Jackie Kallen

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Jackie Kallen: Born Jackie Kaplan in 1946 into a middle-class Jewish family in Detroit. She attended Schulze Elementary and Mumford High School. She is a boxing manager, one of the sport's first, and quite possibly most successful female managers. Her life was the inspiration for the film Against the Ropes. She also worked as a consultant for Mark Burnett's reality tv series The Contender. Other consultants for the program included Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sylvester Stallone, and Sugar Ray Leonard.

Kallen began her career during the 1970s. She was actually a show business journalist before getting involved with boxing, and she worked for a magazine. She interviewed The Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and countless others as a show business reporter. During 1977, she was assigned to interview a new boxing prospect from the Kronk gym in Detroit. The fighter's name was Thomas Hearns, who, coincidentally, went on to fight Leonard twice. Kallen became fascinated with sports; she began working as a sports journalist, covering other sports but specializing in boxing.

She worked with Hearns as a publicist for ten years, becoming a well known person around Detroit's boxing circles. But she also met with sexism. At the time, women's boxing was practically non existent, and there were many people, both men and women, who believed that boxing was a sport that was exclusively for men to be involved in. Kallen was allegedly told by different people that women did not belong in boxing, thus being turned down by those who believed that.

Kallen was excited about her opportunity to be involved in boxing, and her managerial debut actually began in 1988 with the arrival of heavyweight Bobby Hitz. She truly arrived on the boxing scene in 1991 when she managed her first champion James Toney. Toney became her first world champion when he knocked out Michael Nunn in eleven rounds at Iowa in 1991 to win the WBA world Middleweight title. Another of her fighters, Bronco McKart was also a world champion, having won the WBO world Jr. Middleweight title in 1994.

Her business relationship with Toney was rather controversial, but it allowed her to gain celebrity among boxing's hard-core fans. She began to be featured on articles by such magazines as Ring and KO Magazine, with the topic of most of her articles being her manager-boxer relationship with the world Middleweight champion. Kallen referred to Toney many times as someone she loved like a son, but there were rampant rumors that she and Toney did not get along well behind the scenes. The pair had an on and off friendship until their bond was finally broken in the late 1990s.

Kallen had been diagnosed both with heart disease and with cancer during that decade, but, after three surgeries, she recovered and is enjoying good health.

Her indirect involvement with her biopic allowed her to meet Meg Ryan, who played her in "Against the Ropes".

Kallen currently lives in Los Angeles, and manages three professional boxers, including McKart and a new prospect from the Philippines.