''Harry Greb and Mickey Walker fought each other in 1925 and was actually filmed, however the footage has never been found'' This is a quote i didn't make it up, is it truthfull? Do you know of any other fights that were filmed but the footage was lost ?
A Sports Illustrated article in the 1960's mentions a collector in Europe saw a Greb film. Are they out there? I would lean toward yes.
The holy grail is the first Greb/Tunney fight, which I suspect someone, somewhere is chuckling about after watching it again, last night...
Would these videos really have survived this long though... I was under the impression that the filming methods used back then only has a limited life of the film.. so unless it was re-recorded... it probably isn't even viable anymore.
The great boxing film collector and former co-manager of Mike Tyson, Jim Jacobs, claimed he had seen a clip of Tunney/GrebI in 1986. The film was also archived in the American Film Institute, but the film had disappeared after further investigation...
Its probably in some corporate library somewhere ESPN wont release Rudkin Olivares. The probably have the Greb fights in some dark recess of their library and they A) Are just stubborn *******s and arent bothered about releasing it because they own the copyright on it B) Dont even realise that they have it.
Yeah, you'd think that if someone was really serious about finding it we could unearth lost films. What would it take? To find the Greb/Tunney tape we'd have to start with the name of the promoter for the fight, then find out who he sold filming rights to, who was a regular cameraman, what theaters the film was shown at, where the film was processed, etc. Then you make a few calls, knock on a few doors to see if any of those places are still in business and if they keep any vaults. Check with the descendants of whoever was involved. And eventually find out that the film perished in Hurricane Sandy or when someone's house burned down a year ago. I know there are societies dedicated to the preservation of old silent films. Is there anything like that for boxing footage? You'd think one of the international organizations would sponsor something like that. I also don't get why there's no company subtitling foreign bouts so we can understand the commentary. We have tons of companies that do that for commercial films.
There's an old post by klompton that addresses this. Bottom line: espn doesn't have it and probably by now the film is too degraded to be viewable.