The commute from Bruno Escalante's home to the venue of his next fight this Saturday night shouldn't take longer than 15 minutes.
The SportsHouse in Redwood City, Calif., where will face Michael Ruiz Jr. in his first ten-round bout, is just on the other side of town from where he has lived since moving to the Bay Area in 2009.
The scenery is familiar to Escalante (10-1-1, 5 knockouts), and so is the opponent, having split a pair of bouts against Ruiz (9-3-1, 3 KOs) as an amateur. While making it to the ring on Saturday night will be simple, the journey to this point has been anything but.
Escalante, 25, is a California-based, Hawaii-raised and Filipino-born junior bantamweight prospect gunning for his sixth straight win as a professional.
Adopting the nick name "The Aloha Kid" as an homage to the state that he called home from age 8 to 20, Escalante was born in the small town of Sibonga in the Philippine province of Cebu. Escalante was the youngest of ten children; his father made sofas out of bamboo while his mother sold beverages at a fair on Thursdays to help support them all.
"When I was younger, my parents, my brothers and siblings would work just for food," said Escalante. "That's the money for the following week, to buy dried fish, vegetables. We couldn't get rice."
Relief and hope came in the form of Escalante's grandmother on his father's side, whom they discovered was an American citizen based on the fact she was born in Hawaii before returning to the Philippines at age three.
The family saved up enough money to send their grandmother back to Hawaii, where she would petition for visas for the entire family to return. The plan took years, with Bruno's father finding work on a horse farm, before the family was finally reunited intact.
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The Sports House in Redwood City is located at 3151 Edison Way Redwood City, CA 94063. Doors open at
6:00 p.m first fight at
6:30 p.m. For more information please visit
www.pacopresentsboxing.com. 
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