The statue of two men locked at a table on the corner of Petaluma Boulevard North and East Washington Street commemorates the World Wristwrestling Championship, which began a block away in a bar and ended up on national television. On the evening of 27 January 1955, at Diamond Mike Gilardi's saloon at Washington and Kentucky Streets, the newspaper columnist Bill Soberanes matched Jack Homel, a trainer for the Detroit Tigers, against a local rancher named Oliver Kullberg. The bout lasted about three minutes and was called a draw; by some accounts the table collapsed under it. Soberanes, Gilardi and Homel made it an annual event for the March of Dimes. The crowd grew from fifty to a couple of hundred, and in 1962 they incorporated the World's Wristwrestling Championship and moved it to a hall, where a thousand people watched. In April 1968 Charles Schulz sent Snoopy to Petaluma for the championship in eleven Peanuts strips, and disqualified him for having no thumb. In 1969 ABC's Wide World of Sports filmed the event, for a rights fee of 500 dollars, and broadcast it in January 1970. Petaluma made itself the Wristwrestling Capital of the World by official proclamation in 1969. The statue, by the sculptor Rosa Estebanez, was unveiled on 8 October 1988, and one of its two figures is Soberanes himself. Gilardi's Corner, which had opened in 1937, was demolished in 1967 when Washington Street was widened, and the corner went to a bank's parking lot. Soberanes died in 2003, and the championship left Petaluma after 2002 for Reno.
Getting there
38.2360, -122.6410
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