Like Serena Williams with older sister Venus, like Pedro Martinez with older brother Ramon, Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez started out as the younger sibling who tagged along.

It was his brother Joshua Franco, older by four years and three months, who first wandered into the San Fernando Boxing Club in downtown San Antonio, and Rodriguez—full name Jesse James Rodriguez Franco—all of nine years old at the time, went along with him.

“If my brother didn’t try it and like it, I would never even have watched a boxing fight to this day,” Rodriguez, now 24 and a champion in two weight divisions, said last week during a break in training. Rodriguez’s main interests at age nine were school and skateboarding. But after watching his big brother do his thing in the boxing ring for a couple of weeks, Rodriguez got curious enough to give it a try.

“I put the skateboard away,” he said, “and stuck with boxing.”

Lester Bedford, the driving force behind the Texas Boxing Hall of Fame and the San Antonio Boxing Hall of Fame and a man who has seen and done it all in forty-plus years promoting fights and managing boxers in the state, is resolute in his assessment of the impact of this kid hopping off the four-wheeled board and into the four-sided ring.

“Bam Rodriguez will be San Antonio’s first [International Boxing] Hall of Fame fighter, in my opinion,” said Bedford, who has no financial ties to Rodriguez, an unbeaten flyweight and super flyweight belt holder who both ESPN and the Ring rank among the ten best pound-for-pound fighters in the world. “He’s got a real chance to be San Antonio’s best fighter ever before it’s all over. He’s headed down a path where he’s gonna be one of the great lower-weight-division fighters of the last twenty or thirty years.”

On Saturday, at the Footprint Center in Phoenix, Rodriguez headlines a fight card airing on streaming network DAZN as roughly a 4-to-1 favorite to defeat Juan Francisco “El Gallo” Estrada of Sonora, Mexico, himself a major titleholder several times over across the flyweight and super fly divisions and a near-lock for International Boxing Hall of Fame enshrinement. The matchup would stand out as a significant step up for Rodriguez . . . except that he’s spent the past few years stepping up nearly every time he faced a new opponent.

Rodriguez leapt two weight divisions on short notice for a shot at veteran Carlos Cuadras in February 2022. The Alamo City product had just turned 22, and he was taking a major risk by fighting a heavier, more proven contender. Rodriguez passed the test with flying colors, making Cuadras look outclassed throughout the bout and claiming his first title, by unanimous decision, along the way. He defended that belt for the first time four months later at Tech Port Arena in San Antonio against another decorated veteran, Srisaket Sor Rungvisai. After knocking down the challenger in round seven, Rodriguez won by knockout in round eight, becoming the first fighter to stop the Thai ex-champ in thirteen years. Last December, Rodriguez agreed to face unbeaten British star Sunny Edwards in a fight that oddsmakers considered almost a 50–50 affair; then the unbeaten Texan hammered out a TKO win within nine rounds.

Now 19–0 with twelve knockouts, Rodriguez is at the forefront of a San Antonio boxing resurgence and can take a substantive step toward delivering on Bedford’s Hall of Fame predictions by scoring victory number twenty against Estrada.

The success that seems to be coming so easily now to Rodriguez was much harder to secure when he started boxing. He lost his first three amateur fights. Then he got off the schneid with a win, but proceeded to lose his next couple. For many, a start like this in an athletic endeavor—particularly one that involves getting punched in the face—might be discouraging. But it wasn’t for Rodriguez.

“I was, honestly, probably too young to even think about it that way,” he said. “It was just about having fun for me at that age. That’s what kept me going when I lost the first three fights. And when I did get that victory, it just felt really good.”

Once he won a tournament for the first time at age ten, he was hooked. “That altered my mind,” he said. “It made me fall in love with the sport even more, and I just kept winning after that.”

The next critical moment came when Rodriguez was twelve. A major fight card—which Bedford helped organize—rolled through San Antonio in 2012. Julio César Chávez Jr., the son of the man generally regarded as Mexico’s greatest boxer ever, headlined at the Alamodome. And one of the top pound-for-pound fighters in the world, 122-pounder Nonito Donaire, fought in the HBO-televised cofeature.

