I don't like watching women hit each other. It disturbs me. Women's boxing was difficult for me to get used to. Call me chauvinist or chivalrous -- it's up to you. Apparently, I do like watching men hit each other. Always have. Liked it so much that when I was a kid I started my own public access show, "Max on Boxing," in 1989. I used to occasionally get calls on that show asking how I felt about women's boxing, and whether I thought it should even exist.

	Ali had the look even in her pro debut, back in Oct. 1999.

My stock answer was that I did not care for it personally, but I certainly did not want to come down on the wrong side of history. History -- American history anyway -- tends to frown on any kind of prejudice, sexism included. So out of self-interest I supported women's boxing as a burgeoning sport and industry.

Nowadays, no one ever asks whether women's boxing should exist. We have in a few short years grown accustomed to seeing women get hit, hurt, bloodied, and even beaten unconscious. We're fine with it. The question is no longer what any of us think about women boxing, but rather where we rank the women that do box, who should fight whom, and who is the best in the world. All the same questions we ask about the men.

I suppose that is a good thing. The sport has come a long way. It is perceived as a legitimate enterprise. And it is one.

Friday Night Fights gets e-mail all the time from fans who want to know why we don't have more women on our air. Many fans believe that on average the women put on a more exciting show than the men.

Our e-mailers aren't wrong. The average women's fight seems to feature more action than the average men's fight. Women's matches feel more passionate and personal, the action more desperate.

We should bear in mind, however, that a professional boxing match is generally not about the participants' personal feelings about each other. There is usually a degree of emotional detachment between the combatants. More experienced fighters generally take their fights less personally than less experienced ones.

There are far fewer female fighters than male fighters, and as a result there are not a lot of experienced professional female boxers. Many bouts between relatively inexperienced women feel more like street fights than boxing matches. They fight with an urgency that often wears off with experience. An urgency that produces the kind of donnybrooks Joe Six-Pack wants to see. If you've ever met Joe, you know he loves violent action, maybe even more than he loves six-packs. He goes in for offense.

With the women, he gets it. In any form of combat, from the ring to the chessboard, offense comes first. Offense is easier to learn than defense. It is less sophisticated, less reliant on experience. Offense acts, defense reacts. It is easier to throw a punch than it is to avoid one.

Two inexperienced chess players throw pieces at each other recklessly, often unaware of their own defensive vulnerability. Their games are decided violently, in furious exchanges of material. But in a match between two Grandmasters, there is constant reaction and adjustment to offensives. The games usually end in a draw.

In boxing, a 10-round main event between two solid but unspectacular contenders is an example of two artisans plying their trade. Appreciation of such a fight takes work on the part of the viewer. Not so with a four-rounder between two relative novices exchanging haymakers.

The novelty of women's boxing has been wearing off for more than a decade now, and the industry has continued to grow. But I always wondered what would happen when the women became more experienced, and their fights more professional and less action-packed. Would the industry survive?

Boxing has always been a star-driven sport. Several years ago, when a proposed super-fight between women boxing's most recognizable star, Christy Martin, and its best fighter, Lucia Rijker, fell through, it looked as though the industry, if not the sport itself, was in trouble.

Enter Laila Ali. She is big, athletic and genuinely good looking. And she can fight. And because of her famous last name and the purses it generates, she has become one of the more experienced professional female fighters around. She is exciting, and not because her fights resemble tough-woman competitions. They do not. At least not always. She is a compelling professional.

Before her fight with Joe Frazier's daughter, Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, I felt as though I was living in a Simpson's cartoon. Can't you see it? Little Lisa has a dream about the future, and the cartoonists demonstrate that it is the future by having her walk past a fight poster advertising Muhammad Ali's daughter fighting Joe Frazier's. The subtle, classically Simpsonian touch is that it's a fight between Ali and Frazier's daughters, not their sons. Gender equality, a trend of the 20th century, is the rule of the 21st.

In real life, Laila won that the fight, which was in fact a sloppy, passionate tough-woman competition. Now Laila is trying to move past that. She has since convincingly beaten Valerie Mahfood, a relatively experienced professional fighter.

People will watch Laila, whether her fights are action-packed or not. She is a star, and the ideal frontwoman for woman's boxing. And we have her on Friday Night Fights, February 14th.

Max Kellerman is a studio analyst for ESPN2's Friday Night Fights and the host of the show Around The Horn.