"WHY, is he here?" loudly asked Alberto Garcia, 76 years old, balding, and slightly deaf. Man Ambing, as he is called, posed the question to Primo Hotricano, his acquaintance and my friend, who helped me gather additional biographical information about Ceferino Garcia, boxing’s Hall of Famer who introduced the "bolo punch" and was world middleweight champion in 1939-1940.

We chanced upon Man Ambing one early afternoon, in shabby shorts and shirt and headcap, repairing the ramshackle pushcart which he uses in his trade buying and selling empty bottles in my hometown of Naval in Biliran Province. He now resides with a cousin in the dilapidating Garcia ancestral house across the church in the poblacion. He takes his meals in the house of a nephew’s family some 300 meters from where he lives.

After Al S. Mendoza published my letter in his "Spectator" column last Sept. 14, word somehow reached Man Ambing that Ceferino’s name appeared in the papers. He took this to mean that his boxer-brother is still alive, and in the country. Thus the almost discordant question that, unfortunately, did not solicit a positive answer for Man Ambing’s life-long yearning.

The interview corrected Man Ambing’s false impression and enabled him to reminisce his past and the early years of his long lost brother.

Ceferino Garcia, the boxer, was the eldest child of Fortunato (Porto) Garcia and Pascuala Pieras. The couple bore six children, but only five grew up to adulthood. The second child was Francisco, the third was Leona, and the fourth was Rufina. Man Ambing was the fifth and deemed the youngest, a younger sister having died in childhood. He is six years younger than the champion boxer.

Ceferino was baptized Cipriano and nicknamed Predo. He typified the poor, less schooled, and rural-bred Filipino who aspired for wealth and fame through the boxing arena.

Predo did not complete his Grade I studies in Barrio Caraycaray, Naval, where he was born and grew up to adolescence. This literacy deficiency would later disqualify him from enlisting in the US Navy, the other avenue for peasant escape from poverty in the 1930s. He seemed to have been drawn early to gambling, hantak (head-or-tail betting game, using three old one-centavo coins) being his mania. He was also good in the pool table.

And in street boxing matches. By age 15, when Predo left home for good, he was so feared that nobody would pick a fistfight with him in the neighborhood or in the poblacion.

But Predo was a good blacksmith, the obvious favorite among the three sons of Porto. It did not take long to finish a bolo from his powerful blows with the sledge hammer. Man Ambing idolized his brother for this.

I asked Man Ambing about extant pictures of his brother. He had none. Instead, he ran inside the house from where he got and then showed me his picture as a young man. He told me he had similar facial features with Predo, who was tall, lean but husky, and with thin wrists. The photograph had the typical Garcia features, memorialized in a sketch of his great grand-uncle, the priest who established Naval as a town in the 1860s.

Predo left home with a heavy heart. The cause was believed to be his spurned love proposal to the local girl of his fancy, who supposedly dismissed him for his gambler’s ways.

He joined the master baker of the local bakery on a trip to Cebu City, where he was introduced to some boxing promoter and started his professional boxing career. He had not returned home since he left, for which he was sorely missed by many of his contemporaries.

Man Ambing recalled that his brother, having assumed the boxing name Ceferino, became a prominent boxer around 1936 or 1937, first in Cebu and then in Manila. He became famous for the dreaded "bolo punch," of which he was the recognized inventor.

In 1938, Ceferino traveled to the United States to take a crack at the world middleweight crown. He succeeded in his quest. During the same year, he provided the country’s boxing spectacle of the 1930s when he successfully defended his title by beating the (white) American challenger, Glen Lee, at the Rizal Track-Football Stadium. He was assisted in this match by the famous Jack Dempsey.

Afterwards, he returned to the US, where he probably lost his crown, and did not come back to the Philippines.

The "bolo punch" presumably assured Garcia’s place in the Boxing Hall of Fame. Two other Filipino boxers had been inducted to this august Hall: Pancho Villa and Flash Elorde. Primo Hotricano told me that Garcia’s boxing feats were once featured in an article, perhaps in the Philippines Free Press.

Somehow, the Garcia family had dispersed before World War II. Man Ambing’s brother, Francisco, settled with his family in Mindanao. He retired as a captain in the Philippine Army. In his deathbed, he asked his children, now settled somewhere in Cubao, Quezon City, to locate Man Ambing. This they had obliged.

Leona settled somewhere in Pampanga, now a lahar country. Man Ambing failed to tell me about her fate.

Rufina got married to an American named Foreman, and settled somewhere in Oregon, USA. Man Ambing recalled that she bore three children by her American husband. He has not heard from her for decades.

The war caught Man Ambing in Manila. Life was desperate there, but it helped that he was the brother of Ceferino Garcia, the boxing champion. Basking in his brother’s glory offered some comfort and opened a few doors for him during the war years.

When the US Forces reached Manila in 1945, Man Ambing worked with them as truck driver transporting military cargo between Manila and Cavite. He was offered to join the troops in Okinawa, Japan. But he refused, because he had to attend to his ailing father back in Leyte. The Americans offered him transport to Cebu.

Man Ambing located his father in Ormoc and brought him home to Naval. Along the way, he sold the family’s blacksmithing tools to a junkshop. His father died not long afterwards.

Man Ambing returned to Manila, where he failed two attempts to settle down in marriage. He has no children of his own.

Not long ago, he wrote to the US Army Archives in Missouri, USA, to inquire about the possibility of his being recognized as a veteran for his war services. The answer told him that his name does not appear in the official roster of Filipinos who can qualify for veterans’ benefits.

Now, Man Ambing is spending his sunset years in Naval.

Where is Ceferino Garcia?

Throughout the interview, Man Ambing expressed his wish to know the fates of his brother Predo (Ceferino) and sister Rufina in the United States. Is Ceferino dead, or still alive? Did he ever marry and raise a family of his own? If still living, Ceferino would be 82 years by now.

The answers to Man Ambing’s questions are probably with his sister Rufina, if still alive, or with her children, if they are still in Oregon, USA.

Perhaps, living boxing contemporaries of Ceferino in the US can also help provide some answers.

Fifty years after Gen. MacArthur’s return to the Philippines, Man Ambing continues to await words about his champion brother, Ceferino Garcia.

(NOTE: I learned recently that Ceferino Garcia had been inducted to the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1981, but not yet in the other hall, International Boxing Hall of Fame. A rejoinder to this article, written by somebody else, narrated Garcia's professional exploits and his retirement in the United States, where he passed away. Unfortunately, I failed to get a copy of the Inquirer that carried the latter article. Man Ambing himself passed away around February 1996. Around early 2000, a California-based descendant of Glen Lee, whom Garcia defeated in Manila in 1938, informed this writer that his uncle was in fact white, not black. Very recently (January 2002), I established contact with Andrea Garcia Hursala, Ceferino Garcia's granddaughter, who had stumbled upon my website. She sent me the photograph above of Ceferino Garcia and Ceferino Jr., Andrea's father.)