Donaire held a media workout at a local gym and invited tween Rodriguez into the ring with him. Donaire used his open palms as mitts and asked Rodriguez to flash his jab. “Oh, a southpaw!” Donaire remarked as the young lefty snapped his right fist forward. Double jabs and one-two combinations followed. “He’s gonna be good, man,” the champ decreed as he rubbed Rodriguez’s head. Behind Donaire, the fighter’s trainer, Robert Garcia, watched with a smile.

About three years later, Garcia and Rodriguez met again. “I brought Joshua Franco into training camp with me after the 2016 Olympic trials, as he was getting ready to turn pro,” Garcia recalled. “And he brought his brother with him. [Rodriguez] was fifteen, and he reminded me about us meeting when Nonito came to San Antonio. He jumped right in and joined my training camps alongside his brother. You could see how good he was immediately. Just seeing him spar, his work in the gym, I knew he was special. I told everybody to pay attention to this kid.”

Garcia, a former champion himself in the late nineties and a one-time Boxing Writers Association of America Trainer of the Year, has been the man in Rodriguez’s corner ever since.

Prior to meeting Garcia, young amateur Rodriguez was trained by San Antonio local Martin Barrios. And it’s Barrios’s 29-year-old son, Mario, who is the city’s other major belt holder, as he currently holds a 147-pound title. Mario Barrios’s name is being floated as a potential opponent for 45-year-old living legend Manny Pacquiao, who’s contemplating a comeback. If that fight gets made, it will only solidify Barrios as the second-most-important figure in what could be an emerging golden age of San Antonio boxing.

“San Antonio has always in a way been a boxing city,” said Rodriguez, who grew up near the SeaWorld theme park in northwest San Antonio. “But, I mean, to the level it’s at right now, I feel like me and Mario Barrios are really setting a higher standard.”

According to Bedford, San Antonio was “kind of a sleepy boxing market” when he first got involved in the sport. There had never been a major nationally televised card out of San Antonio until June 17, 1979, when Danny “Little Red” Lopez stopped hometown featherweight Mike Ayala in the fifteenth round at the Convention Center in what would be named The Ring magazine’s Fight of the Year. Ayala’s kid brother, Tony, came along next with the talent and fan following to push San Antonio boxing to new heights, but his life and career derailed in 1983 when he committed a sexual assault in New Jersey. He was convicted of rape and served sixteen years in prison.

The nineties saw three San Antonio fighters claim major titles: Robert Quiroga, John Michael Johnson, and the Bedford-managed Jesse James Leija—who probably still stands, for now, as the city’s most accomplished boxer ever. Future Hall of Famers Chávez Sr. and Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker fought for the mythical pound-for-pound title in 1993 in front of 58,891 fans at the Alamodome. Superstars such as Pacquiao, Oscar De La Hoya, and Canelo Álvarez later headlined in the same stadium.

“If you take one city outside of Las Vegas that is probably the best boxing market in the country, I would argue that it’s San Antonio,” Bedford said. “The fans really come out when you bring a fight there. Now, if you bring bullshit, they won’t come. But if you bring a decent event, I mean, San Antonio has done several multiple-million-dollar gates that I’ve been involved with.”

Rodriguez has fought in his hometown three times. He’ll be in a home away from home against Estrada in Phoenix, a city he says “holds a special place in my heart” because it’s where he topped Cuadras in his breakout performance, but he hopes to headline in San Antonio again soon. “There’s definitely more pressure fighting at home,” Rodriguez said, “just because you have your fans, your family, you got everybody there, and you want to impress them. But I love fighting in San Antonio. There’s nothing like it.”

And there’s nobody like Rodriguez on the San Antonio boxing scene.

“He’s got a chance to be the best fighter ever out of one of the best fight towns in the country,” Bedford said. “You can almost look at him like a franchise. He’s now the boxing franchise in San Antonio. He could be the second biggest sports franchise in town. They’ve got the Spurs, and now they’ve got Bam Rodriguez.”