If you know who Margaret MacGregor of Bremerton is, chances are it’s because she earned a spotlight in the boxing world when she won a bout in four rounds against male boxer Loi Chow of Vancouver, Canada, in 1999.

Held at the Mercer Arena in Seattle, it was the first sanctioned professional mixed-gender fight.

MacGregor retired from the ring at age of 50 and now works driving a van for Eagles Wings Coordinated Care Work, fighting not in the ring – but for her community. This April, she’ll be awarded by the International Women’s Boxing Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

At 61, MacGregor’s voice and hands are somewhat compromised by what she said was the administration of a medication when she was hospitalized in 2005. It left her with an inability to speak at a normal cadence and some muscle contractions in her hands. The condition doesn’t get in her way very often, however, and she continues to work and stay involved with her family, friends and community.

“I had been involved in martial arts, and I really enjoyed it,” MacGregor said. “But I found and went into kickboxing, and I enjoyed the full contact of it. It felt better.” In martial arts, bouts are won using “point sparring,” and it’s not necessarily a full-contact fight. Kickboxing, however, allowed the fighters to be more aggressive. From there, she started boxing and said that she loved the hard work.

“I wasn’t one of those real cocky people. My father told me that there’s always going to be somebody better than you, but you keep working and doing your best and you’ll do well,” she said. “The actual fight is the icing on the cake. It’s the training and camaraderie and showing up somewhere to work that really counts.”

MacGregor said that boxing kept her out of trouble. “I could fight, and I wouldn’t go to jail,” she joked.

MacGregor’s godson, Gabriel Echavvaria, will be going to Vegas and is excited to see her get the recognition she deserves.

Recently, he saw a photograph of boxer Darnell Boone standing in front of a painted mural of himself, and it gave Echavvaria the idea for a mural of MacGregor. “I thought, why don’t we have one of those for Margaret in Bremerton?” he said. “Somebody said, ‘we have a building!’ and so we know what wall we’re going to use, and we have a couple of artists we’re working with to get it started.”

The mural will be on the Eagles Wings building on Wheaton Way, though a timeline has not yet been established. Echavvaria’s interest in preserving MacGregor’s legacy is rooted in how she fought for him and his family.

He met MacGregor when his mother brought her down to visit him in California. He’d been addicted to drugs but was sobering up. “I watched her make coffee in the hotel room, and she sort of hunched over and moved her arms forward when she was making coffee, and I said, ‘she moves like a boxer.’ My mom told me Margaret’s story and showed me pictures of her at the fight in 1999,” he said.

With a few months of sobriety under his belt, Echavvaria came to Washington. “She was here for me. She took me to recovery meetings—took me to different places in Kitsap County and introduced me to restaurants and things like that here,” he said.

“When I had my daughter, my daughter’s mom asked Margaret to be her godmother as well.” Echavvaria’s daughter’s mother died, and MacGregor “stepped up” to be there for his family. “She’s seen me develop into someone who’s working hard, being responsible and a good dad and really, into a man,” he said as MacGregor teared up from his comments.

While MacGregor no longer boxes in the ring, she continued doing martial arts until a few years ago. “I’d absolutely box again if I could,” she said.

MacGregor’s professional boxing record stands at 5-1, and her kickboxing record, as near as she remembers, is 8-0-1.

“When I first got here, before I really knew this city, we would always go places and meet people who would say, ‘Oh I love Margaret! She’s just the nicest, sweetest person,’” Echavvaria said. “You never hear that she was bragging about being tough or arguing with people. Everyone just loves her.”

Margaret MacGregor later in life.