San Francisco once had an institution of higher learning for boxers — an elite fight club and fistic academy (of sorts) on the West Coast.
No diplomas, no degrees were given— just a pat on the back or a playful jab to the breadbasket for the hard, honest curriculum of the squared circle.
It was called Newman’s Gym.
It only exists in memory now, but it was once the oldest and one of the most revered boxing gymnasiums in the nation.
Follow boxing’s trail long enough and it brings you here, to the Tenderloin…and to its historic past.
When Joe Herman and Billy Newman took over the old Taussig & Ryan gym in 1942, they did not arrive as strangers to the fight game.
They arrived as lifers.
Joe Herman — born Anton Scherer on January 28, 1899 — had been introduced to fighting as a newsboy in street-corner tournaments in Southern California. By the time he was done as a professional, he had logged more than a hundred bouts across California and Australia, fighting through the old four-round era when the game was still finding its shape on the West Coast. In Fresno, where he fought and promoted, people knew him as the Valley Champ.
He was also a founding member of the California Boxers Hall of Fame and the California Society for Boxing. When the fighting was over, Herman became whatever boxing needed — trainer, manager, matchmaker, promoter, publicist when it came to that.
He worked with hundreds of fighters over the decades, and those who knew him said much the same thing: steady, even-tempered, not one to hold grudges.
Together, Herman and Newman co-managed their one mutual world champion — Tony Olivera, who held the NBA Flyweight title — and worked with former titlists Tony Marino and Carl “Bobo” Olson.
William “Bill” Newman was Herman’s partner and, in most ways that mattered, the heart of the place. What Newman is remembered for is not any single fighter. It is the decades he spent keeping the doors open.
Champions and beginners walked through the same entrance and received identical treatment, which is to say nobody received special treatment. You worked, or you found somewhere else not to work.
If a fighter needed gear, Newman found a way. If someone was short on money, he covered it. He never made a thing of it.
The gym bore that character. By the early 1980s, Newman’s was reputedly the oldest boxing gymnasium in the United States and the last serious professional fight gym left in San Francisco. You could feel the history in the walls — in the worn canvas, the smell of leather and rosin, the photographs staring down from every surface. The names that had passed through the place read like a roll call of the sport’s golden age — Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, James J. Braddock, Max Baer, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, Sandy Saddler, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, Sugar Ray Leonard. Different eras, different divisions, same address.
Then there was Miles Davis, who sparred there regularly and was known to remind his partners not to punch his mouth. He had a gig that night.
And there was a nineteen-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, who walked through the door sometime around 1960. Known at the time as Cassius Clay, he had just won the national amateur light heavyweight title in San Francisco and punched his ticket to the Rome Olympics.
He was supposed to go home. He could not — he hated flying, missed his ride, and ended up staying a stretch.
He trained at Newman’s during those weeks, and when it was finally time to leave, Billy Newman reached into his pocket and handed the young man three hundred dollars to get back to Louisville by ground.
The man who became Muhammad Ali never forgot it.
Newman died in March 1984. Joe Herman had gone just weeks before, struck by a car in San Francisco at eighty-five. The two men who had kept that gym alive for over four decades were gone within a month of each other.
I remember meeting Don Stewart’s office in 1983 or 84, Stewart himself seated among his gallery of photographs, a pose similar to the picture above, the way a man sits in a room he has earned.
Born in 1910, he had been a fighter once, something like 26 and 3, before moving into training.
By 1984, with Newman gone, he was the last keeper — running things day to day, keeping the doors open for at-risk youth at fifty cents a day.
He had worked with Sonny Liston, Gerry Cooney, and a young George Foreman fresh out of the Job Corps. Foreman had sought him out specifically.
The gym’s reputation still meant something, even then.
The office was a proper man cave — photographs and artwork covering every surface, the ephemera of fighting heroes stacked and hung without apology. A museum before anyone called it that.
The gym eventually closed in 1984 and relocated a block south on Leavenworth near Golden Gate and held on into the mid-nineties before closing for good.
My father once watched Foreman train at Newman’s in the early eighties and told me about those sparring sessions more than once, to make sure I understood what it meant to be in a room where legends worked. It was my father, along with Jack Fiske of the Chronicle and Al Corona of the Examiner, who first brought me to Newman’s just before the original site closed in 1983.
The Tenderloin Museum now occupies a space within the Cadillac Hotel. The neighborhood’s history — its people, its tensions, its long complicated life — finally has a home.
Newman’s Gym memory and its legacy lives on — in every fighter who laced up inside those walls, in every corner man, in every boxing fan who understood and appreciated the fight game.
Sources, References, Acknowledgements and Recommended Readings:
- This article contains selected excerpts, quotations, images, and archival references used under the Fair Use provisions of Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act. These materials are presented for educational, scholarly, and cultural preservation purposes. Every effort has been made to properly attribute sources and limit use to what is necessary to honor the historical and cultural narrative.
- https://www.tenderloinmuseum.org/
