classic

The snow was flying sideways and he had no jacket, but this lumberjack did not shiver. He stood about 25 feet tall, ax in hand, wearing a red hat and rictus grin. And he was made of fiberglass.

I stood at his feet on the Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff, full of the satisfaction that comes at having accomplished something truly trivial: At last, I was face to face with the original Muffler Man.

Stories, photos and travel recommendations from America’s Mother Road

Easter Island has its stone-faced monoliths. China has its terra-cotta warriors. And we Americans have these roadside giants, also known as Paul Bunyans, Uniroyal Gals and most commonly, Muffler Men. Manufactured in Los Angeles, they first appeared on the highways of North America in the early 1960s as an advertising gimmick, often promoting car lots or car parts. Now they’re rising again, a battalion of restored and replica specimens, beloved by road-trippers, kitsch aficionados, artists, preservationists and savvy entrepreneurs.

“To me, they’re kind of instant friends,” said Amy Inouye, the designer and artist who rescued L.A.’s most iconic Muffler Man, Chicken Boy, a chicken-headed statue that stands atop her gallery in Highland Park. “They’re really tall and they just want to be accepted for who they are.”

The Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff includes the first oversize fiberglass Muffler Man, who has long been outfitted as a lumberjack.

These figures are especially plentiful along Route 66 this year as it turns 100 — there was a “pre-centennial frenzy” in the words of roadsideamerica.com, which coined the term “Muffler Men” and tracks them on a map. Nobody’s certain how many figures were made during the golden age of Muffler Men, but since 2020, the tally of giants has climbed above 250, including “a few dozen” rediscoveries since 2010, according to Doug Kirby, the co-founder and publisher of the site.

“Just in the last year or two, all these Muffler Men are being added,” he said. In addition, more than a dozen giants are currently in transition — that is, getting reconditioned or relocated.

1.) Cigars and Stripes BBQ in Berwyn, Ill., features a Muffler Man smoking a cigar and holding a jumbo bottle of barbecue sauce. 2.) The Gemini Giant stands along Route 66 in Wilmington, Ill.

On a recent westbound journey from Chicago on Route 66, I started seeing them almost immediately.

First, on Ogden Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, there was the Cigars & Stripes Muffler Man. He stood on the roof of the Cigars & Stripes BBQ Lounge, brandishing a chicken wing and a fridge-size bottle of barbecue sauce while chewing on a stogie.

Next, in Wilmington, Ill., came the Gemini Giant, who stands 23 feet tall above a tiny park. Made for a Wilmington diner in 1965, he was auctioned off for $275,000 in early 2024 and placed in his current location later that year. He wears a clunky silver space helmet and holds a rocket in his hands.

I had come across a few Muffler Men before this trip, including Big Josh, who looks down upon Joshua Tree from the Station gift shop on State Route 62. But now I was paying more attention.

At first, I learned, these giants were all men, conceived around 1962 by a Lawndale entrepreneur named Bob Prewitt and made popular from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s by a company in Venice called International Fiberglass.

Made from a standard set of molds and held together by steel frames, most Muffler Men are assembled from three or four pieces. Besides those figures holding mufflers and tires, others were outfitted as cowboys, Indians, lumberjacks (often known as Paul Bunyans), astronauts, chefs, dentists, golfers, hot dog vendors, race-car drivers, pirates and service-station attendants. Then there were the jug-eared goofball characters, which some scholars of the art form call halfwits, while others prefer snerds.

As interest in this kind of advertising grew, female giants followed, including Uniroyal Gals and Rosie the Riveters. Oversized animals, including dinosaurs, bulls, roosters, hens and seals, also multiplied.

Juni Peraza, 25, works at the Meadow Gold Mack retail shop on 11th Street in Tulsa, Okla. She said she has only recently realized the possibilities that come with 11th Street being part of Route 66.

All that action faded in the 1970s. But in about 1989, the seeds of a new Muffler Man era were sown.

Kirby, Mike Wilkins and Ken Smith, who had worked together on the 1985 book “Roadside America,” were building a database for a follow-up project when they realized, “Hey, wait, this configuration of statue we’re seeing in a lot of places,” Kirby said. “We decided we’d better start keeping track.”

The first few they saw were holding mufflers. Thinking of the old nursery rhyme “Muffin Man,” and a Frank Zappa song of the same name, Kirby decided to call them Muffler Men.

When the roadsideamerica.com website launched in 1996, Muffler Men were part of it. By 2000, Roadside America had uncovered their origin story and interviewed Steve Dashew, former president of International Fiberglass. And readers had embraced the giants in a big way.

This fiberglass Rosie the Riveter figure went up on 11th Street in Tulsa in 2025.

“It was like a religious epiphany for some people. For years, they were driving past these things,” Kirby said. “As soon as they realized it was part of an uncharted network across the country … it’s like your third eye has been opened.”

Ken Bernstein, principal city planner for Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources, calls Muffler Men “monumental and distinctive representations of midcentury car culture, especially along auto-centric corridors where it was important to catch the eye of passing motorists.”

