People We Meet: Frank Maldonado, the boxing coach

Frank Maldonado does not remember exactly when the last punch was thrown in his garage boxing gym.

The sign-up sheets, however, offer a clue: The last entry is from 2016. 

Maldonado, who turned 85 on May 25, began coaching young men to box in the 1980s, out of a garage he converted on his block on Cordova Street between Seville and Munich streets. 

Those daily sheets tracked the fighters’ names, rounds completed and body weight before and after each session. 

Now, they are artifacts of a distant era, stored alongside binders of photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, framed prints and polaroids that cover every inch of the walls of a space that has grown quiet.

A soft-spoken man of few words, Maldonado lets his archives speak for him.

“The gym used to be packed,” Maldonado said, recalling the days when kids would arrive after school unannounced, sometimes even uninvited. “It’s just word of mouth … they would just show up.”

Maldonado grew up in San Francisco and moved around the city to neighborhoods like the Excelsior, Bayview and the Fillmore, eventually settling back in the Excelsior on Cordova Street in 1971 with his new wife, Florence.

He held a day job as a produce manager for 45 years, but his passion was his boxing ring. 

At 14, he had learned boxing by watching and occasionally absorbing punches from his older brother. He decided it would be a good way to protect himself.

Later, Maldonado trained at Newman’s Boxing, a gym in the Tenderloin, located within the Cadillac Hotel at Eddy and Leavenworth streets. It was a place, he recalled, where you could buy gloves or trunks on the way in and then head downstairs to a small ring.

“It was small,” he said, “just like this one.” He pointed to his garage ring. 

There was no place in the Excelsior like Newman’s, so kids in the neighborhood eventually found their way to Maldonado’s Boxing Gym, or just Frank’s, as those who trained there knew it.

At its peak, Maldonado — who boxed in the 1960s in the Golden Gloves, an amateur boxing competition — would take on a dozen students at a time. Some went on to have successful boxing careers themselves. 

In 2002, then-Mayor Willie Brown declared Nov. 2 that year as Frank Maldonado Day in San Francisco. The proclamation noted that Maldonado had coached two Golden Gloves champions: His son, Roman Maldonado, in 1998 (who is now in his 50s) and Omar Barefield in 2002. 

Brown’s proclamation credited Maldonado as “an incredible coach” who taught fighters “not only in skills necessary to do well in boxing, but the hard work, discipline and dedication to do well in all aspects of life.”

The gym displays his graduates’ testimony to his dedication. Alumni include onetime staff sergeant Ian Seth Steward, who sent Maldonado a letter after serving as a flight engineer on a combat search and rescue helicopter in Iraq. 

Steward, who today teaches criminal law at City College of San Francisco, wrote that he had taught  fellow service members to box during his deployment, using what Maldonado had taught him.

“I felt prepared, based on all the training I received,” Steward wrote. “And because of you, I understand hard work, adversity and poise.”

Another young man Maldonado trained was Pat Lawlor, who grew up in the Sunset and went on to fight occasionally. A newspaper feature on Lawlor, “the pride of the Sunset,” still hangs from the ropes of the garage ring, alongside towels and a shirt from Maldonado’s Boxing Gym.

The ropes themselves, which endured decades of training, are now reinforced with gray duct tape. 

These days, Maldonado moves through the garage slowly. On a tour of the space, he  sometimes had to pause to rest in one of the chairs near the mirror by the garage door, a corner where his students once jumped rope, he said.

Occasionally, in the quiet of the gym, Maldonado rose from his chair, settled into his familiar boxer’s stance, and threw a few punches into the air. Slightly hunched over and wearing a dark green lounge robe over sweatpants, he jabbed quickly at an unseen opponent.

“Pang! Pang, pang, pang!” he said as he threw a punch.