The soft early evening spring light floods the room behind the world champion you’ve probably never heard of. In front of a big poster of a shirtless Bruce Lee adorning her wall, Diana Prazak smiles and laughs often as she talks about her most unlikely career and her road to the top.
The expatriate from Melbourne is arguably the most successful professional boxer that Australia has produced – she attained the ranking of best active professional boxer pound-for-pound in 2014 – but celebration of her world champion status remains disappointingly muted in her home country.
“It’s kind of broken my heart really because growing up we were always told what a sports-mad country Australia is and how proud we were of our athletes. And here I had done something no other Australian had ever done and there was just no [media] coverage back home,’’ she says in a call from the home she shares with her American wife, Naomi, in Riverside County on the border of Los Angeles County in California.
“It is demoralising. My country hasn’t really acknowledged anything we’ve done.”
She says this without apparent bitterness or anger. Women’s professional boxing has never had the profile or prize money of the men’s sport. Now, two years retired, she can see other up-and-coming women starting to build a profile that was never possible for her.
Earlier this month when Prazak, 45, was inducted into the International Women’s Boxing Hall of Fame in Las Vegas as a legend of her sport, it was a fitting if overdue celebration of an extraordinary career that almost didn’t happen.
As a child in Hoppers Crossing, deep in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Prazak was always good at sport. She was a small-framed cross-country runner and tennis player. But she also experienced abuse – something she did not begin to psychologically deal with until well into adulthood.
“My abuse happened when I was a child and [is] something I only dealt with later in life as I was able to come to terms with it.
“My fitness diminished because I became a workaholic [in information technology] and had no goals. My coping mechanism was food and alcohol.
“Being a fighter was a way for me to feel like I was in control again as well as an outlet. I felt like I wasn’t supported and didn’t want my life defined by what was in my past.
“I was really quite the drinker. I was a chain-smoker and I was really quite overweight.”
She explains how she got into the sport that would captivate her.
“My ex was a muso and we were at a gig together one night, and I was just on the piss is the honest truth … and then a mate came along and said there was a new [boxing] gym [nearby] just opened up and if I wanted to come and check it out with them I could and … that’s how it started,” she says.
“I asked the owner of the gym about sparring and he said, ‘What’s the bloody point – you’re too old, you’re too fat and you’re also a girl – you’ll never amount to anything in this sport.’ And they were some motivating words for me. But I never thought I was going to actually be any good at boxing.’’
But she was wrong. She was very good. She had natural talent. But she also quickly became addicted to a desire to get better and better while sparring.
“It was a way, initially, for me to get into better shape. But then it became an absolute compulsion for me to get better and better, to train harder every day. I really wanted to be the best. Definitely. And to win.”
But Prazak was already nearly 27 – a definite disadvantage given many of her contemporaries had been in the ring since their mid-teens and fighting competitively for years. After just six months of training Prazak had her first amateur fight. She won it – and her next five amateur bouts.
She decided to turn professional. To stand any chance of becoming one of the world’s best she says she felt she had no choice but to move to the United States. So in 2012 she moved from Melbourne to Los Angeles.
She had no promoter and no sponsor.
“I just had to do it off my own bat,” she says.
But she engaged as her trainer the celebrated world champion Dutch boxer, kickboxer and actor Lucia Rijker, dubbed by the sport’s media as “the most dangerous woman in the world”. She rented a room in a motel on Sunset Boulevard while they prepared for a shot at the World Boxing Council women’s super featherweight title in Sweden.
LA was a culture shock. It was often lonely and sometimes frightening because of random street crime – including the threat of mugging.
“I was there [at the motel] for about four weeks,” she says. “I would shit myself every night. It was nothing like what I thought it was going to be like. I was too scared to walk down the street after dark. It was crazy. But I had to run, like all boxers do – we run – to train. So I would do my work during the day and then I would run at night. It was so scary. But I was fast because I just had to be.
“Every night there was a stabbing or a shooting and you heard sirens 24/7. It was just a massive culture shock.”
But her sights were on Sweden where, in 2013, she won the super featherweight world title, knocking out the champion Frida Wallberg in the eighth round. She received little publicity for her efforts back home even after successfully defending the title.
While top professional male boxers stand to make millions of dollars from prize purses and sponsorship, the financial reward for Prazak was as scant as the publicity. Pre-fight training expenses were often up to US$20,000.
“It’s a gigantic inequity. We would be in the red after almost every fight. I’ve been retired for two years now and I think the most I ever made was 17 grand for a fight. It was very rare that I found myself with money in my pocket after a fight … I definitely wasn’t flying business class. It was cattle class the whole way.”
When she eventually retired, Prazak had lost just four of her 18 professional fights, eight of which she won by knockout.
She says that while boxing – and her enormous drive to win – has involved enormous personal sacrifice and, at times, physical pain, it also gave her life a meaning she could not have imagined before she entered the ring.
“Boxing took so much away from me but it also gave me so much. It gave me balance in my life … it allowed me travel the world, it made me a champion and it gave me a goal I thought I’d never achieve. And I never would have met my wife if I didn’t come to America. It gave me so much more than it ever took away from me.”
Prazak says she feels a deep affinity with Australia even though she has lived in the US for the past 13 years during which she has witnessed enormous political and cultural change.
“When I arrived [Barack] Obama was president and he was seeking re-election,” she says. “Back then the haters weren’t speaking up so you didn’t hear the hate here so much. But as we all know that has changed. I’m in a same-sex relationship and I’m a dual citizen over here. But I’ll never be an American and they know that and I feel that.”
Having conquered the world of women’s professional boxing, Prazak has her eyes on returning home to Melbourne.
“My end goal is definitely to come home to Australia and to stay at home and to visit the States so that my wife can see her family as opposed to me visiting Melbourne so I can see mine.’’
A homecoming for a boxing world champion who only ever entered the ring by chance in the first place.
