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History: West End Training Ground for Boxing Champs

Billy Shannon's Villa was a combination saloon, restaurant and boxing facility in San Rafael's West End where world-class boxers trained.

Celebrity boxing champs favored San Rafael’s West End for a training ground in the early 1900’s. Billy Shannon’s Villa, a combination saloon and boxer training camp, sat on the triangle-shaped lot where Fourth Street and West End Street meet, now the site of the Fourth Street Shell Station.

Billy Shannon, an amateur lightweight champion of the Pacific Coast and a short-time professional boxer, moved his training gym from San Francisco's South of Market to San Rafael’s West End after the 1906 earthquake and fire. He operated Billy Shannon’s Villa from 1906 to 1914. Shannon provided living quarters for fighters and their trainers while Shannon’s wife Lena cooked them hearty meals.

On weekends and holidays, throngs of fans disembarked at the West End train station and paraded over to the gymnasium at Shannon’s to watch the boxers spar and to bet on their favorites. Patrons bellied up to the bar in Shannon’s saloon to discuss sports over mugs of steam beer. Photographs of prizefighters lined the walls, and beer towels hung from the bar for wiping foam off damp moustaches.

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The saloon even had a ladies’ section and private rooms for dancing and piano playing. Shannon’s was also a favorite site for weddings, including that of boxer Young Corbett, aka William Rothwell.

The Fighters

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Boxing was wildly popular at the time, and rural West End was a perfect setting for a training camp. Marin’s hilly terrain gave boxers challenging runs. "SF Examiner" sports journalist Eddie Muller wrote in his book "Boxing Gems," “Fighters from all over the world sometime or other made Shannon’s their headquarters. It was like being miles away from the hustle and bustle of city life. No bridges, few if any paved roads led to Shannon’s.“

Heavyweight rivals “Gentleman Jim”  Corbett and Joe Choynski often sparred at Shannon’s. Corbett had been world heavyweight champion from 1892 to 1897. Jimmie Britt and Battling Nelson also frequented the Villa. Willie Ritchie prepared there for the bout with Ad Wolgast that crowned him the lightweight champion of the world.

First Black Boxing Champ

The popular Joe Gans, the world lightweight champion from 1902 to 1908 and the world’s first African-American boxing champ, also spent many days at Billy Shannon’s.

In his career, Gans fought 155 opponents, losing only eight fights.

The October 24, 1904 "San Francisco Call" wrote, “A large delegation of sporting men visited Billy Shannon's villa yesterday to watch Joe Gans work for his coming battle….The champion's condition greatly pleased his admirers. In the morning Joe did his usual fourteen miles on the road and returned as fresh as a daisy.”  In a 1973 interview for the "Marin Independent Journal," West End boyhood resident William T. Ortman remembered Gans fondly as a “likable chap who used to play football in a vacant lot with us kids.”

Look Straight Ahead

Eugenie Watson Grady, another West End resident, spoke in an oral history of living near Billy Shannon’s Villa:

“My mother used to say to me, 'Now when you get down to Billy Shannon's, look straight ahead and don't talk to any of those men. If they say anything to you, you just don't say anything, you just look straight ahead.' So I walked like this -- all these men and they never said a word. They were all on these captain chairs facing Fourth Street.

And the only thing I was scared of with Billy Shannon's really was, he had an English bull dog…Mr. Shannon lived about four doors down from the saloon in a nice little white house and there was the dog always outside and I was more scared of that dog.”

San Anselmo Goes Dry

IN 1907, the San Anselmo’s Town Trustees voted to prohibit the sale of alcohol in the town of San Anselmo.  The "Sausalito News" reported, “Now the thirsty in San Anselmo have to wander over to Billy Shannon's Villa in San Rafael for a refreshing 'steam.'"

Shannon’s training camp closed in 1914 when professional boxing was temporarily outlawed in California, but the saloon may have stayed open until Prohibition closed its doors in 1919. 

Next time you drive down Fourth Street onto the Miracle Mile, you might give a thought to Billy Shannon’s Villa and the world-renowned boxing greats that built their strength in sunny San Rafael’s West End.

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