New giants, known as custom jobs, are being steadily manufactured now. There’s an entire economic community emerging around their restoration, replication, sales, transport and display, including companies like (Re)Giant and sculptor Mark Cline’s Enchanted Castle Studios. (To confuse matters, many Southern California mechanics woo customers by welding together mufflers to make human figures. Those creations, too, are often called Muffler Men.)

The American Giants Museum in Atlanta, Ill., created in 2024 by Bill Thomas of the Atlanta Betterment Fund and collector-historian Joel Baker, is devoted to the fiberglass figures. The museum, open April through October, includes four standing Muffler Men, with two more expected around Memorial Day.

Because the giants stand in the open air, visitors who show up after hours — as I did — can ogle them any time.

Atlanta, Ill., is home to the American Giants Museum, which celebrates the Muffler Men and Uniroyal Gals that were common roadside advertising features in the middle 20th century.

“I love history. I love anything to do with cars and old advertisements. I think it just takes people back,” said Lee Woods, 55, who jumped on the Muffler Men bandwagon about five years ago and owns the museum.

Woods and his wife, Diane, who have a fleet of tow trucks in Hot Springs, Ark., were collecting old porcelain gas station signs, gas pumps and old cars in 2021 when, on a drive through Illinois, they laid eyes on the Gemini Giant.

“I told my wife I would love to have one of them things to represent our tow company,” Woods recalled.

Before long, they had hired someone to build a custom tow-truck-operator Muffler Man. And before that Muffler Man was done, Lee Woods had bought another one — a Paul Bunyan in Oklahoma. Then in 2023 he got a hold of a Muffler Man Mr. Spock from Rainbow Neon in Salt Lake City. Now Woods has eight Muffler Men in Arkansas.

“Sometimes I get carried away, my wife says,” Woods said.

Last fall, he bought the museum, where he collaborates with Baker, who is founder of the American Giants website, creator of a Giants YouTube series and serves as a Muffler Man broker, consultant and transportation specialist.

“When people see these things, they think they’re the coolest thing out there,” Woods said. “Today we’ve had people from six different countries here.”

1.) Cowboy Bob, who is about 20 feet tall, plays guitar and wears a bolo tie, is one of several oversize fiberglass mascots along 11th Street in the Meadow Gold District of Tulsa. 2.) Meadow Gold Mack, a friendly lumberjack, is mascot for a shop of the same name on 11th Street in Tulsa. 3.) A Muffler Man near Gearhead Curios in Galena, Kan. 4.) The 2nd Amendment Cowboy is a fiberglass giant that stands at the entrance to a trailer park near the art installation Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas.

From here, the giants seemed to come fast and furious. One in Galena, Kan. Two in Vinita, Okla. (which has since added a third). Five in Tulsa’s Meadow Gold District (including one with an 8-foot-long guitar).

Then in Weatherford, Okla., came a 30-foot astronaut. In Amarillo, a “2nd Amendment Cowboy” with a pair of big pistols at his feet. In Gallup, N.M., a giant on the roof of a used car lot.

By the time I’d reached Flagstaff, my count was 18.

Then came my snowy moment with the original Muffler Man, whose nickname is Louie. Experts agree that he was produced in about 1963 and sent to a Flagstaff cafe with a lumberjack theme (and yes, that cafe stood along Route 66).

Louie stood there until the cafe closed more than 10 years later. Then he was donated to NAU and stationed by the ticket office of the university’s Walkup Skydome. Another lumberjack stands inside.

But after Louie, I hit a drought — no more giant sightings in Arizona and none on the Route 66 alignment I followed into Southern California.

This seemed wrong, because there are so many giants along the byways of Southern California and because this is the land of their birth. Besides Big Josh, there’s the Paul Bunyan in Mentone, the empty-handed Muffler Man known as Kevin on Sherman Way in Van Nuys. There’s the flag-wielding Porsche Muffler Man in Carson (who previously served in the same spot as a club-brandishing Golf Man). And there are plenty of others.

It didn’t seem right to end the journey without another sighting. So I made my way to Highland Park to meet the one who rules the roost.

More specifically, I headed for 5558 N. Figueroa St., which was on the path of Route 66 for several years in the 1930s and which is the home of Chicken Boy.

Blessed with the customized head of a chicken, the body of a Muffler Man and a bucket in his hands (for eating chicken?), Chicken Boy stood for years atop the Chicken Boy fried-chicken restaurant on Broadway downtown, inspiring writer Art Fein to label him “L.A.’s Statue of Liberty.”

After the restaurant was shuttered in 1984, Inouye swooped in to rescue Chicken Boy and place him in protective storage — for years, as it turned out.

The fiberglass statue known as Chicken Boy stands on the roof of artist, designer and gallerist Amy Inouye’s studio on Figueroa Street in Highland Park.

In October 2007, after she and longtime partner Stuart Rapeport had bought the Highland Park studio space and pulled permits, Inouye put Chicken Boy back together again and set him up on the roof. There he remains, sharing space with a billboard, visible up and down the block between Avenue 55 and Avenue 56.

