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1922 – 1950s
The room: The Palais Royale ballroom, opened in 1922 across from the Palace Theatre, was converted after the Second World War into a boxing arena — the city's principal fight room of the postwar years, in a building that also held a bowling alley and roller hockey at different times in its long life.
The gym: South Bend's documented boxing record runs through an unlikely door: trainer and promoter Johnny Nate, a bantamweight Golden Glover who ran a makeshift gym beneath his tavern on North Hill Street, and who trained women fighters at a time when almost no one in the sport would.
The fighters: Nate's two best-known pupils were JoAnn Hagen, the "Bashing Blonde from South Bend," a Bendix worker, and Pat Emerick — born Arvilla Emerick in Mishawaka on February 26, 1931, and raised in South Bend, a boundary this record prints rather than smooths over. Emerick lost her first bout, at the Palais Royale shortly after her eighteenth birthday, and by her own account then won eighteen straight. A third Nate pupil, Phyllis Kugler, traveled the country fighting out of the same gym.
The title fight: In November 1949, before 4,000 people in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Emerick fought Hagen — billed going in as the women's world champion — for the Ladies World Boxing Association championship, and won it. South Bend's boxing record thus holds a world-title chapter, won by one of its own against another, out of a tavern-basement gym. The city's men's professional record of the era is thin in the record reached, and is printed at that size: the documented center of South Bend boxing in these years is Nate's gym and its women.
Sources:
- Women's Boxing Archive Network — Pat Emerick and JoAnn Hagen: the Nate gym, the Palais Royale debut, the November 1949 LWBA championship fight in Council Bluffs.
- Venue histories of the Palais Royale — the 1922 opening and the postwar conversion to a boxing arena.