An overflow crowd of New York’s newspaper, political, and boxing elites assembled yesterday at the Riverside Memorial Chapel to hear raucous voices and trumpets raised to praise the life of Jack Newfield, the muckraking reporter who died Monday night at age 66.

During the funeral service, Mark Jacobson, a former Village Voice colleague, described the motto of the often-combative Newfield as: “An eye and an ear for an eye.”

“Discover, dissent, dig, reveal, confront, besiege, level, care,” Newfield’s sometime writing partner Wayne Barrett said, in describing Newfield’s technique.

They could almost have been describing a pugilist, and Newfield’s love of the sweet science came up repeatedly at the service.

Lou DiBella, a boxing promoter, suggested that Newfield’s love of the sport developed out of a concern for the disadvantaged. “Boxing,” Mr. DiBella said. “It’s hard to find a world with more underdogs.”

Teddy Atlas, a former street fighter and felon who is a boxing trainer and protege of Cus D’Amato, and a longtime friend of Newfield, said: “For a long time, I didn’t know he was a liberal. … I thought, ‘I didn’t know they liked boxing. They have a guy who actually understands and fights.’ He wrote and fought for the underdog. It was simple.”

Atlas said he gave Newfield an Everlast fight robe when the columnist went into the hospital for surgery in October. Newfield had the boxer Carmen Basilio’s name sewn on it, because Basilio was the toughest fighter he’d ever seen.

One of Newfield’s favorite ways of nurturing friendships was to invite people over for “fight night,” when he would present videos of classic bouts.

One frequent friend at fight nights was Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter of “On the Waterfront.” Mr. Schulberg said he first met Newfield at Robert Kennedy’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly before Kennedy was assassinated.

“He said, ‘If you’re from L.A., you must have seen Jackie Robinson play football,’ ” Mr. Schulberg said.

Describing attendance at fight night, Mr. Schulberg said: “Ray Kelly, Tim Witherspoon, some ex-drug dealer from Harlem – Jack was at home with all of them.” Mr. Kelly is police commissioner, Mr. Witherspoon an ex-fighter.

Many who attended fight night were younger journalists, for Newfield went out of his way to serve as a mentor for those just beginning in his craft. “Jack lost his own father at age 4, and Jack became a father to a generation of journalists,” Mr. Barrett, who counted himself among those who learned from him, said. Among the lessons Newfield tried to impart was “immunity to cynicism and optimism of will,” Mr. Barrett said. And there was this: “Always detail over dogma.”

Newfield’s love of music, especially music that, when he was growing up, might have been referred to as “race music,” was reflected in a New Orleans style funeral march played by Wynton Marsalis. Mr. Marsalis provided the soundtrack for a documentary Newfield produced on the peerless boxer Sugar Ray Robinson in 1998.

Jimmy Breslin, who along with Mr. Newfield and Murray Kempton was one of the best-loved New York columnists of the past quarter-century, delivered a jeremiad condemning Senators Clinton and Schumer for supporting the war in Iraq. “Newfield leaves us with the issues he hated the most – the death penalty, war, child poverty,” Mr. Breslin, a friend of Newfield’s for decades, said.

A mayoral candidate in 2001 and very likely in 2005, Fernando Ferrer, called Newfield “an incredible megaphone for working people and poor people.”

And Newfield was still at it, filing his column in The New York Sun as recently as two weeks ago, when he wrote about the lackadaisical prospects facing the state’s Republican Party.

“Staying on Jack’s good side was a prudent idea, especially if you were a politician,” Governor Cuomo, a longtime friend and fellow boxing fan, said yesterday. “He was at the top of his game, and then the game was called on account of darkness.”

Newfield himself designed the service and chose the speakers. It seemed fitting that at the end the approximately 500 mourners rose to sing “We Shall Overcome.”