The curious boxing career and tragic death of 'Young' Stribling, the schoolboy fighter who was almost champion

For a few hours one night in 1923, W.L. Stribling was a world champion.

He thought he was, anyway. Just as importantly, his father thought he was. So did most of the state of Georgia. And why wouldn’t they? At the age of 18, he’d taken on light heavyweight champ Mike McTigue, “The Cyclonic Celt,” and won a referee’s decision in front of a passionate, partisan crowd in Columbus, Georgia.

Finally, he’d done it. The fresh-faced kid who’d gained national fame as “Young” Stribling, the plucky teenager who skipped out on much of high school in order to pursue a professional boxing career, had silenced the doubters who derisively called him “The King of the Canebrakes.” Strib, as he was known to his friends, had won a real world title.

Except, as he would come to find out soon enough, he actually hadn’t. The fight would officially be ruled a draw and the title would stay with McTigue. Referee Harry Ertle, who’d announced the result, would later explain that he’d only named Stribling the winner because he feared for his life while surrounded by the hometown crowd.

He had tried to call it a draw in the ring, Ertle said, but the mob of Stribling fans refused to let him leave until he named the Georgia boy as the winner. He complied, but only long enough to guarantee his own safe passage out of the arena. Once he was well away from the mob, he corrected the record. “Young” Stribling was not a champion after all.

Even for the misfit sport of boxing, Stribling’s career was a strange and fascinating one. His story is one of those that’s been largely forgotten by the sport and the American public, but the broad strokes are nonetheless familiar to anyone who’s ever heard of the concept of a “stage parent” or a viral sensation.

He was born in 1904, the first son of a young couple who worked as itinerant carnival workers in turn-of-the-century America. Stribling’s parents quickly incorporated both he and his younger brother, Herbert, into their vaudeville stage act. Performing as “The Four Novelty Grahams,” they would perform gymnastic feats sprinkled with a few wisecracks.

According to Jaclyn Weldon White’s excellent biography of Stribling, “The Greatest Champion That Never Was,” one of the staples of their act included the father, William Lawrence Stribling Sr., extending his arm while baby Herbert amazed audiences by standing firm and straight in his palm.

But Stribling’s father always had a passion for boxing, and he kept finding ways to work it into the act. Sometimes this meant working a heavy bag while his wife entertained audiences with witty asides about his form and technique. As the two boys got older, Stribling Sr. would referee boxing “matches” between the two, always with the younger Herbert winning in the end.

Stribling Sr. had always dreamed of being heavyweight champion himself, but he was a small man more suited to the acrobatic feats he picked up while traveling with various carnivals over the years. As his sons got older, he funneled more of these ambitions into them — especially his eldest son, William Lawrence Jr.

Ever since he was a toddler he’d been told that it was his destiny to become world heavyweight champion. His upbringing was in many ways geared around this, with his parents keeping him on a rigid diet and exercise program.

As the boys grew older and the market for vaudeville variety acts softened, the family gave up the wandering performer lifestyle and settled in Macon, Georgia. The Stribling boys struggled to fit in at first, having only been homeschooled between shows by their mother, but school sports helped them find their footing. W.L. was a standout basketball player, leading his team to a state championship. But to his father, this was at best a silly amusement and at worst a distraction from his true calling: boxing.

By the time he was 17, Stribling was an established professional boxer who regularly fought two or three times a month all over the American South. His father saw no problem with taking him out of school nearly every week so he could travel hundreds miles to fight grown men for money several states away. His father may not have ever had his son’s athletic talents, but he did excel as a somewhat visionary promoter. He leaned into his son’s age and youthful good looks, billing him as “Young” Stribling, the schoolboy fighter. As his son’s profile grew, he also used him to help promote his other business, including a gym, a sporting goods store and several real estate ventures.

While still in high school, Stribling fought over 70 professional bouts. Locally, he was a beloved sensation. Macon was so proud of his boxing success that the school mostly turned a blind eye to the fact that Stribling missed as many classes as he attended. (One sports writer dubbed him “the Georgia schoolboy who never goes to school.”) But as he gradually moved up in weight and fought more prominent opponents, he also withstood some withering criticism.

