Pancho Villa, Small Montana, and Little Dado
La Carlota is located just five miles east of Mount Kanlaon , the most active volcano in the central Philippines, and it has never let the city forget it. The mountain has buried La Carlota in ash more than once — most recently in December 2024, and again in May 2025 — and in its long history it has just as often given the city something rarer: little brown men who could take a beating and make a great mark in the fight game.
Between 1923 and 1941, La Carlota produced three of the finest boxers the Philippines has ever sent into the world…Pancho Villa, Small Montana, and Little Dado. Three men, one small sugar town, eighteen years. It is hard to call that a coincidence. Whatever Kanlaon put into the soil and water of that corner of Negros Occidental, it seems to have gone into them too.
The Filipino “Pancho Villa”
Francisco Tingson Guilledo was born in La Carlota on August 1, 1901, and started life herding goats and shining shoes, not training for greatness. He grew into a fighter barely over five feet tall, never weighing more than 114 pounds, but he carried himself like a much bigger man. Under the eye of American trainer Rufe Turner at Manila’s Olympic Stadium, he sharpened a cross-armed defense, fast scientific footwork, and a double left hook that ended fights before opponents understood what had happened. He swept the Philippine and Oriental flyweight and bantamweight titles before he ever left the islands.
In 1922 he sailed for the United States and gave American crowds something they had not seen before. He knocked out Johnny Buff for the American flyweight title that September, and on June 18, 1923, he beat reigning world flyweight champion Jimmy Wilde by seventh-round knockout at the Polo Grounds in New York — becoming the first Filipino, and the first Asian, to win a world boxing title. He finished his career with 79 wins, 25 by knockout, against only 5 losses and 4 draws, with 20 no-decision bouts along the way. He was never once knocked out.
He fought his last fight on July 4, 1925, against Jimmy McLarnin at Oaks Ball Park in Emeryville, California, a bout many ringside men believed he had won. Ten days later, he was dead — a dental infection that turned septic, taking him at twenty-three. The squared circle had given Pancho Villa everything, and then it took him before he ever had the chance to come home.
“Small Montana”
The Little Mountain
Benjamin Ledesma Gan, grew up working as a blacksmith and carrying a photograph of Pancho Villa in his wallet — proof, perhaps, that what Guilledo started in La Carlota did not end with him. At eighteen, sportswriter William “Bill” Miller and the men who ran Olympic Stadium gave him a new name: Small Montana, a nod to the size of what he might become.
He fought differently than Villa had — speed, angles, and defense over knockout power, standing 5’4” and rarely above 112 pounds. He beat Midget Wolgast twice in 1935 to take the American flyweight title and earned recognition from the New York State Athletic Commission as flyweight champion of the world. He lost the title to Benny Lynch in a brutal fifteen rounds in 1937, but kept fighting at the highest level for years afterward, trading punches with fellow Filipinos Little Dado, Little Pancho, and Speedy Dado, and beating world-class men like Manuel Ortiz and Tony Marino. He retired with 83 career wins, 13 by knockout.
When the fighting in the ring was done, Montana enlisted in the United States Army, serving with the 340th Infantry Division’s First Battalion at Camp McCoy as the unit bugler — beloved, by most accounts, for taps, and somewhat less so for reveille.
“Little Dado”
The Final Flame of La Carlota’s Golden Trio
Eleuterio Togonon Zapanta, the last of the three and the one La Carlota called Little Dado, was small even by flyweight standards, but he hit like a heavier man and moved faster than fighters twice his size. Between 1938 and 1943, The Ring magazine ranked him among the top five flyweights in the world, and in 1939 — with the world flyweight title vacant — they placed him at number one.
He fought his way to recognition as a dual champion in California, holding both the flyweight and bantamweight titles at once, and he once set his sights on a featherweight crown as well — chasing what would have made him only the second fighter in history, after Henry Armstrong, to hold three world titles in three weight classes at the same time. He never reached it. He did not need to. Three sons of one small town, three championships, in less than two decades, was already more than most places see in a hundred years.
The Mountain Still Speaks
Pancho Villa, Small Montana, and Little Dado were never just boxers. They were evidence of what that corner of Negros Occidental could produce when hardship met stubbornness — proof that a hard life at the foot of Kanlaon did not have to end in defeat. Whatever moved through that ground seemed to move through their blood too: a restlessness, a refusal to stay down, a hunger that carried each of them clear across the Pacific and brought them home again as champions.
Kanlaon has not settled since. It buried La Carlota and its neighboring towns in ash in December 2024, and again in May 2025, and the tremors still have not fully stopped. The same unpredictable force that once tested these three men is testing the people who came after them now. Roofs sag under the weight of it. Fields sit uncertain. Families wait to see whether the ground will hold, or whether they will need to start over the way it has asked of them before.
We tell their story because they earned their place in this book regardless of what is happening on Negros Occidental today; their courage does not need a current crisis to justify the telling.
But it would be its own kind of dishonesty to treat the volcano as nothing more than a backdrop. It raised these men, and it is testing their descendants in the same breath. If anything in these pages moved you, let that feeling travel a little further than the page, toward the people still living in its shadow now.