently,” she said.
Now that she is back into boxing, Muringi hopes to revive the sport in a positive way.
“Now I am back in the sport because there was new board put in place and they felt they needed people with experience and have participated before with some measure of success. I guess those stakeholders who recognised me looked for me and asked me to come forward,” she said.
Muringi said she hopes her new board will decentralise the administration of the sport for a start and she also hopes the historic World Boxing Union bantamweight title fight will be a springboard for the sport.
Clyde Musonda of Delta Force Boxing Promotions has been sanctioned to hold the title fight between Zimbabwe’s Tapiwa Tembo and Zambia’s Gibbon Kamota at the City Sports Centre on October 26 and Muringi hopes the bout will get boxing to another level.
“The target for the new board is to get the boxers to register with us and put their faith in us. We also want to have liaison officers in each province to reach out to the boxers. The liaison officers should be former boxers and the fighters do not need to come back to Harare but will get help from their provinces on what is happening,” said Muringi.
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