Italian Boxer Primo Carnera in the Tri-Cities

Primo Carnera (left), Al Singer (right)

Primo Carnera hit the Tri-Cities like a runaway circus elephant that suddenly decided to walk upright and take questions. People had whispered about him for months—the giant from Italy. He was built like a locomotive—six-foot-eight, two-eighty-five, wearing size-23 shoes that looked less like footwear and more like state-issued pontoons.

The papers printed a photo of Carnera looming over Al Singer, the Bronx firecracker who usually strutted into a ring like he owned the joint. Next to Carnera, he looked like some doomed newsboy drafted into mythology by mistake. Singer was coiled and ready. Carnera looked like he was debating whether to punch, or simply let gravity do the job.

He wasn’t here to fight. Just an exhibition match on July 10, 1930, at the Palmer School’s open-air arena. A chance for the locals to gawk at something their brains refused to classify as normal. Crowds swarmed him. They wanted to touch the hands, measure the shoulders, stare at the monstrous shoes and swear they weren’t hallucinating.

For a few days that summer, the Tri-Cities felt wired with electricity—like the whole place had been plugged into some great brutal engine. Carnera wandered through town, enormous and unhurried, and people followed him just to make sure the giant was real and not something conjured out of heat, rumor, and American hunger for spectacle.