Why was Greb ranked as no.1 so late?

It wasn't unique in his own time. Johnny Dundee and Memphis Pal Moore had similar styles.

 

S, I suppose Johnny Dundee as featherweight came closest to Greb's style, though not as unorthodox in his tactics...But picture a 160 pound strong middleweight as fast as a featherweight and there you have Harry Greb...Ah, Johnny Dundee,a forgotten great from the past !

 

Only read 2 pages in. I don't tend to get people rating Langford over Greb though, but the TS topic is something I've thought of before. It's an interesting questions.

 

I wonder if Greb could sell tickets when up against a no-namer. Maybe his style made for messy fights.

This was all before close-ups and slow-motion replay. There's a lot of fighters that wouldn't be worth watching if it wasn't for that.

Maybe he needed that to be fully appreciated in his time.

 

I wanted to revive this to see what people think about it.

The question isn't whether Greb belongs at or near the very top in the ATG P4P rankings, or how he might stack up H2H against others in the middle weights ... but rather if anyone can pinpoint when, why and how it was that Greb began to be considered more highly in the last decade than he was 50 or 60 years ago, which seems to be the case.

The answer that makes the most sense to me is geography, particularly the lack of a large number of big fights in New York on his resume. Perhaps he was regarded by the powerful NY/East Coast press as more of a provincial talent who did well but didn't rise to the big time in their eyes because he chose (for whatever reasons) not to have big fights in the mecca of boxing of his time.

They might have viewed him as more of a barnstormer who fought a lot on home turf or friendly confines like Ohio and therefore regarded him as not being enough of a big-timer because of this.

I wonder if they thought, too, that newspaper decisions in his favor might have been less meaningful when he fought in Pittsburgh or in Ohio or in lesser fight towns (in Maryland, Nashville, etc.) where he would have been the bigger name most of the time -- I'm not suggesting those verdicts were biased, but that could have been the perception of some experts of his day.

And in a time with no TV, there may have just been many top writers or pundits of the day who didn't see enough of him to properly judge him as ATG material since he didn't have as many high-profile, big-city marquee fights.

I'd like to know what others think.

 

I get the idea that Greb's standing fell off somewhat after the end of his career, because circumstances around his fights started to be obscured, and the people who saw him fight started to die. History was very kind to some of his opponents, because they rewrote it.

 

And to be fair this is the era where Greb is getting rewritten in a historically positive manner. He is for the moment the flavour of the month.

 

But lets not forget that history is being rewritten in his favour, based on the very earliest and closest sources. It was when they were deviated from that his star began to fall.