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Philippines, 13 Aug 2025 |
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Maurice H. Goldner: Letting the Filipino Fist Speak for Itself By Emmanuel Rivera, RRT PhilBoxing.com Tue, 12 Aug 2025 Before TV and the internet made champions feel like they were sitting in your living room or your computer, before glossy magazines polished them up, there were soldier-reporters like Maurice H. Goldner. He carried a pen instead of gloves, catching the heat and noise of the ring, then sending it far beyond Manila. Our story today is both history and homage as we follow Mr. Goldner’s example. He believed that if you told it straight, the fighters would step into the light on their own. No need for photos in our tribute for a forgotten scribe, just the same faith in the craft he practiced so well. Goldner didn’t start at press row. He came in uniform, a U.S. Army corporal stationed in the Philippines. Back then, boxing was mostly a barracks diversion- two willing men, a roped-off patch of dirt, and a crowd ready for anything. He stayed long enough to watch it change. Years later (by then sports editor of the Manila Daily Bulletin) he wrote like someone who’d lived it from the inside. His byline ran in Manila papers and in The Ring and Boxing & Wrestling News, tracing the rise of Filipino boxing. When He Arrived The sport was still shaking off its rough start. Soldiers and sailors had brought it in 1899, and it got a reputation for mismatches— too many locals put in against men far bigger and much better in ability. By 1902, Governor-General William Howard Taft had seen enough. After one night of obvious mismatches, he banned it outright. For years, fights carried on quietly under “club” memberships. Then Frank Churchill, Stewart “Eddie” Tait, and others stepped in to fix things. Tait and former lightweight contender Rufe Turner began training Filipino fighters for free. It worked. Goldner later wrote, with a grin in the words, “Every other Filipino nowadays wants to be a fighter.” A Fix and a Stadium By 1919, boxing in Manila was alive again, but trouble came quickly. At the Olympic Club at Palomar Park in Tondo, Francisco Flores drew with visiting Australian Sid Godfrey in a decision the Australians didn’t buy. They even talked of sailing home. To cool things down, Churchill brought in a scoring system (eleven points a round, totals deciding the bout). No tied score). They called it the “Australian System” to be polite, though it was born in Manila. That same year, the Olympic Stadium opened…Manila’s first true fight palace. For the first time since Taft’s ban, tickets were sold openly downtown. No back doors, no whispered invites, just a box office. And Filipinos, once hidden in preliminaries, began topping the cards. Saturday nights there drew senators, sailors, shopkeepers, and longshoremen alike. Governor-General Leonard Wood often sat at ringside, bringing Manila’s high society with him. “Society hobnobbed with the masses,” Goldner wrote. Parties often waited for the final bell. Names Worth Remembering Kid Dencio’s story still hits hard. Champion at both featherweight and lightweight in the Orient, he went to Australia in 1920 to face Eugene Criqui (author’s note: It was actually Bert McCarthy who last fought Kid Dencio Cabanela) In the fourteenth round, he collapsed and never woke up. Australian sportswriter W.F. Corbett called him “the greatest fighter to hit these shores since Jack Johnson.” When his casket came home, it lay in state at the Olympic Stadium. Nearly 100,000 people joined the funeral march. “Kid Dencio… was buried with a greater ceremony than the Hawaiian queen,” Goldner wrote. It showed how deeply boxing had worked its way into the Filipino heart. Then there was Macario Villon. Once just a sparring partner, he came back from Australia a national idol. In 1921, his fight with Elino Flores for the lightweight championship of the Orient drew over 20,000 pesos, a record at the time. Goldner in The Ring— Bible of Boxing By the mid-1920s, Goldner was writing for The Ring, the sport’s top magazine. In June 1926, his piece Filipinos Too Game looked at the fearless style that made Filipino fighters famous and sometimes cost them dearly. He pointed to Dencio, Pancho Villa, Clever Sencio. All three refused to quit, even when the fight was slipping away. “They fear nothing in the ring,” he wrote. “Game to the core… they battle till they drop.” To him, it wasn’t recklessness, it was pride. They fought for the crowd, for neighbors who skipped dinner to buy a ticket, for the honor of their towns. “They were the heroes of the hour among their own,” he intoned. Proving the Filipino Boxer’s Worth Some Americans in the Islands came to see them lose. Locals came to see them win. Goldner knew there was only one cure for doubt…victories no one could talk away. “The skeptical attitude… had to be broken down,” he wrote. “The best way was to offer proof.” Pancho Villa’s 1923 world flyweight title was that proof. Goldner had an eye for the telling detail. He could take you from a Saturday night in Manila to a kitchen table in San Francisco without losing pace. He wrote about the smell of resin and sweat, the roar after a clean shot, the way senators and dockworkers sat just a few feet apart. He caught the politics too— a knockout that earned tea with Senate President Manuel Quezon, a funeral that stopped the city cold. For him, boxing was never just about the fight. It was about the people it pulled together: rich and poor, soldier and civilian, skeptic and believer. Goldner’s name might have dimmed, but his work remains one of the clearest records of Filipino boxing’s golden years. His Boxing & Wrestling News series, The Rise of the Filipino Boxer, mapped how the sport found legal footing, earned public respect, and raised a generation of heroes. His pieces in The Ring kept both the glory and the cost alive. More than anything, he treated Filipino fighters as equals to anyone in the world. He saw the flaws and brilliance and the bravery that sometimes went too far. Because of his words, the roar of the Olympic Stadium still feels near. The slow beat of Dencio’s funeral still echoes in Manila’s streets. The city still hums, in memory, with the sound of a nation finding itself, one fight at a time. And maybe that’s the best tribute; to write with the same faith he carried, trusting the story to let the fighters step into the light. Sources, Acknowledgement and Recommended Readings: • We proudly remember Mr. Maurice H. Goldner for his hard-hitting reportage during the glory days of boxing in the early 1920’s and thirties in the Philippines • Filipinos Too Game (The Ring, JUNE, 1926, Public Domain) • The Rise of the Filipino Boxer-Part Three: Boxing & Wrestling News (JAN. 1933) • This article contains selected excerpts, quotations, 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. Click here to view a list of other articles written by Emmanuel Rivera, RRT.  |
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