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Young Corbett III takes posthumous 8 count at
Selland
At the entrance to Selland Arena in Fresno is a statue of Young Corbett III.
Corbett (Ralph Giordano) was a local Fresno sports hero who fought as a
welterweight from 1919 to 1940. He had 151 fights with 122 wins (33 by knockout)
including one over Jackie Fields in San Francisco on February 22, 1933 for the
Welterweight Championship of the World.
Recently HBO came to Selland Arena to televise a title fight for the World
Middleweight Championship. The champion, Floyd Mayweather used superior boxing
skills to beat challenger Victoriano Soza, who was competitive but unmistakably
defeated in the view of judges and the 3 HBO announcers Jim Lampley, Larry
Merchant and ex-Heavyweight Champion George Foreman.
When Mayweather was announced the winner, by unanimous decision, there were some
boos from the crowd. If it was due to Hispanic ethnic pride (as Mayweather said
he believed) or to isolated provincialism that the HBO broadcast crew had been
alluding to all night, Larry Merchant didn't like what he was hearing.
He couldn't resist putting the locals back into their place and Young Corbett
III and the rest of the Fresno Area's great sports heritage were the most
vulnerable targets within his verbally vindictive range
After smugly chuckling that HBO had brought “The Circus” to Fresno, Merchant
first went after Corbett. He said that outside Selland Arena there was a “statue
of some guy named Corbett”.
He said that they’d looked up Corbett's record and found that he had beaten
Jackie Fields for the Welterweight Championship and then immediately lost it to
“The Great Jimmy Mclarnin”, knocked out in the first round in the first defense
of his new title.
Just to make sure that nobody missed the very implied message that the people of
Fresno probably had wasted a lot of bronze, he stated to a world-wide HBO
audience that the “the real heavyweights in the area are the writers…(pause).
William Saroyan”
“John Steinbeck?” Lampley chimed in. “Grapes of Wrath” verified Merchant who
then went on to the often stated but incorrect cliché that Fresno is known as
the “Raisin Capital of the world “
Any references to Fresno's real sports legacy, (after all, this was a sporting
event not a C-span book review show) other than Merchant’s reference to
Corbett’s short holding of the title were totally absent. It wasn’t so much what
was said, but what was omitted.
By referencing Saroyan and Steinbeck as the “ real heavyweights” of the area,
the HBO crew was saying by omission that the only notables of any significance
that this area had ever produced was a one title defense welterweight champion,
who they had just verbally dismissed, and a couple of famous writers.
The Conclusion by Omission was that Fresno suffers from a glaring big time
sports legacy void that can only be partially filled by its "heavyweight"
writers, even if the HBO announcers had to borrow Steinbeck from Monterey
county, where he was really from, and loan him to Fresno to make their point.
If they had scratched the surface just a little, they may have found that Fresno
and the Central Valley of California has produced a long line of nationally and
internationally acclaimed athletes.
Deep in major league baseball lore there are not many legends more ingrained in
our national sports memory than the trio immortalized in the poem “ Tinker, to
Evers to Chance”
Frank Chance went to Fresno High School at the end of the 19th Century and was
more than a just a name in a famous poem. He became one of the first sports
super stars of the 20th Century as the ” Peerless leader” of the Chicago Cubs
and as a player-manager led them to their only World Series Championships in
1907 and 1908. Sixty years later, Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver, who also went
to Fresno High, led the 1969 Mets to a World Series Championship.
One of the most legendary names in auto racing was Fresnan Bill Vukovich, who
won the Indianapolis 500 in both 1953 and 1954, only to be killed in a tragic
accident while leading the race and going for a third straight win in 1955.
If you extend out to a 50-mile radius of the city of Fresno, two of the most
acclaimed decathlon gold medallists in Olympic history came from this area. Bob
Mathias, from Tulare, astounded the sports world in 1948 by winning the
decathlon in the London games at the age of 17 and repeated again for gold at
Helsinki in 1952.
Refer Johnson, who grew up in nearby Kingsburg, followed him twelve years later
and won the decathlon gold medal at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Both developed
their great talents on the athletic fields of Central California, as did the
first man to pole vault 15 feet, Cornelius "Dutch" Warmerdam from Hanford ,who
along with many other great valley athletes were featured in a 2000 Andy
Boogaard article A harvest of Athletes” that ran in the Fresno Bee.
But it was Ralph Giordano, who fought as Young Corbett III, who would be honored
in bronze in the city where he grew up defending his corner as a paperboy. The
same streets of downtown Fresno that Saroyan later chronicled in many of his
writings.
William Saroyan, who died in 1981at the age of 72, has the areas venue for the
arts, Saroyan Theatre, adjacent to Selland Arena, named in his honor. Saroyon's
experiences on the streets of Fresno were his source to unleash a literary
talent that would lead to being a world famous, Pulitzer Prize winning,
playwright and author. Corbett used those same streets as a platform to boxing
fame.
Both become celebrities in San Francisco. Saroyan won over the City's
intellectual and literary set and Corbett was adopted as a "local" hero of the
San Francisco Italian American Community and attracted huge crowds and purses
for his fights.
He was a fighter with finely tuned defensive skills and considered by many
boxing historians to be one of great counter punchers of all time.
In 1930 he defeated the World Welterweight Champion "Young" Jack Thompson in San
Francisco, but it was a non-title fight and Corbett couldn’t claim the title
that he was obviously qualified to hold. Ring historian Nat Fleisher was once
quoted as saying that "Young" Jack Thompson “ was " one of the finest performers
the ring has ever known”. Corbett beat him 3 of the 4 times they met.
After winning the championship from Fields in 1933 and then losing it to
McClarnin, Corbett never got a chance at the title again. Ironically, McClarnin
lost his newly won title to Barney Ross just about as fast, but where Corbett
never got another title shot, McClarnin did. He got a rematch and won it back
before losing it again to Ross in a legendary 3 fight series
Later in his career Corbett had wins over some of the best fighters of his time
including Fred Apostoli, Micky Walker, and the legendary Billy Conn. In 1937
Conn was a sensational 19 year old from Pittsburgh, who had won 24 straight
coming into his fight with Corbett. Corbett defeated Conn in San Francisco with
his experience and finely honed boxing skills.
Three months later Conn reversed that loss with a win over Corbett in his
hometown, Pittsburgh. Later in his career Billy Conn gave the great Heavyweight
Champion Joe Louis one of his biggest career challenges before losing to the
champ in a historic 1941 battle at the Polo Grounds in New York.
Corbett passed away in 1993 at the age of 88. In all of his fights, it’s highly
unlikely that he had to endure any lower blows than he did during the wrap-up to
the Mayweather-Soza fight.
The HBO “Circus” is long gone and may or may not be back, but after surviving a
posthumous 8 count, Young Corbett III is still standing in his locked- in- time
bronzed boxing stance at the entrance to Fresno’s Selland Arena.
Corbett’s statue stands not only as a tribute to his skills and achievement, but
also as a symbolic honoring for all of those who also helped create a great
multi-sports legacy in the city that honored him in bronze.
Fresno.
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