• Home
• About Us
  • History
  • News
  • Officers
  • Photos
• Events
  • Upcoming
  • Wrestling
  • Boxing
  • Dances and Shows
• Rentals
• Directions
• Contact

History

 

Founding Members

Gus Holt, First President and Organizer
Hermann Kempf
Ed Boehm
Joe Kern
Frank Doran

 

Background

The above five men met at Holt's home and formed the South Broadway Athletic Club. The club was incorporated under Missouri law on February 14, 1904, and founded its first home at 611 Geyer Avenue. Due to the club's growth, it moved to Seventh & Shenandoah in 1914. In 1923, the members purchased the building, which is where the club is still located today.

 

Boxing

South Broadway entered Golden Gloves when the tournament was started in St. Louis by the Globe Democrat in 1935. From 1942 through 1949, the SBAC teams won the local City Championships in the Golden Gloves tournament each year, except one. That was in 1943, when Buder Centers sub-novice boys came through with so many titles that they beat out the South Broadway squad by a single point. This tradition went on until the end of the 1965 boxing season.

After 28 years of inactivity, the South Broadway Athletic Club purchased the old Stag A.C. building at 3337 South Seventh Street for their new gym and resurrected boxing late in the 1992 season.

 

Wrestling

Around 1907, the club had a twenty man wrestling squad, which was the best in the area. There was a time when the wrestlers gave the boxers a run for their money. John Weerstein, lightweight, and Max Reinhold, a featherweight, who came from Germany, made grappling history for the South St. Louis organization in 1910, 1911, and 1912. During those days, the matches were held on Sundays and were as well attended as they are today.

Today professional wrestling is still very popular. Professional wrestlers come from St. Louis and various parts of the Midwest for matches. However, wrestling today has the distinction of also including women amongst its ranks. Matches are generally held once a month with a large number of fans in attendance.

 

Teams and Social Gatherings

For years, indoor corkball was played on the dance floor in individual nets which were draped from the ceiling. However, today it has been replaced with Fuzzball, which is played once a week, with ten teams participating.

SBAC sponsors softball teams and various other activities, which include an Annual Spring Fishing Tournament, Dances, and other Social functions. There are many other activities going on at the club other than sporting events, thanks to our present hall rental manager, Al Bauman. Our calendar for the previous year was booked solid nearly all year.

We also host Bingo every Sunday, trivia nights, fish fries, BBQ's, meat shoots, Halloween Parties, Christmas Parties, Golf Tournaments, and many more activities.

It takes a lot of hard work and many fund raisers to keep our doors open, and to maintain the club in the manner in which the members have grown accustomed to. Two new fund raisers, the Reunion Rumble and Soulard Mardi Gras are our most popular and most productive of all our fundraising events.

Myrl Taylor started the Reunion Rumble back in 1993 to help get our gym and boxing program off the ground. We have had one every year since, and each year after the show is over, we all have to ask, "How is he going to top this one?"