SAN FRANCISCO—A TALL, skinny, black kid looking like the ex-welterweight champ, Paul “The Punisher” Williams entered the basement gym of the Straight Forward Club (SFC) on Mason Street one Monday afternoon.

He comes from arguably the most notorious neighborhood hereabouts and wanted to learn the basics of the “sweet science.” Immediately the Fil-Am gym owner demonstrated the jab in front of a wall mirror, explaining the importance to make it straight and snappy. Then he moved to the heavy bag, spending several rounds to make sure the kid was “feeling” him.

“Ya know what I’m sayin’?” he asked. The boy nodded meekly, and for the rest of afternoon repeated everything “Coach Ben” taught him.

Judging by the young man’s awkward punches and footwork, it was probably the first time he’d stepped into a serious boxing gym. Like many other kids in the Tenderloin area, he’s probably just after a couple of hours’ sweat, courtesy of Ben’s free boxing clinic for the youth. Little did he know that by meeting The Man himself, he was in for some serious training both in and out of the squared circle.

Big Bro

Ben, 37, isn’t concerned only about punch combinations, head movement and footwork. His work goes beyond the ropes. He’s foremost a father figure, psychologist, counselor, big brother—name it—to hundreds of kids in the city.

“I want to train champions inside the ring and outside the ring,” he tells the Inquirer in an interview at his dimly-lit office nook at SFC Monday.

It’s his way of bringing back to life a community he admitted to have helped “kill” about two decades ago. He does so partly through the SFC boxing gym, which provides kids a welcome and productive distraction from the area’s nasty preoccupations.

The gym is located at the heart of Tenderloin, a place first-timers in San Francisco are often told to avoid. Described by an online travel guide as the “last frontier” of the city’s gentrification, it’s home to drug dealers, street gangs, prostitutes, greasy bums, and what-have-you.

But it’s a place Ben calls home. It’s where he grew up. And it’s where he now serves in a variety of ways: antidrug advocate, motivational speaker, church volunteer, counselor, essentially a key community figure.

His goal is to keep children away from drug trafficking, gang wars and the overall sense of hopelessness that has pervaded much of Tenderloin over the years. He does it by simply giving them something else to do.

His own template

The template of his community work is none other than Ben himself. Not too long ago, boxing helped save him from self-assured destruction too.

Born to immigrant parents who met here in the 1960s, Ben was exposed early to the dark side of the city. Blame it on his much older half-brothers and cousins, who kept him company most of the time.

“I was always the young guy in the group so I followed them all the time,” he recalls. “By 7 or 8 years old, I was already smoking marijuana, stealing newspapers, candy bars and selling them door-to-door. I used to go to Market Street and steal at department stores. You name it.”

Why? “’Coz I was broke. There were a lot of things I wanted as a kid and I didn’t get them. So I had to find other ways to get them. One of the ways I found was stealing.”

Crude mix of immigrants

His group, a crude mix of Americans and children of immigrants, would later be named the “Skulls.” Much later still, Ben’s fellow Filipinos would be known as among the most notorious in all of Tenderloin. He was, in a manner of speaking, a gangster before he even turned 10.

The sight of the Bautista home offered very little motivation for young Ben to play fair. Rented monthly at $135, it’s one of the cheapest in the South of Market district, a favorite settlement of newly-arrived Filipino immigrants.

True enough, the house was worth only its meager lease. There the Bautistas, including Ben’s three half-brothers, competed with rats and roaches for valuable space. “We were real poor, man.”

Selling crack

Ben “changed” his ways at age 13 – he let go of the rampant stealing, but only to replace it with something much worse. Again influenced by his group, he turned to selling crack.

It began with small quantities sold to fellow students at a school near the Mission area. Then he branched out to a much bigger clientele, the gangs of San Francisco.

It’s no surprise that in five years, young Ben was “made.” At one point, he was earning $30,000 a month with seven high-end cars to boot. He got his drugs, he got his money, he got his women.

“I was living fast and I didn’t know what was going on,” he says.

Still, he says he wasn’t completely miserable. In school, despite his rampant absenteeism because of his drug business, he kept a surprisingly good standing.

He said he was never addicted to using his own merchandise either, which is why he still managed to stay in shape and pursue his childhood passion for boxing. “I was just addicted to the money and the lifestyle, not to drugs,” he says.

Boxing gave Ben an alter-ego to the tough and wasted guy who sold cocaine in the streets. Always “good with my hands,” he found home at the famed Newman’s gym, the city’s boxing mecca for nearly a century.

