Stream It Or Skip It: ‘UNTOLD: Deal With The Devil’ on Netflix, The Hard-Knocks Story of Women’s Boxing Champ Christy Martin

In their new line of standalone documentary films under the UNTOLD banner, Netflix is seeking to take a hard-hitting look at sports stories. Well, there’s hard hits to spare in UNTOLD: Deal With The Devil, which tells the underdog story of Christy Martin, who rose to fame in the mid ‘90s as one of the first prominent female professional boxers. Her battle wasn’t just in the ring; struggles against a tough background, acceptance of her own sexuality, and violence in her personal life meant her whole life has been a fight.

UNTOLD: DEAL WITH THE DEVIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “I grew up a coal miner’s daughter,” Martin notes, over a wide shot of Mullens, West Virginia, the small town where she grew up. It’s a hardscrabble background, and Martin fit right in—playing multiple sports, even serving as the catcher on the boy’s baseball team. But she was a fighter at her core, and immediately impressed trainers when she stepped into a boxing gym, hitting harder than many of the male fighters.

After a series of small-time fights, she caught the eye of boxing’s biggest promoter, Don King, and quickly found herself battling at the MGM Grand on the undercard of a Mike Tyson fight, and the dominating performance she put on on that stage won her magazine covers, late-night TV guest spots, and a level of fame she scarcely could have imagined growing up in tiny Mullens. Success puts a target on your back, though. Soon every woman in the boxing world was gunning for Martin, both for her level of fame, and her carefully-managed image as boxing’s “girl next door” (albeit, a brash, fiercely trash-talking girl next door).

“In front of the camera, it was great,” Martin notes, as her career peaks. “My personal and my private life… it was the opposite.” Martin married her longtime trainer, the much-older Jim Martin, and with King’s help, the media ate up the image of the husband-and-wife boxing duo. Behind that facade, Christy Martin struggled mightily, with her hidden sexuality, with Jim Martin’s limitations as a trainer, and his constant emotional and physical abuse. She longed to break free and move beyond him, begging for a divorce and reminding him that she was a lesbian, and he longed to keep her as, per her words, “his personal ATM”.

Jim Martin’s jealousy, control and abuse came to a violent conclusion after Christy reconnected with a high-school girlfriend. On November 23, 2010, Jim Martin stabbed Christy multiple times, shot her and left her for dead, a crime for which he is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for. She survived the attack, though, and recounts it in visceral detail herein. News coverage of the incident brought Martin’s long-hidden personal life into the public view, finally allowing Martin to live her truth.

“One thing’s for sure, I didn’t creep out of the closet. I kicked the door down,” Martin laughs, darkly.

With Jim Martin out of her life and her sexuality out in the open, Martin’s story culminates with an attempt to return to the ring, “a bullet still in my back.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s hard not to think of Martin’s life as the real-world version of Million Dollar Baby, if not Rocky.

Performance Worth Watching: The strength of the UNTOLD series so far has been the incredible access they’ve gotten in interviews, and Deal With The Devil has the most important figures in Martin’s story, including her ex-husband, interviewed in his prison scrubs. For proof of her boxing bona fides, though, look no further than the awed tone with which Mike Tyson describes watching her early fights, and Laila Ali describes getting into boxing after seeing her fight.

Memorable Dialogue: “Throughout my life, the only place I felt safe was in a boxing ring,” Martin says early on, “For one—there were rules. Every punch was clean. Number two, I had so much anger, the only place I could let it out was the boxing ring. And number three, boxing was my survival. It was preparing me for how I was going to escape my own destiny. I might get beaten, and I might get knocked down, but m*****f*****, you cannot kill me.”

Sex and Skin: There’s frank discussion of Martin’s sexuality, and a brief mention of one of Jim Martin’s sexual kinks, but Deal With The Devil earns its TV-MA content rating more from blood than from skin.

Our Take: Much like ESPN has done with their long-running 30 For 30 series of documentaries, Netflix is hoping to tell compelling sports stories that might have otherwise been forgotten in the UNTOLD series, of which Deal With The Devil is the second of five installments. The choice of Martin’s story is an excellent one—anyone who followed sports in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s might have a passing familiarity with Martin’s story, and might even recall the dramatic headlines that ensued after Jim Martin’s attempted murder of her in 2010. But it’s unlikely that many have heard the full story, and certainly not with the kind of full coverage UNTOLD is offering, with lengthy interviews with both Martins, rival boxers Laila Ali and Lisa Holewyne, and loads of archival footage of Martin’s biggest bouts. It’s a compelling story when taken as a whole, whether or not you knew a thing about it going in.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As Sylvester Stallone showed us a generation ago, boxing stories make for terrific drama, and Martin’s hard-knock story is fascinating to the final bell.

“You shot me with my own gun,” Martin says, confronting her former husband during his trial, “and guess what, m*****f*****? I walked out.”

 Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.

Watch Untold: Deal With The Devil on Netflix