Jessica McCaskill is not one to step down to a challenge. She has an innate drive to be the best.
On this particular night, McCaskill’s challenge was a 5’4 Argentinian boxer named Erica Farias. From the moment the two bumped gloves before the match, McCaskill’s eyes were locked on her opponent. Her black silky hair tightly braided in cornrows didn’t move with her as she bounced forward and backward in her fighting stance with her fists raised near her face.
McCaskill’s sported the flag of her adopted home, Chicago, down the sides of her loose-fitting black shorts. On the official’s signal, she pounced toward Farias, quick to make contact first in order to knock her opponent out of sync.
One year ago in front of a packed crowd at Wintrust Arena, McCaskill, a Chicago investment banker who moonlights as a professional boxer, won her first World Boxing Council (WBC) World Super Lightweight title belt, dethroning former world champion Farias.
Next Saturday, Farias, who is 26-3 with 10 knockouts, is seeking her revenge against McCaskill at Wintrust Arena. But the stakes have been elevated since the last time the two have met.
McCaskill, known as CasKILLA in the ring, is putting two belts on the line — the WBC and World Boxing Association (WBA).
“The last fight was close, and I have been waiting for a shot at winning the title back,” Farias said. “I am coming to Chicago to take back what is mine.”
This will be McCaskill’s first rematch of her nine-bout career.
“We’ll see what she shows up with and if she’s the same fighter,” said McCaskill, who is 7-2 with three knockouts over the last three years. “I know that I’m not the same fighter, we’ve been tweaking a lot of different things in what we do on a daily basis and so I’ll show up a lot stronger and a lot faster and plus more experience.”
McCaskill is a natural brawler. She prides herself in her hard-hitting punches and precision.
“As soon as that bell rings, she’s all over you,” her manager and trainer Rick Ramos said. “She’s extremely aggressive. Comes forward, never steps back.”
“I have not come against another fighter that I feel has the same amount of power as me,” McCaskill said. “My goal is to always get my knockout in.”
When McCaskill tells people she’s a professional boxer, their reactions vary.
“It sometimes just depends on my appearance that day,” she said. “If I’m really dolled up, I get more of a ‘wow’ or more of a double take, and people say things like, ‘Oh but you’re face is so pretty’ or something kind of creepy like that.”
McCaskill stumbled into boxing. When she was 24, a friend gave her a monthlong pass to kickboxing class at a St. Louis gym.
McCaskill hated it.
“I didn’t really feel like I needed to kick above my head,” she said.
So a trainer encouraged her to take up boxing instead in which she quickly took off.
At first, McCaskill had no intention of competing, but in time she decided she wanted to join the growing female boxing community.
“Once I started to see more female boxing on TV and then I started sparing and things like that, I thought to myself, ... ‘I could do that,’” McCaskill said. “I thought I could really compete with these girls.”
Now in her fourth year as a pro, McCaskill, 35, is a rising star in the boxing community. And she’s miraculously managed to obtain success in the ring while maintaining her full-time job as an analyst for R.J. O’Brien & Associates.
As one can imagine, McCaskill’s training regimen is intense. But she’s found a way to schedule it around her eight-hour work day.
Three days a week, McCaskill wakes up to her alarm at 3:50 a.m. In less than an hour, she’s at her gym, where she does an hourlong strength and conditioning circuit. By 6 a.m., McCaskill is logged onto her computer at her desk.
During her hourlong lunch break, McCaskill runs two miles and stretches.
When she clocks out at 3 p.m., McCaskill, a St. Louis native who moved to Chicago in 2012 for work, heads straight to Body Shot Boxing Club in Pilsen where she trains and helps teach children to spare.
“It’s not always about me,” she said. “If somebody else has a fight coming up it doesn’t mean that I can just take off and not be at the gym, I have to help them train because they help me train.”
R.J. O’Brien has been extremely supportive of McCaskill. They’ve become her main sponsor. So when McCaskill won her first belt last year at Wintrust Arena in front of some of her colleagues, she wore a green R.J. O’Brien T-Shirt as the official raised her hand above her head.
Boxing has changed McCaskill’s life for the better. It’s taken her many places, including London, New York City, Oklahoma and Colorado.
And now, she wants to use her platform to increase the sport’s visibility and help the next generation of female boxers.
“One of my biggest goals is to ... add something to the history or what will be the history of female boxing,” she said. “[My] a message to all the female fighters coming up aspiring to be world champions is, you have to always be ready for the next opportunity. ... And you just have to be very smart about your choices — not only from what am I eating today but who is in your network, what kind of things are you doing in public. That’s very important because there are people looking at you and you have no idea who is looking at you.”
