The young fighter was Ekbert Karel Albert Coldenhoff. He was known to many as EKA Coldenhoff. “Golden Hoff” was his ring name.
“As far as I can recall, he never lost a match,” his son Ringo told FMT. “He used to fight three or four times a year and was never beaten.”
His success got him on the Top Ten List of the World Boxing Council in the 1960s.
Coldenhoff fought in rings all over Asia Pacific, claiming the scalps of Malaysia’s “Battling Ooi” and Ismail Fahmy, as well as Sonny Chia of Singapore, Nara Singh of India, Tamil Thong of Thailand and Armando Amarin of Australia.
Ringo said his father was born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a Dutchman and an Indonesian woman. When his parents separated, he went to live in Indonesia and started boxing at 17, eventually turning professional and building a reputation as a solid welterweight while in his 20s.
He was more than just a bruiser. He was once an active member of Permesta, an anti-Sukarno rebel movement that had violent armed clashes with government forces. However, there is no known record of his ever taking up arms against the government.
Nevertheless, his involvement in Permesta landed him in trouble with the Indonesian authorities, whose state agents tried to kill him twice within 48 hours, according to a report by The Straits Times in 1964.
Due to his hatred of the Sukarno regime, Coldenhoff renounced his Indonesian citizenship and settled in Malaysia in 1963. He told the Malaysian government that he would take up arms for the country against Indonesia in the “Konfrontasi” that Sukarno declared because the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak were included in the newly formed Malaysian federation.
Ringo said his father moved to Air Itam, Penang, and in 1965, married his mother, Irene Ng, and opened a training camp for young boxers. He also trained the Malaysian boxing team which won five silver and two bronze medals at the 1977 Southeast Asia Games.
In the 1980s, he slipped from public view, working as a security manager for hotels in Batu Ferringhi until 1997, when he became the National Sports Council’s boxing coach in Penang for four years.
Penang Amateur Boxing Association secretary Arujunan Kandasamy said he knew Coldenhoff for 30 years and that they trained the Penang boxing team for the 2002 Sukma tournament in Sabah.
“I sparred with him several times and remember he was a tough man to fight despite his short stature,” he said. “He was a strict but jovial coach.”
Coldenhoff never retired from coaching even after he was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006 at the age of 68.
Thangkarajoo Coomarasamy, 46, who worked as an assistant coach to Coldenhoff with the Penang Sukma boxing team from 1995 to 2000, remembers him as a disciplined but kind trainer who took great care of his athletes.
“His cancer took us all by surprise because he led a healthy lifestyle,” he told FMT. “I remember how he would run with the athletes even in his sixties.”
Coldenhoff died in 2008 at the age of 70.
His fighting legacy is carried on at Octagon Asia MMA, a mixed martial arts gym in George Town that Ringo set up 22 years ago, where he trains young boxers and Muay Thai fighters as their chief coach.