In the interest of courtesy and fair play to the Grebbists, I'm willing to concede that there are films alleged to contain someone named "Greb." I don't see how that provides any evidence of the actual existence of Harry Greb as a real person in history, however.
If there was no Harry Greb does it mean that my new favourite fighter, the superb and almost invincible Gene Tunney was in fact invincible after all, considering the mythical Harry Greb was the only man to ever defeat him??
We should also be skeptical of claims that color existed back then. The evidence is anecdotal at best.
I am wondering, though, why a forum ostensibly about boxing history allows posters to create threads about fictional boxers like Greb. Don't we have an obligation to fight fake news and disinformation?
Not to be politically incorrect, but how can you claim this while accepting the idea of colored world championships...? This is part of the reason I'm suspicious of Greb's existence. I think Tunney was in on it. As you said, his record would be perfect if not for this pesky imaginary boxer. I suspect he was paid off to put a blemish on his record to hype up Greb.
Tunney was a smart man. He realized that if you beat EVERYONE, they say you never faced good opponents. So when they invented a P4P GOAT for Tunney to beat in repeated rematches...well, what do you think Gene did?
Bingo. Everyone loves a comeback story, avenging defeats, etc. The masses don't like a perfect athlete with a perfect record. They already didn't like Tunney for his perceived snobbery and intellectual personality (not to mention the fact he dethroned the beloved Dempsey). Tunney taking a beating from Greb then bouncing back to beat him convincingly 3x with 1 dubious draw was a good hype tool to pretend like their rivalry was competitive. The public would be outraged if he sailed off into the sunset undefeated just like they got mad at Mayweather. I wonder if Bill Russel also threw a championship for similar reasons. That would certainly explain all the "white only" and "colored" signs at water fountains they meant it literally. That is, until the shift in the Earth's axis lead to atmospheric changes that produced melanin and color globally sometime in the 60's-70's. How else do you explain the civil rights movement and racial tension being so high around the same time we saw colored photos and television...?
The lack of actual color in the real world back in the day is the primary reason zebras were impossible to domesticate (they blended in and caused disorientarion in humans when they stared at them), and the reason tigers were such lethal hunters (amazing camouflage and stealth). How else do you think tiger populations suddenly declined rapidly when the world became colorful? Their natural advantages vanished when the white patches on their fur became orange and any person or animal could see them coming from a mile away. This made it easier for prey to flee and for humans to aim properly at them with their guns.
Precisely. Tunney's people already invented George Bernard Shaw as one of Tunney's "friends". If they could rig the Nobel Prizes for a fictitious person, inventing Greb would be child's play. It's not a coincidence that 60s films focus so much on breakdowns in reality. Sure, they blamed it on drugs at the time, but we both know that the adjustment to color was too much of a mind-warping event to leave humanity's psyche unchanged. Sadly, North Korea and a few poorer countries remained monochrome into the 80s, presumably due to the Kim regime creating a giant dome to keep out the colored sunlight.
Drugs as we know them didn't even exist back then pre-color-update. Sure, you can point to stories of hallucinogens in ancient texts and rumors that "berserker" viking warriors took drugs as a crude form of PEDs, but they were very much natural and relatively safe to use. It wasn't until the CIA experimented with them that they became widely distributed and harmful. Modern drugs, like modern medicine, is filled with chemicals and unnatural substances. When the world had it's global color shift, most people couldn't cope and they mentally broke which lead to a high demand of more and more extreme drugs. The government and drug cartels had to set aside their differences in order to combat the mass hysteria, but they couldn't fathom how far drugs would go nowadays with experimentation. "Colored sunlight" is a term first used by boxing pundits during the era of Jack Johnson. The term became popular as a means to describe both a natural phenomena (the atmosphere occasionally leaking real color before the major color shift which signaled the beginning of a new era), and as a slur to poke fun at black boxers. Johnson's success was attributed to the fact he had an innate advantage in outdoor arenas due to his darker melanated skin shielding him from the sun's deadly rays. However, since he was literally black back then, he bit off more than he could chew so to speak against Willard. The sun was so hot and he absorbed so much energy he overheated and couldn't continue against Willard who wasn't absorbing as much heat and outlasted Johnson.
In that kind of climate, it was really remarkably daring for the director of The Wizard of Oz to just roll with it when that freak bit of colored sunlight fell on the production, and just keep filming. The world was already reeling from the introduction of sound in the 20s. All of those speech bubble note card companies went out of business. No need for them when you can actually hear the person who's talking to you.
