On New Year's Day 1981, a legendary Filipino boxer died in the Kaiser Hospital, San Diego California. He was Ceferino Garcia, former world middleweight boxing champion and inventor of the devastating "bolo punch."
Garcia's strange swing first attracted the attention of boxing aficionados when he used it to knock out Fred Apostoli in the seventh round at the Madison Square Garden on October 2, 1939. That evening he won the New York version of the middleweight crown even if a rival organization, the National Boxing Association, recognized Al Hostak as the champion.Garcia was born in t he Visayas in 1912. He supposedly developed the bolo punch because of his experience in wielding a bolo knife as a boy working in a sugarcane fields. The punch is a combination of uppercut and half-hook. It was imitated by other fighters, including boxing greats Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.
Garcia's lifetime boxing mark was 81-26-9. Of his wins, fifty seven came about through knockouts. He was the fourth Filipino boxer to win a world title and was the twenty-fourth New York middleweight champion.