In 2004, Ana “The Hurricane” Julaton decided to throw her mettle into the ring, step out of the box to box, and debunk stereotypes held about Filipino women being fragile.
She’s a woman boxer. She’s a woman boxer who primps when not in the boxing ring. She is easy on the eyes, something that has not gone unnoticed during on-cam interviews, but which she is able to shrug off with ease. Most importantly, she’s a boxer who has become a media darling, giving great interviews, a rarity for someone in a sport where fighters more often than not are not talkers.
“I didn’t like boxing in the beginning. I hated it,” says the 26-year-old with a laugh during a one-on-one interview with Asian Journal.
For someone who started out hating the sport, Ana has gone a long way. The 125 pound, 5’5″ Ana is currently ranked the number 4 boxer in the U.S. and has to her name, the California State, the San Francisco Golden Gloves and the Diamond Belt Champion titles.
She initially started out training in Martial Arts, with a primary focus on self-defense at the West Wind Schools in Berkeley, California. The sport taught her discipline, conceptual knowledge and spirit, she says, traits that she brought with her into the boxing ring when she decided to take up the sport in February 2004, joining a boxing tournament a mere three weeks after training.
And she has lived up to her boxing moniker, “Hurricane,” a tropical cyclone that constantly batters the Philippine islands, her country of ethnicity, year in, year out. The tropical cyclones are bad news when they hit, as they cause damage and destruction. But for a boxer, being able to do damage and destruction in the ring is good.
Interestingly enough, she earned her nickname not because of her boxing skills but because the announcers needed a mnemonic device to help them remember how to pronounce her surname, Julaton (Hoo-la-ton).
“My name starts with a ‘J’ so they’d say something like ‘Joo-la-toon’ or something like that. They’d always mispronounce it so we added ‘The Hurricane’ in so they could remember the ‘H,’ ‘Hoo-la-ton.’ And then after a while, when we started having people watch some of the fights, I had people coming up and tell me, ‘Oh that’s why they call you ‘The Hurricane’ because you throw a lot of punches. I just never thought, you know, ‘coz it never came up to mind. It was more of a name thing and people started, you know, getting into it after watching some of our fights,” she explains with amusement and a hint of pride.
Her journey as a boxer is closely tied to that of her current coach, Filipino American Angelo Reyes, who introduced her to the sport. Ana and Angelo meet almost on a regular basis for training. Ana has a 6-day a week training schedule, which accommodates both boxing and martial arts, which she teaches. Her day starts sometime around 10 a.m., when she trains until 3 p.m. Then it’s an hour of cooking or lunch for her and then she teaches martial arts from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. She says her only day off is Tuesday, but she’s still connected to boxing or martial arts in some way. She gets around 7 hours of sleep at night, 8, she says, “when she’s lucky.”
“You kinda have to, I feel. Every time I jump into the ring, if you don’t put time in the gym, oh you pay for it,” she says.
Ana professes to be a big fan of Filipino boxing champ Manny Pacquiao, “hands down.” She happily tells of when she had the chance to hang out with Manny a month ago in Oxnard for close to a week, showing him some of her fights, watching him train.
“It’s just amazing to see how simple-minded he is but at the same time he’s very goal-oriented. He has a lot of desire and he’s passionate about what he does. With something like said, I’d say, a lot of people I meet normally, they don’t have that luxury to actually enjoy what they do for a living,” she says with awe.
Ana, who grew up in the South of Market and Daly City areas in San Francisco, says she has a yearning to rediscover her Filipino roots. Though she has not been to the Philippines yet, she says that she wants to go there someday when her schedule permits. She talked at length about her parents, who were both born in the Philippines and migrated to the U.S. during trying times.
“For me it’s an interesting thing. Being a Filipino American I grew up not learning Tagalog. My parents really felt like I didn’t need to living in America because back then when my dad was growing up in the 60s, they were having the big civil rights thing and there was a lot of racial issues. The last thing that my grandfather wanted, because he came to the States. He enlisted in the US army at the age of 16. He lied, he said he was 18 just so he could build a future for the family. He went through a lot of discrimination, a lot of people were threatening to kill him. But he just worked really hard. He wanted to make sure that his kids didn’t have to go through the same thing so he had to Americanize them in order for them to fit with society,” she says by way of explanation.
Ana says that her parents “support her in anything” that she does despite her initial apprehensions that they wouldn’t because boxing was such a contact sport. Her younger brother is supportive as well.
As a boxer, Ana’s ultimate goal is to lobby for the acceptance of women’s boxing as an official sport in the Olympics, something which she passionately works for. Another goal for her is to put Filipinos on the map.
“I’d say it’s about time that we come out in the mainstream,” she says about Filipino Americans. And surely, with her drive and spirit, she just might be able to do so. (AJ)
(Editor’s note: This December 10, Ana has an upcoming non-title fight against the currently ranked number 2 Bantamweight in the U.S., Teresa “Tree” O’Toole in Berkeley. The anticipated exhibition match pits Ana against Teresa, a four-time National Champion and a former U.S. representative for the PanAm and the World games, with over 8 years of experience and over 80 fights.)
