Abe "The Newsboy" Hollandersky (December 3, 1888 – November 1, 1966) was an American professional boxer who won the Panamanian national Heavyweight Title when he defeated Californian Jack Ortega in nine rounds in Panama City on May 30, 1913.

[16][17][18][19] Pogroms, famine, restrictions on career opportunities, the inability to own or purchase property, and highly limited access to public secondary education caused by Tsar Alexander III's May Laws of 1882, encouraged the family to leave Russia.

According to genealogist Marlene Silverman, Falk Hollandersky, Abe's Uncle, emigrated to America at age forty-three, arriving in New York around 1886 accompanied by his wife Sarah Feyga whom he had married in a small ceremony in Berznicki in 1865.

[25] For a boy who chose boxing as a profession, this was a minor offense, but Hollandersky may have suffered from a lack of adult supervision having never attended public school, and having a blind father who was limited in the role he could take in his upbringing.

According to Hollandersky's autobiography, their meeting took place during Roosevelt's presidential review of the Naval fleet in New York's Oyster Bay, off Long Island, September 2–4, 1906, and was a pivotal point in Abe's career.

Around 1906, Abe met Captain George Fried who would become famous in the late 1920s for the valiant rescues of the French ship Antinoe and the Italian freighter Florida while he commanded ocean liners of the United States Lines.

[31] When they first met, Fried was a young fledgling sailor serving his first Naval assignment aboard the old civil war era schooner USS Hartford, where he learned the art of navigation.

[34] Twenty-five years later, Admiral Leahy, while serving as Chief of Staff to Franklin Roosevelt, would write a brief review of Abe's book in March 1930 and on December 7, 1943, would sign his Award of Merit for recruiting 1700 men for the Navy in the ramp up for WWII.

With his friend, Irish heavyweight boxer and ex-Navy man Tom Sharkey acting as referee, Abe claimed to have knocked out the bear, who fell from the ring damaging a grand piano, infuriating the museum's manager and amazing the large audience who included several Tammany Hall politicians.

[1] As a young New York club fighter in 1906, Abe fought the better-known boxers Todo Moran, Patsy Connors, Harry Greenhouse and "Buffalo" Eddie Kelly.

In the early Spring of 1906 in a smokey New York City boxing club known as the Lion's Palace, talented featherweight "Buffalo" Eddie Kelly took only ten seconds to knock an inexperienced eighteen-year-old Abe to the canvas for a full count.

[39] On December 14, 1908, not long after his participation in the Cruise of the Great White Fleet at only twenty, Hollandersky fought a close six-round match with Maurice Lemoine at the Grand Opera House in New Haven, Connecticut.

Fellow New Londoner Mosey King, an early New England Lightweight Champion and Yale boxing coach for forty years, is included in Hollandersky's list of fights in the back of his autobiography as a "Win".

[49] In his mid-career with the Navy, he worked as a boxing instructor for sailors at the pier in New London near the end of WWI, and as a recruiter of 1,700 naval personnel in WWII while he was living in Los Angeles.

The second half of the fourteen-month cruise, much of which included Abe, routed sixteen state-of-the-art coal burning American battleships with white painted hulls from the California coast to New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and China.

He used his naval privileges in combination with commercial vessels between 1912 and 1914, to sail south from his hometown of New London, selling newspapers to the fleet while stopping to fight boxing matches in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Chile, and later Mexico.

The Reverend W. H. "Ironsides" Reaney was a boxing mentor to Abe while he was in Cuba, and helped arrange his Cuban bouts during morning breakfasts aboard the ill-fated battleship USS Utah.

[68][2][69] Hollandersky successfully defended his Panamanian Heavyweight Title only once, in an 18 of 45 round rematch with Jack Ortega on Sunday, August 10, 1913, in the National Sports Arena in Panama City.

Few in the crowd believed that Hollandersky would last ten rounds with the future Boxing Hall of Fame champion, who had a four-inch height advantage and outweighed him by over twenty-five pounds.

The Panamanian crowd voiced their approval of the Newsboy's tenacity, and as soon as the final bell sounded to end the long contest, they "stormed the ring and carried the little fellow (Abe) off on their shoulders."

In February 1915, giving up five inches in reach, Abe lost a twenty-round bout to 5' 9" El Paso welterweight Frankie Fowser in Agua Prietta, Mexico, a border town near Douglas, Arizona.

[89] The Springfield Courier said of the twenty round battle that "K. O. Palitz of this city handed Abe the worst trimming a man ever received in a local ring, though the newsboy was on his feet at the end of the bout".

[92] Though Hollandersky continued to find matches, and even returned to Panama for several lucrative bouts in 1916, he may have sensed his days as a competitive prize fighter fighting top talent were numbered.

In San Pedro, he spent time delivering papers, giving boxing training, and performing odd jobs aboard the USS Camden (AS-6), a four hundred foot, highly armed, slow-moving submarine tender with a crew of around 300, confiscated from the German Navy in WWI.

He received a reference letter that February to assist him in his journey from Commander H. G. Gearing of the USS Dobbin, near Guantanamo, and then made his way to the West Coast overland by that spring making a stop in El Paso on his way to California.

[121][122] He left Honolulu on July 29, 1925, after a working vacation of three months, and returned to San Francisco via commercial liner in mid-August, attending the Diamond Jubilee, the 50th anniversary of California statehood.

Hollandersky may have received rights of passage for travel from the presidential staff, campaigned for other signed photographs, and asked for book endorsements from Navy brass who advised the President.

[27] On March 24, 1930, playwright, journalist, and one of America's greatest sportswriter's on boxing, Damon Runyon, interviewed Hollandersky about his newly published book for his New York American Sports column "Between You and Me.

[157] Abe claimed several thousand attended his wedding reception at the Jewish Sheltering Home in Los Angeles, including a number of high-ranking naval officers, most notably Admiral Wat Tyler Cluverius Jr., base commander of the Pacific Fleet.

Hungarian born Texan Jack A. Herrick, another ex-boxer turned actor that appeared in the film, had fought in Panama City eighteen years earlier with Abe, and had faced two of the same opponents while there, the great light heavyweight Kid Norfolk, and "Steamboat" Bill Scott.