In the company of professional pugilists, including a regular named Roberto Duran, he needed no further motivation to put on the gloves. He was soon fighting as an amateur, although his thriving underground business kept him out of the ring most of the time.

Then came the cops

Then came the cops, who finally got wind of his activities and sent him to rehabilitation. Ben entered a juvenile hall on four occasions and later served time at a county jail. His life as a drug dealer was coming to a close.

He recalled giving crack to his brothers and cousins with the vague idea that they were selling the drug too. Unlike him, they got hooked to morphine. Once, a brother grew desperate and stole $4,000 from him.

An enraged Ben came close to killing him, if not for their mother’s plea. “He’s your brother,” she told him. The remark got him thinking: “Yeah, he’s my brother and he has a problem. And I’m killing him because I’m giving him drugs.”

The full extent of his indiscretions blew right in his face one afternoon in the late 1980s.

Acting on a tip, a police task force raided the Bautista shack and arrested Ben right in front of his mom, cousins and other relatives. The family was then agonizing over the death of his uncle.

“The pow-lis (police) came and turned the house upside down, trying to find anything,” he says. “I got arrested in front of my mom, aunties and cousins. It was crazy.”

Motivational speaker

On his way to the county jail, Ben was having a gradual epiphany: “I almost killed my brother. I was killing my community by selling drugs. Wow, what the f*ck is going on, man? It’s all because of me!”

His probation officer at the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center referred him to a teenage fathers’ program and later to a drug rehabilitation program. Both opportunities brought out another facet of Ben’s personality. He has kept the new person ever since.

Considering his recent past in the San Francisco underground, he became a runaway choice for a motivational speaker for kids in trouble. “I realized I had a talent for reaching out. A lot of people were listening to what I was saying.”

There was no turning back, especially since he was expecting his first baby, Ben Jr.

Bent on making a career as a community activist, he enrolled at the city college and earned a psychology degree in 1997. At the same time, he returned to boxing full-time, now serving as coach for high school kids at a basement gym in the Fillmore area.

“Even if I was doing negative things, I was doing positive things too,” he says. “So when I left the negative things behind, it wasn’t difficult for me to get my life together. I was in college. I had hope. I had my son. I had a lot of positive people around me at the same time.”

Ben started SFC in 1999 and found a home for it last October at the basement of a residential hotel near the corner of Eddy and Mason Streets in downtown San Francisco. It provides free boxing to kids in the area, if only to steer them out of problems like drug addiction.

Back to serious boxing

The program got a lift from the Tenderloin Economic Development Project and a handful of like-minded individuals who agreed to help finance SFC’s operations.

Ben has only grand dreams for his neighborhood. Through his gym, he wants to resurrect the glory days of boxing in all of San Francisco. He says it vanished when Newman’s gym shut down in 1992. He says it’s time for the city to get back to some serious boxing.

As for his pupils at SFC, he knows that discipline, hard work and perseverance are effectively taught in the ring and will come in handy in real life. “All these things will help kids sooner or later,” he says.
Ben also dreams of becoming a topnotch trainer and manager. His current protegé is Adrian “A-Game” Gallon Jr., a bright featherweight prospect. He’s already been tapped as a sparring partner to Manny Pacquiao in his next bout versus Juan Manuel Marquez.

Gallon, 22, almost quit boxing following a disappointing loss at the nationals in 2006. Ben saw how the boy fought and was convinced he had the goods, but needed only the right motivation. He knew he could bring out the best in the young amateur.

Father figure

Now awaiting his first fight as a pro, Gallon owes Ben his transformation from what he called a one-track haymaker to a more or less complete boxer. “He’s a father figure to me. He’s a good man.”

Gallon’s experience is pretty much the same with hundreds of other kids Ben has inspired through the years. Ben talked, they listened.

“I would take nothing away from my life experiences because they make the total sum of who I am today,” says Ben. “Now I am able to give back to these kids because I’ve been there, been down the dark road, and now I can help them.”

Just one week into his training, the skinny black kid, Ben’s new “work in progress,” is beginning to show improvement. His movement is less awkward now, his punches are straighter. Not far from where he works on the drills, Ben sits on a high chair, purportedly watching his undefeated junior middleweight ward, Karim “Hard Hitta” Mayfield, spar.

But his attention is on the other kid. Beaming with pride like a father watching a son, he shouts at the boy: “That’s it, man. That’s it. Nice work.”