The Ring, The Bible of Boxing, August 1994
The Best of a Nation: The All-Time Top 10 Of The Philippines
The pages of The Ring in August 1994— the Bible of Boxing — were never meant to settle arguments so much as to keep them alive.
But when Jack Fiske and Hermie Rivera put their names on a byline together, they weren’t just chronicling greatness.
They were insisting on it.
What they were really doing was picking up a conversation nobody had finished — one that started decades back, in packed arenas and waterfront gyms and port towns where Filipino fighters first showed the world what they had.
It started the way a lot of things worth remembering start — not at a desk, not on a deadline.
Saint Patrick’s Day, 1990. A corner table at Lefty O’Doul’s on Geary Street. The aroma of cabbage and corned beef in the air, Tony Bennett on the speakers, the city outside doing what San Francisco does on a green-streamer afternoon.
My father Hermie Rivera and Jack Fiske sat together, and the talk turned — the way it always did between those two — to the ones who made history and the ones history let slip.
That conversation became an article. The article became a document.
The Ring recognized Mr. Fiske as the dean of American boxing writers, forty years at the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote through eras most journalists only read about — filed from payphones, scribbled notes on whatever paper was within reach. The words came out clean and lasted.
Hermie Rivera was a radio and TV announcer, a manager, a storyteller — but above all, a man who never stood at the edge of the fight game looking in. He was inside it. He managed world champions Morris East and Luisito Espinosa through the long seasons of a fighter’s life — the training camps, the title shots, the losses that don’t leave you. These weren’t subjects to him. He’d broken bread with them, traveled with them, sat with them in back rooms that smelled of tape and liniment while they waited for everything to be decided. When a fight ended and the room emptied out, my father was still there.
Mr. Fiske gave the bouts and the fighters fitting words.
My father gave the fighters their witness.
On those two pages of The Ring, they did both.
The List
Pancho Villa reached boxing’s summit first. Next were Gabriel Elorde, Ceferino Garcia, Ben Villaflor, Little Dado, Small Montana, Rolando Navarrete, Erbito Salavarria, Dodie Boy Peñalosa, Bernabe Villacampo.
Ten names that live on.
Villa — Francisco Guilledo — is where the article begins. He was not just the first Filipino world champion. He was the beginning of belief and hero worship. In 1923 he knocked out Jimmy Wilde — the greatest flyweight who ever lived, most people still say — and took the 112-pound title. The old-timers swear by him. Mr. Fiske wrote that, and it hasn’t aged a day. Villa made four successful defenses before a non-title loss July 4, 1925 to Jimmy McLarnin in Emeryville Baseball Park near San Francisco, and died ten days later at twenty-three — blood poisoning from an ulcerated tooth.
Gabriel Elorde — “Flash”, they called him— was the craftsman. He beat Sandy Saddler in a non-title tenner in Manila, then lost on cuts in their second bout at the Cow Palace. He lost to legendary lightweight Carlos Ortiz twice, but learned from those defeats the way only great fighters can — not by changing who they were, but by refining what they got. Then Harold Gomes came along, and the world junior lightweight title with him, and that was the end of the questions. March 16, 1960, the Cow Palace. Elorde stopped him in seven rounds. Gomes wanted another shot. Fine — June 4, 1960, Araneta Coliseum, home crowd, everything on the line. One round. Same result. He made ten successful defenses thereafter.
Mr. Fiske and Señor Rivera called him one of the best junior lightweights of all time. Where Villa had kicked the door open, Elorde held it — patient, precise, always there. The kind of champion who doesn’t just win a title but makes you understand what a title is supposed to mean.
Ceferino Garcia brought defiance — fists and his bolo punch, Filipino instinct refined into ring science, and a middleweight crown taken from Fred Apostoli by seventh-round kayo in 1939. A controversial draw against Henry Armstrong may have cost Garcia a fourth world title simultaneously held — a distinction that would have been unprecedented. He never got it. He never stopped coming forward either.
Ben Villaflor turned professional at fifteen — before he’d barely started. He outpointed Alfredo Marcano in 1972 and took the world junior lightweight title. Left-handed, heavy hands, and when he lost the belt he didn’t disappear — he came back and took it again. What came after made the early exit hard to believe.
Little Dado — Eleuterio Zapanta — moved to Northern California and did most of his fighting there, outpointing countryman Small Montana in 1938 for the vacant California flyweight world title. Two Filipinos, far from home, fighting each other for a title most of the boxing world barely acknowledged. Fiske and Rivera put it down without comment. They didn’t need to add anything.
Benjamin Ledesma Gan — Small Montana — went seventy-nine and change, ten knockouts, and ran through men the record books still carry. He won the New York State world title in 1935 by decisioning Midget Wolgast — a man who required outpointing, not outpunching. He fought draws against Little Dado and Jackie Jurich, defeated Manuel Ortiz and Tony Marino. An era that preferred knockouts never quite knew what to do with him. He didn’t change his approach for anyone.
Rolando Navarrete — the Bad Boy from Dadiangas — was the hardest-punching 130-pounder in the world during the golden age of the division. Arguello knocked him out cold in 1980. He came back anyway — crushed Cornelius Boza-Edwards in five rounds the following year and took the WBC crown. Defended it. Lost it to Bazooka Limon. Then spent years in jail. The article records that too, without flinching. Greatness rarely arrives clean.
Erbito Salavarria put Chartchai Chionoi away in two rounds in 1970 and had the WBC flyweight belt. Five years later he became the first Filipino ever to win back a world title. His people never forgot that.
Dodie Boy Peñalosa had polio as a child. Left leg shorter than his right. Became national junior flyweight champion, won the IBF title in his fourteenth bout, made three successful defenses. Some records you have to sit with for a moment before they settle.
Bernabe Villacampo — and Fiske and Rivera said this plainly — wasn’t polished. His record wasn’t pretty either. But he went all-in every time he climbed through the ropes, and somehow worked his way to a world title shot. The crowd always loved him for it. You can’t manufacture that.
Ten fighters. Two writers. One document that refused to let these men disappear.
That afternoon at Lefty O’Doul’s remains in my heart. The corned beef, the cable car, Tony Bennett in the background — and at our table, my father and Jack Fiske talking the way men talk when they’ve earned the right to be certain.
Luisito Espinosa and I listened quietly.
We didn’t interrupt that conversation.
We were just grateful to have been there.
What I understand now, that I couldn’t fully then — it wasn’t two writers planning a piece. It was two men settling a debt, something owed to the Greatest Boxers Made in the Philippines.
The Filipino boxing greats crossed oceans and filled arenas but never quite got the homage they deserved, and Mr. Fiske and my father corrected that oversight the only way reporters and fans of The Sweet Science, like them, can.
The byline remains true and closed to our heart— Jack Fiske & Hermie Rivera and has become a veritable hall of fame.
Two names on pages in the Bible of Boxing — and inside those pages, ten men who were never little, never dolls, never anything less than the best of a nation.