In two weeks, world champion boxer Mea Motu will be back in the spotlight defending her title against South African-based challenger, The Tigress, in Auckland. A survivor who’s had to fight her whole life, she talks to Joanna Wane about putting the dark years behind her and finding peace in the ring.
A gnarly scar curves above Mea Motu’s right eyelid where the skin split open in a head clash with Iranian boxer Nastaran Fathi last November in Dubai. Her first overseas fight, staged outdoors in the sweltering heat, she remembers it felt like breathing in sand.
As blood poured down her face and a massive haematoma ballooned on her cheek, coach Isaac Peach knew there was a risk the referee would step in to end the fight. So he went to work on patching her up. Adrenaline chloride to stop the bleeding. Vaseline to pack the gash. Pressure on the cheek to reduce the appearance of swelling.
A photo taken after the final bell shows Motu slumped to her knees in the ring, fists clenched in victory, the veins in her arms so pumped they look ready to burst through the skin. Over eight rounds, in a match that won the Fight of the Night award, the Hokianga-born mother of five had dealt Fathi the only loss of her career.
Not that there was much time to celebrate. With a plane to catch in less than six hours, a long hospital wait to have the cut stitched up was out of the question. “So we got some super glue and laid her on a park bench, eh Mea?” says Peach, and they’re both laughing as she lifts up a strand of dyed bright-red hair to show me the scar. “I cleaned it up with my hand and then I said, ‘Close your eyes’ and tipped in the glue. Beautiful.”
On August 26, “NightMea” Motu takes on South African-based boxer Ellen Simwaka to defend the IBO Super Bantamweight World Title she won at Fight for Life in Auckland, a few months after coming home from Dubai. “The Tigress”, who’s originally from Malawi, will be her toughest opponent yet.
Since turning professional in 2020, Motu (Te Rarawa) has had 16 wins, including six knockouts. Deep into an intensive 10-week training campaign in the build-up to her title defence in the 55kg weight division, she’s a stripped-back 1.62m ball of muscle with eyes that blaze with intensity and punches that sound like rifle shots when her gloves hit the pads. At 33, a time when most boxers are reaching their peak, Motu feels like she’s just getting started. On top of her own demanding programme, she runs fitness classes at Peach Boxing four times a week that are so brutal people have been known to throw up out of the gym window. Talk about keeping it real.
“Mentally, physically and emotionally, it’s the happiest I’ve ever been in camp and in life,” she tells Canvas, her body steaming after a hard Sunday morning session with amateur Amy Andrew, who’s aiming for the Paris Olympics and flies up from Palmerston North every weekend to spar with Motu. “I don’t see a limit on me at the moment.
“Everyone thinks I’m strong because of the way I look, but I’m more mentally strong than physically. Building courage and strength, knowing what’s good and what’s bad, you learn that in boxing. It took time. I didn’t trust anyone — my whole life was a secret. It wasn’t until I came here and voiced my story that I felt free.”
Peach, who runs a plumbing company, had the gym built right next to the Henderson Valley house where he lives with wife Alina and their four young children. Alina, who boxed as an amateur, handles Motu’s strength training and manages the business side of things. Zen, their 8-year-old son, has such a tight relationship with Motu that he’s become an invaluable part of the team, so intuitive that she credits him with teaching her how to throw a strong right hand. He even came up with Motu’s fight name.
To say they’ve become family sounds like a cliche, but it was Isaac and Alina she eventually confided in about the extent of the violence she suffered for years at the hands of her ex-husband, a gang member who’s now in jail. They met when she was in her last year at Auckland Girls’ Grammar School.
And it was Isaac and Alina who found a new home for Motu and 11 of her extended whānau after the January floods left their rental chest-deep in water. Uninsured, they lost almost everything. Alina says she and Isaac only found out how bad things were months later because living in the damp, mouldy house was triggering Motu’s asthma. She now sees a doctor for weekly medical checks.
“Mea won’t tell you when something’s wrong, we have to work it out,” says Alina, who helped Motu open her first bank account and made her buy a new bed to replace the old couch she’d been sleeping on since the floods. “She won’t moan. She doesn’t even think it’s not normal — for her, it is normal. Just learning that people can be kind and trusting and look after you… Every time I hear her [talking about her past] in an interview, it still makes me cry.”
