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1940s–1950s · South Bend
The documented center of South Bend boxing in the postwar years is a makeshift gym beneath Johnny Nate's tavern on North Hill Street. Nate himself had been a bantamweight Golden Glover, and he trained women when almost no one in the sport would — the gym's account belongs to the Sports record; the fighters belong here. Pat Emerick — born Arvilla Emerick on February 26, 1931, in Mishawaka, the boundary printed, and raised in South Bend — lost her first bout at the Palais Royale shortly after her eighteenth birthday, then, by her own account, won eighteen straight. In November 1949, before four thousand people in Council Bluffs, Iowa, she beat JoAnn Hagen for the Ladies World Boxing Association championship. Hagen — the "Bashing Blonde from South Bend," a Bendix worker — had been billed going in as the women's world champion. Phyllis Kugler, the third of Nate's pupils, traveled the country fighting out of the same gym. One boundary is kept plainly: the man who beat Joe Louis in the 1933 Golden Gloves finals, Max Marek, was a Chicagoan who fought at Notre Dame, where the Bengal Bouts belong to the university's own record; this history does not claim him for the city.
Sources
- Women's Boxing Archive Network records, as carried in this history's Sports record — Nate's gym and pupils, Emerick's account of her career, the Council Bluffs championship bout of November 1949 and Hagen's billing.
- Notre Dame Magazine — Max Marek, the 1933 Golden Gloves final and the Chicago and Notre Dame addresses of his career.