Frazier loses to S. Philly boxer in race for a statue

While promoting a March fight, Bernard Hopkins wondered aloud why there isn’t a Joe Frazier statue in a city that prides itself on a fictional boxer. “If they find somewhere we can put it,” he told Metro, “I will pay for it.”

Yesterday, City Council passed a resolution approving land for a boxing statue, but it wasn’t Frazier. Councilman Frank DiCicco cleared the way for a monument to former middleweight champion Joey Giardello at Passyunk and Moore streets.

“He’s a neighborhood legend,” said DiCicco, noting that Ring One Boxing Association had fundraised for a while to make it happen in his district. Asked if he’d get behind a Frazier statue, he added, “I don’t see why there shouldn’t be one if there were people behind it.”

Hopkins has the money. The problem: Joe Frazier’s Gym sits on the border between two different districts, and neither Darrell Clarke nor Donna Reed-Miller have resolved to put a statue there.

Tim McCloskey, who started a “Joe Frazier deserves a statue” group on Facebook last year, said after hearing about the new Giardello statue that “there’s something wrong with a city that can’t name a street after the heavyweight champion of the world.”