It’s already gone down in legend how Motu turned up at the Peachs’ door one night three years ago, with a baby in one arm and a toddler in the other. She stayed for dinner and her fate was sealed when Isaac told her she had the potential to be a world champion. When she weighed in for her first professional fight just a few months later, he told the judges that, too. “I was cracking up laughing,” she says, “and he’s like, ‘This is going to be the next world champion, I’m telling you. Remember the name. Remember the name.’”
The pair had first met when Motu was a sporty 14-year-old and joined the same boxing gym to get fit for soccer. Peach, who’s eight years older, saw her natural talent even then. “It was a bit of a flash gym and we kind of gravitated to each other. I was a rough white guy, she was a rough Māori girl. So there was that connection.”
In her teens, Motu won three gold medals at the national amateur boxing championships but was pregnant before she turned 18 and drifted away from the scene. In the years that followed, the relationship became so violent she was hospitalised several times. Once, he attacked her with a metal bar as she slept. Each time she tried to break free, he’d force his way back into her life.
“You get so captivated and think you’re the only one who can rescue them,” says Motu, who’d send the children away to live with her family when she knew keeping them with her wouldn’t be safe. “I allowed him to control my life. People told me to get out, that I was the idiot for staying. So I just kind of shut myself off. For eight years, it felt like I was running. I don’t know if I was running from me, my life or him.”
It was with her new partner, the father of Motu’s two youngest children, that she began repairing those broken pieces. They’re no longer together but he encouraged her to get back into boxing. Looking for someone to train with, she put up a post on her Facebook page and Isaac messaged her. “Dickhead, come to the gym. You’re just down the road.”
Motu’s title defence will headline the card at North Shore’s Eventfinda Stadium, where five international opponents are up against a team of fighters from the Peach stable. Lani Daniels (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine) is the current IBF heavyweight champion. Jerome “The Panther” Pampellone, another of the gym’s elite boxers, is challenging for the IBF intercontinental light heavyweight crown.
The final line-up was officially revealed at a press conference in Auckland last month. “We start our campaign 10 weeks out,” Peach had told me at training the night before. “But when they do the announcement tomorrow, that makes it all real.” Talking up a storm for the television cameras, promoter Dean Lonergan described it as a golden era of New Zealand boxing: “Two homegrown world champs and we’re very, very excited about having these women on. They’ve both got very, very tough fights and they’ll be entertaining as all heck.”
Motu, who’d already done Breakfast TV and a radio show that morning, is a marketable commodity and right now, everyone wants a piece of her. That can create some tension between Lonergan, who’s looking to boost ticket sales, and Peach, who buffers Motu from the constant demands being made on her but knows that building her profile now will help secure her future after she retires from the ring.
Given the space to relax into her own skin, Motu has a quick smile and an easy way about her. She’s done pretending and doesn’t shy away from talking about her past but doesn’t want to be defined by it either. After gigs where she’s been able to genuinely connect with people, Peach says she comes back to training energised. Sponsor commitments are also contributing to the first real money she’s ever earned in her life.
The week after the media conference, she was on a three-city speakers circuit with Equalize, taking part in a series of panel discussions promoting gender equity as part of the fan festival programme for the Fifa Women’s World Cup. In Dunedin, she was flanked by Lydia Bradey, the first woman to climb Mt Everest without using bottled oxygen, and Paralympian gold medallist Holly Robinson. In Hamilton, her co-panellist was Black Ferns co-captain Ruahei Demant, the 2022 World Rugby Player of the Year.
Motu loved it, talking candidly about the challenges she’s faced and how she got through them, about being brave enough to take risks and knowing that it’s okay to fail. She says the main message she took home with her was this: Don’t be afraid and don’t be ashamed. “That was the most inspiring.”
The oldest of four kids, Motu grew up in Pukepoto, a small town in Hokianga where she was surrounded by family and a strong Christian faith. It was, she says, a childhood rich with love. The smallest of her many cousins, she became one of the toughest by fighting to hold her place — a rough, scrappy kid who ran around in bare feet and dressed like a boy. (She’d never worn high heels before until she was photographed in a red dress and matching stilettos for a women’s magazine after winning her world title fight, and she’s sworn never to wear them again.)
Motu’s mother, Aloma , played rugby league at halfback. When the family moved to Auckland, she took her daughter along to boxing classes for fitness conditioning and caught the coach’s eye.. At the time, Motu was aiming for a place on the national youth soccer team. Her aunties had wanted her to go into modelling.
Aloma, who lives with Motu, is a key part of her support team. On the day we meet, there’s one month to go before Motu’s title defence. For Isaac, this is the most crucial stage of their campaign. “Everything becomes real,” he says. “If we’re not on track now, it’s getting too late. But things are great. Yeah, she’s doing real good.”
