They came in waves from 1910 to 1942 — during the golden years of the sport, up until the start of World War Two.
Factotums, farmers, soldiers, wanderers from the Philippine archipelago, looking for their place in the sun.
San Francisco was where many of them found their pugilistic purpose — heart and soul.
They arrived with little more than the will to fight and the instinct to survive, and what they built inside the gyms of this city, inside Newman’s most of all, was something the sport had never quite seen before.
Eddie Duarte got there first, in the 1910s. He stepped off the USAT Burnside, found his way to the Dreamland Rink, and became the first professional Filipino boxer to fight on American soil. He arrived unknown. He left with a record and a reputation — and in doing so cracked open a door that nobody would ever fully close again.
Francisco Guilledo walked through it in 1922. He fought as Pancho Villa and became the first Filipino world champion in any sport — not just boxing.
Villa once trained at Newman’s, and he carried that distinction the way he fought: clean, efficient, devastating, with a quiet certainty that tended to silence whatever doubts were in the room. He was twenty-three years old and already the best fighter on the planet at his weight. He died at twenty-three, too — a dental infection, of all things, just weeks after his last fight. The sport has never entirely recovered from the loss of what he might have become.
Small Montana came along a decade later, training at Newman’s when he wasn’t across the bay in Oakland, and picked up where Villa left off — winning a world title of his own.
Paddy Ryan himself, the same man who had built the gym, was in his corner for that run. Think about that for a moment. The co-founder of the institution was working the corner of one of the best small fighters in the world, passing whatever he knew directly into the next generation of champions.
Little Dado — Eleuterio Zapanta — followed in those footsteps. The first two-division Filipino world champion, he last fought a fellow Filipino, Little Pancho, at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium in a world title fight that ended in a draw.
Little Pancho — Eulogio Villaruel Tingson, Pancho Villa’s half-brother — had trained at the same gym preparing for that very fight.
Ceferino Garcia came next, shaped in part by that same atmosphere. By the time he climbed to the middleweight championship, the point had been made plainly enough — Filipino fighters were not merely competitive at the top of the sport. They were defining it. Dazzling hand speed, brilliant footwork, a rhythm and timing they brought with them from across the Pacific and refined on the hardwood floors of the Tenderloin.
Gabriel Flash Elorde, the longest-reigning world champion in the 130-pound division, trained and sparred at Newman’s alongside Sandy Saddler and later with Harold Gomes — opponents he would face on great cards at the Cow Palace in the late fifties and early sixties.
Gabriel “Flash” Elorde on a treadmill at Newman’s Gym. August 1960. (Photo courtesy of the San Francisco History Center)
Photographs from the San Francisco History Center show him on a treadmill at Newman’s, young and focused, the city still new to him, the titles still ahead.
My father, Hermie Rivera, once said that had Newman’s remained open, Manny Pacquiao and Luisito Espinosa would have fit right in. He would know.
He had been a mentor to the young Pacquiao and personally brought Espinosa — Earthquake Louie — to San Francisco before crowning him the first Filipino bantamweight champion in Thailand. These were not idle words from a man given to sentiment. They were the considered judgment of someone who had watched Filipino fighters work their whole life and understood exactly what Newman’s had meant to them.
The fight game lived in rough places, like London, like Manila, like New York, like the Tenderloin. A.J. Liebling called Stillman’s in New York the University of Eighth Avenue. He was right about Stillman’s Gym, but he forgot to mention its West Coast counterpart — Newman’s Gym, which was older, and which nobody there would have bragged about out loud.
Newman’s was the Tenderloin’s gift to boxing. And the Filipinos — those early wanderers who stepped off boats with nothing but their hands and their hunger — were the greatest gift the Sweet Science ever received.
The Cadillac Hotel still stands at Eddy and Leavenworth.
Inside those walls, fighting men once made the ring at Newman’s Gym their home.
Acknowledgements
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