If a nomination by L.A. preservationist Charles J. Fisher goes through, Chicken Boy could become the first Muffler Man declared a city historic-cultural monument. And if you drop by the Future Studio Gallery on a Saturday between noon and 3 p.m. or 4 p.m., you’ll likely find Inouye, now 74, along with a trove of Chicken Boy T-shirts, patches, pencils and ceramic treasure boxes.

But seeing Chicken Boy is its own reward, especially after seeing so many of his fiberglass cousins. I got there on a balmy afternoon, beheld Chicken Boy’s beak gleaming in the sun, and knew my mission was complete.

Having arrived an hour later than the champion to the venue because of Manchester traffic, Dubois made a brisk, business-like ringwalk.

Wardley, in his first appearance since being upgraded to world champion, soaked in the atmosphere with a leisurely entrance. Draped in an Ipswich Town Football Club robe, he was greeted by a warm reception from the 18,000-strong crowd.

With a combined record of 42 wins – 40 coming by knockout – there was palpable anticipation inside the arena, and Wardley stayed true to his promise to bring the action early as Dubois immediately hit the canvas after a flush right hand.

Dubois winked to his corner but looked shell-shocked. He wrestled Wardley to the ground as both fighters swung for the hills.

Many expected Dubois to impose himself early before Wardley could settle. Considered the better technical boxer, he regrouped and landed a right in the second.

Momentum swung again in the third when Wardley, who looked sharp with his overhand right and uppercuts, sent Dubois wobbling. Dubois took a knee and survived the count before firing back with a right hand that rocked Wardley.

The fighters and fans struggled to catch a breath as trainer Don Charles urged Dubois to lean on his jab, and he followed that instruction to take control of proceedings.

Dubois’ left eye was swollen, but Wardley’s face looked a mess as Dubois set up his attacks with a left jab before landing his biggest shots in the fourth and the sixth.

Wardley, who was working in recruitment a decade ago, showed an extraordinary chin and heart as he refused to go down despite his legs trembling and blood pouring down his face.

Most would likely have been withdrawn by their corner, but Wardley has built a reputation on dramatic comebacks. This time, however, it felt different.

The doctor inspected Wardley’s injuries before the eighth round and allowed him to continue.

By the ninth, the referee looked ready to intervene as Wardley continued to absorb heavy punishment and the contest became increasingly difficult to watch.

Doctors again allowed Wardley to continue before the 10th and when the stoppage finally arrived in the 11th, there was almost a sense of relief.

A sensational fight had reached its conclusion.

Warren – a veteran of 45 years in the sport – described it as “the best heavyweight fight” he has ever promoted.

The Fitzpatricks missed the cut in last year’s Zurich Classic and finished in a tie for 11th in 2024.

But this victory earns them a cheque worth £1m.

“It was a struggle,” Matt, who won the 2022 US Open, said.

“I was doing zero to help him but he was fantastic on the back nine. I said ‘just give us a chance on the last to hit a bunker shot like that’.”

“It means the world. I’m absolutely speechless, it was a grind today but he was unbelievable and I could not be more proud.”

The event was played over four rounds, with teams of two alternating between fourball (best ball) in the first and third rounds and foursomes (alternate shot) in the second and fourth rounds.

Matt, 31, already had two wins this year, including last week’s RBC Heritage.

It was always going to be difficult for the second period to match the high-octane tempo of the first, and instead the decisive moments, both mad and magnificent, were compacted into the final few minutes.

With extra time looming, substitute Camavinga was dismissed for two yellow cards within 24 minutes of coming on. The first was for a foul on Jamal Musiala in the 78th minute and the second for taking the ball and delaying a Bayern free-kick following a foul on Kane.

The red card was to prove costly for him, and his team as the hosts made the most of their advantage.

Luis Diaz struck in the 89th minute to make it 5-4 to Bayern on aggregate, before Michael Olise put the icing on the cake in stoppage time.

With Guler also sent off in the aftermath, Real boss Alvaro Arbeloa admitted: “With the red card everything was over.

“It’s unbelievable to send off a player for this action. It’s not possible in a player like that, match like that. We feel all of this is a bit unfair.”

For Bayern, a semi-final against holders Paris St-Germain will follow and boss Kompany said: “The boys were mentally strong to recover from setbacks.

“The fans helped us as well. We stayed calm and always felt that our moment would come. The boys deserved this win.

“We showed absolute belief and will to fight our way back into the game.”

Gerrard, a 2005 Champions League winner with Liverpool, described it as “an incredible game of football, end-to-end, fascinating tactical approaches”.

“Extra time was looking likely, but one moment of madness, indiscipline and silliness has cost Real the chance of getting to the last four,” he added.

Former Liverpool defender Stephen Warnock told Match of the Day: “Both teams were brilliant going forward, but defensively both have been poor.

“If you want to win the Champions League, can you play like that? It is going to be fascinating to see how that pans out when Bayern face Paris St-Germain.”