Armed with books and toys, Aloma has brought along her two youngest grandchildren to watch their mum training. Amy Andrew, Motu’s sparring partner, has her 10-month-old baby with her, too, and at one stage there are six kids and the Peachs’ elderly dog, Sushi, roaming at large on the gym floor. Strapped into protective body gear so the fighters can practise body blows, Alina somehow manages to hold her ground and absorb a flurry of punches with 2-year-old son Apollo clinging onto her leg, desperate for his turn on the pads.
It sounds chaotic but you can’t argue with what they’re achieving here. The boxers in this gym’s elite squad are at the top of their game, but Isaac still wears trackpants and jandals to their fights. Aloma likes the gym’s whānau environment and the Peach philosophy that surrounds it, built on values like commitment, discipline and mutual respect — life skills that teach you about not giving up when things get tough. Three of Motu’s close male relatives who were lost to suicide didn’t have those coping mechanisms, Aloma says.
“I’ve been with Marea in those darkest hours,” she tells me, and for a moment I don’t know who she’s talking about, but that’s Mea’s proper name. “I’ve flown to Australia to pick up my grandchildren and bring them home. But she is an overcomer. What’s happened in the past doesn’t define her as a woman.”
Isaac hates it when people think Motu is strong in the ring because being in such a violent relationship taught her how to take the blows. “That didn’t make her a boxer,” he says. “It ruined her life. All the trauma and s*** she’s been through. That leaves mental scarring and it causes problems for her to this day. All this stuff she’s doing now is so good for Mea and it’s good for her kids because they’ve all been through hell and now they’re seeing what she can do.”
It’s a miserably wet day, almost seven weeks into Motu’s campaign and she’s been up since 4.30am. The sky is still dark and icy cold when she arrives at the gym for training, with its unforgiving concrete floor. For her, the ring is a quiet place where she finds moments of peace. “No stress, no worries. It’s literally the one time I don’t worry about my kids.”
By the time the bell rings across west Auckland at Green Bay Primary, signalling the end of morning break, she’s sitting in the staff room chatting with three ambassadors from I Am Hope. The charity, founded by Mike King to support young people struggling with their mental health, has just gone into partnership with Dean Lonergan’s company, D&L Events, bringing Motu into the fold.
We walk across to the school library, as a gaggle of small children tumble through the door to sit cross-legged on the floor. There’s a sharp, excited intake of breath when Noah, one of the I Am Hope ambassadors, introduces their special guest. “She’s a boxer,” he says. “And quite a good one, too.”
This is Motu’s first session, so she’s still learning the ropes, but soon she’s goofing around with the group as they act out being silly or sad, and talk about how negative or positive emotions can make them feel. Boxing, she tells them, helped her learn how to control her anger and make friends with people. As a kid, she’d throw chairs around if she didn’t get her way.
Back in Henderson Valley, Alina is sorting out last-minute glitches with a visa for one of the fighters coming out from South Africa, and has police-vetting forms that need signing for the I Am Hope programme. Motu still has hours ahead of her in the gym, with afternoon training on the schedule then a break for dinner before she runs her evening fitness class. By the time she heads home, it’s past 8.30pm and she’s late for bed.
Motu doesn’t eat dairy or red meat and doesn’t drink, although she has a weakness for chocolate. At the official weigh-in, the day before her title match, she’ll have weaned herself down to 55kg, as required for her super bantamweight class. Then, after 10 weeks on a strict diet without fast food, she’ll tuck into a burger and fries to start bulking back up to her fighting weight.
On the night of her fight, she won’t hear the roar of the crowd or the music pumping through the stadium when she steps into the ring. The only voices she’ll register, she says, are the ones she trusts from her team in the red corner: Isaac, Alina, Isaac’s brother Boaz and Zen, who’s studied her opponent closely and is predicting Motu will knock her out in the fourth or fifth round.
The path she’s chosen isn’t without risks. A few months ago, the Peach Boxing stable was badly shaken when one of their top boxers, David Light, had surgery to remove a clot from his brain and suffered a career-ending stroke. Motu says life has taught her to live in the moment. “I don’t worry about getting hurt and I’m not scared of pain. When I walk through those ropes, nothing else exists. It’s just me in this world. It feels like I’m home.”
- Headlining a five-fight card, Motu’s title defence will be held on August 26 at North Shore’s Eventfinda Stadium. For ringside tables and ticketing, visit dandlevents.co.nz