Boxing prohibited

I spend hours going through compilations of old laws in search of history. Laws enacted by the short-lived First Philippine Republic, for example, give us an idea of the times as well as the challenges that the nation endured before the United States eventually colonized it. Over the years, in used bookstores on Recto, I would buy odd volumes of “Philippine Reports” that contain decisions of the Supreme Court with some very engaging narratives of cases that won’t look at all out of place on the front pages of newspapers a century later: cases of murder, embezzlement, rape, sedition, etc.

Laws are like mirrors of society reflecting the sad fact that the world, or human nature, has changed little in the past century, or even in the past millennium.

Going over the Acts of the Philippine Commission enacted in the early 1900s shows how the United States tried to put order in an archipelago that had just been through the Philippine Revolution and was still in the process of dousing the embers of the Philippine-American War. There are laws on salaries, the naming or renaming of places, the organization of government offices, and the streamlining of services and assignment of responsibilities. I went through this in search of the supposed Act that made Jose Rizal our national hero. There is no such law. As a matter of fact, to date there is no law declaring Rizal the “National Hero of the Philippines.”

All the “national” icons we learned in grade school—national flower (sampaguita), national tree (narra), national animal (carabao), etc.—are the legacy of “Nanay” Coring of National Bookstore, who sold millions of postcards and posters with these images to generations of schoolchildren. Then President Fidel V. Ramos attempted to enact a law declaring national heroes in the centennial years 1996-1998, but this did not materialize because the debate over who should and should not be a national hero would have divided rather than united the nation in the commemoration of the 1998 Philippine Centennial of Independence.

While my search for the Rizal Law was fruitless, some laws caught my attention, like Philippine Commission Act No. 557, enacted in December 1902, that banned boxing! Then and now we have many unenforced laws, but this is relevant today as we anticipate the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight. Act No. 557 reads:

“An Act punishing prize fighting and sparring or boxing exhibitions. By authority of the United States be it enacted by the Philippine Commission that: Section 1. Any person who within the Philippine Islands engages in, instigates, aids, encourages, or does any act to further a contention or fight with or without weapons between two or more persons, or a fight commonly called a ring or prize fight, or who engages in a public or private sparring or boxing exhibition, with or without gloves, at which an admission fee is charged or received, either directly or indirectly, or who sends or publishes a challenge or acceptance of a challenge for such a contention, exhibition, or fight, or carries or delivers such a challenge or acceptance, or trains or assists any person in training or preparing for such a contention, exhibition, or fight, shall be punished by a fine of not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year and one day, or both, in the discretion of the court.”

Putting that law in context led to the origins of boxing in the Philippines. Boxing was not something we got from the Spanish colonial period (1565-1898) or from the short British occupation (1762-1764). Boxing was imported to the Philippines in 1898 or 1899 by the United States via its soldiers who came to occupy and pacify the islands. These soldiers engaged in boxing as a recreational sport in camps, and it did not take long for Filipinos to enter the ring. A decade later the US colonial government decided to transform the morals of Filipinos by way of education and sports. It introduced baseball, which did not quite catch on. More research will determine when basketball was introduced and why Filipinos preferred it. Part of the civilizing mission or, in other words, social engineering, in the Philippines was the introduction of three Bs: baseball, boxing and basketball, which were primarily meant to improve Filipino physical and mental health and, at the same time, to counter cockfighting and gambling.

Act No. 557 prohibiting boxing was not enforced because the US military continued to have informal rings and fights in the camps, and it was there that Filipinos learned to box. The problem with boxing was that, like cockfighting, it encouraged betting and gambling. So from these informal boxing bouts, with or without gloves, and at the risk of death, Filipino boxers emerged.

I don’t have his name at the moment but there was a boxer known as the “Tondo Terror” in 1900. The first successful Filipino boxer was Eustaquio “Eddie” Duarte, who fought professionally in San Francisco in the United States. Duarte joined the US Army as a mess boy in 1902, learned boxing in the service, and resigned in 1911 to fight in America. He returned to the Philippines in 1913 and found that boxing had taken a nationalist bent because some men were encouraged to ditch their bolos in favor of boxing gloves.

Boxing did not begin with Manny Pacquiao, and tracing the history of boxing in the Philippines is another way of understanding ourselves.

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