The importance of Tucson businessmen Roy Drachman and Hi Corbett to the history of the Tucson sports community can be understood by two phone calls.
Phone call No. 1: In the spring of 1946, Drachman phoned Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck, who was spending a week at his Lazy Vee Ranch near the Rincon Mountains. Drachman had pitched the idea of starting spring training baseball in Arizona, specifically Tucson, but Veeck told him he would need another team, in Phoenix, to make it work.
A week earlier, Drachman and Corbett had been instrumental in arranging a spring training game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago White Sox at Randolph Park, drawing 3,723 fans.
Suitably impressed, Veeck set up a meeting with New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who was vacationing in Phoenix. Drachman and Veeck drove to Phoenix to meet with Stoneham. Everything came together. A year later, the Indians and Giants moved their spring training headquarters to Arizona. Cleveland stayed in Tucson until 1992.
Phone call No. 2: In 1948, after three years at the bottom tier of what would become the PGA Tour, the Tucson Open was struggling to raise prize money and attract golf’s leading names. After the '48 Los Angeles Open, the great Ben Hogan told L.A. reporters he had planned to play in the Tucson Open but was told all the hotels were booked.
Corbett, who was the leading figure in the creation and production of the Tucson Open and the once-grand El Rio Country Club, knew how important it was to keep Hogan involved in Tucson’s dream to become a regular stop on the PGA Tour. Corbett went to the Pioneer Hotel, then Tucson’s prime winter vacation site, and told them he needed a room for Hogan, preferably the best suite available.
Corbett then phoned Hogan and told him he was booked for a week, on the house.
Hi Corbett played a huge role in helping Tucson become a regular stop on the PGA Tour.
Hogan drove to Tucson and helped to draw more than 10,000 fans for the 1948 tournament, one of the keys that led to Tucson’s long presence in pro golf, a link to tournaments won here by Tiger Woods, Annika Sorenstam, Phil Mickelson and Arnold Palmer.
Long time allies in business and in sports, Drachman and Corbett were almost inseparable in their drive to make Tucson a destination for pro baseball and pro golf. When the Tucson Conquistadores were formed in 1964, Drachman was the group’s first president. When Randolph Park was expanded and the city council agreed to pay for improvements to bring it up to the quality of an MLB spring training site, it was renamed Hi Corbett Field in 1951.
We thus have selected Drachman and Corbett as a dual entry, No. 29 on our list of Tucson’s Top 100 Sports Figures of the last 100 years.
Drachman, born here in 1907, was a baseball guy. He played on Tucson High School’s 1924 state championship team and coached the semi-pro Tucson Gas House Gang and Tucson Greys for five years. He would go on to make a fortune in real estate development.
Corbett, born here in 1887, was a golf fanatic, perhaps Tucson’s leading amateur of the 1930s and 1940s. But the son of a lumber company owner probably became more known for baseball, president of the Tucson Cowboys minor-league franchise and, with Drachman, a long-time member of the Tucson Baseball Commission.
Their impact in Tucson sports cannot be understated. When the Arizona Diamondbacks and Chicago White Sox opened their spring training facilities on Ajo Way in 1998, Drachman was selected to throw out the first pitch in a sellout game of 11,298.
I was privileged to sit by Drachman for a few innings that night, and it was memorable, to say the least.
He told me he had become business partners with New York Yankees owner Del Webb in the 1950s, opening dozens of shopping centers in the Southwest.
“But our friendship was more about baseball than making money," Drachman said. “During the greatest era of the Yankees, in the 1950s, I would travel with Del to all the World Series games. When the Yankees and Braves played in '57 and '58, we traveled by train from New York to Milwaukee. One year we spent the night in the bar car with Abbott and Costello. There were celebrities everywhere. It was quite a time."
Corbett died in 1967. He was 80.
He once insisted that Hi Corbett Field should have been named after Drachman, not him.
Drachman died in 2002. He was 95.
He, too, was a man of modesty.
“I wanted badly to be a big-league baseball player,’’ he wrote in his memoirs. “I had everything I needed except that I was slow, too small, didn’t have a strong arm and couldn’t hit. Otherwise, I was a great prospect."
Together, Corbett and Drachman helped to raise our city’s sports profile from a dusty old frontier town to one where a Tucsonan could drive down the street to watch Willie Mays or Jack Nicklaus at their best.