One night in Madison Square Garden, as Stribling was introduced as a fighter hailing from Georgia, the crowd chanted “Ku Klux Klan!” When he lost bouts in big cities, as he did against Paul Berlenbach in a light heavyweight title fight at Yankee Stadium in 1926, newspaper writers called him “King of the Canebrakes.” The implication was that, while this kid might be a champion among the rural, overgrown thickets of Georgia, he was a nobody in New York.

Still, Stribling was good copy for sports writers all over the country. He was young, white and unfailingly polite with an aw-shucks humility about him, all of which endeared him to newspaper publishers in post-World War I America. He married his high school sweetheart, Clara Kinney, when he was 21. They would eventually have three children together, all as he criss-crossed the nation fighting 20 times a year or more.

But, especially in 1920s America, boxing could be a dirty business. More than once, Stribling and his father were accused of participating in “sham” fights. He was sometimes called a dirty fighter and was warned against taking fights in Europe by one newspaper writer who pointed out that, on the other side of Atlantic, "the rules of boxing are actually enforced.”

On one European trip he fought back-to-back bouts against Primo Carnera, the enormous Italian fighter who would later become heavyweight champion, but was said to be controlled by mob figures who fixed his bouts in advance. Both bouts ended in suspicious disqualifications. Carnera won the first, and Stribling won the second. To keen observers of the day, this seemed a little too convenient.

Stribling was also allegedly approached by Al Capone, who supposedly made an offer to his father ahead of a heavyweight contender fight with eventual champion Jack Sharkey in 1929. The Stribling family politely refused, or so the story goes.

As will happen in boxing, Stribling’s novelty appeal began to fade over time. It was harder to stand out as “Young” Stribling as he fought into adulthood. People were interested in the schoolboy fighter, but less so in the guy who used to be the schoolboy fighter. Still, his father kept him active (and kept pocketing much of his money), even as Stribling’s own interests were proving to be more diverse.

The most interesting chapter in this segment of his life was his fascination with airplanes. In the late 1920s, much of America became obsessed with the seemingly endless prospects of air travel. Flight schools began to spring up all over the country. Airplane pilot didn’t seem like a role reserved only for the extensively trained few. People had learned to drive cars shortly after that technology became available, after all, so why wouldn’t it be the same with airplanes?

Stribling became an avid flyer and even used some of his boxing prize money to buy his own plane. He also became involved with a local flight school in Macon, eagerly lending the power of his local celebrity to help it grow.

In 1928, this same flight school planned an “Air Derby” to promote its classes. To advertise, pilot Samuel “Buck” Steele flew with one passenger over downtown Macon, dropping leaflets from the air. To draw people’s attention to the sky, the pair dropped firecrackers from the plane. It worked. People came out of their homes and businesses to watch the aerial show. But when one of those small explosives blew a hole in the wing, the plane plummeted to the ground outside a pharmacy, killing Steele and his passenger, France Ashcraft. The severed wing of the plane fell onto local blacksmith Clyde Murphy, who later died of his injuries.

To make matters worse, the heat from the burning wreckage weakened the pavement around it. When a crowd of worried spectators rushed to the crash site, the sidewalk collapse, injuring more people.

Somehow, this did not deter or even delay plans for the next day’s aerial show. And far from being scared off by the disaster, Stribling doubled-down on his love of planes by opening his own flight school: the Stribling Aerial School.

Stribling had his life tragically cut short, but neither boxing nor airplanes were to blame. In the fall of 1933, while riding his motorcycle to visit his wife in the hospital, where she was convalescing with the couple’s newborn baby, Stribling was hit by an oncoming car. The crash severed his foot almost entirely. As he lay bleeding in the street, he’s said to have told the friend who rushed to his aid, “Well kid, I guess this means no more roadwork.”

He died two days later in the same hospital where his wife and child had been waiting for him. He was 28, the father to three children, a veteran of around 300 boxing matches. He never did get that major world title, but he came close several times. He even had that one night where, for a few hours, he thought he’d made his father’s dream come true.