Is Harry Greb a top 3 light heavyweight H2H?

There is a good case based on who he beat.

 

Never seen him fight so can't comment.

 

I believe so it's shame he never got to win the LHW title. McGrain has him at #3, thats good enough for me

 

I wonder why Greb was never filmed or that film of him fighting somebody, anybody has surfaced? I mean we have film of Corbett slapping around with what seems like a guy off the street, for christ sake.

 

The fact that film of the period was destroyed because it was a fire hazard likely didn’t help.

The tragedy of this is that we lost all the meaningful film, of arguably the greatest fighter of all time.

 

If we all could see the beat down he put on Tunney and Walker he'd probably be most people's choice.

 

It's an interesting question top 3? Could he,would he beat?
Moore,Conn,Foster,Spinks, Langford,Fitzsimmons,Charles,Lewis,Johnson,?
He did beat Rosenbloom,Tunney,Loughran, Dillon,Levinsky, but at what weights? Norfolk and Gibbons were full fledged light heavies but how many of the others were at the time they fought Harry? I don't know.

 

Greg top 3 to 5 Lt heavy IMO....yes one of the best ever no doubt

 

He beat Rosenbloom, Tunney, Loughran, Dillon, Levinsky, and Gibbons at LHW. The first fight with Norfolk The Kid weighed about 180 if I recall, the second weights were advertised as 174 for both but reporters were skeptical because nobody was allowed inside the room for the weigh in (unusual for Boston) and there was a law preventing fights from taking place below HW with a difference in weight of something like 7 pounds (just from memory). Some reporters surmised by the look of both fighters that Norfolk outweighed Greb significantly and that the weights were given as 174 so as not to cause a cancellation of the card at the eleventh hour. So its kind of hard to say with certainty what they weighed. I always find it interesting that Greb rarely ever gets mentioned in all time great LHW lists and yet he almost always has more wins over guys on those lists than anyone else.

 

Is there any more info on this fire?
Did we lose valuable non-Greb footage as well?

 

For feature films recorded from 1910-1930 something like 20% exist in any form. For sporting films and shorts, it is far less.

What he is saying is that the nature of these nitrate based films makes them a fire hazard. Thus, they were routinely discarded.

 

Arguably, Greb could have defeated any lightneavyweight who ever lived.

 

Its estimated that 90% of all films made before 1929 are lost. I would estimate its higher because I believe (I may be wrong) this only takes into account major productions, not the smaller, local productions, that largely went unrecorded in places like the Library of Congress. Greb isnt the only one who suffers from a lack of footage that we know was filmed.