Harry Greb Footage

Do you record fights? Have you kept every fight you've ever recorded since you started recording fights?

All of them. Since day one? If not, why?

It's not hard to believe at all if you collect fights. It's certainly not hard to believe at all if you think someone held onto Greb fights and preserved them until they died, and then someone came along after them and did the same until they died, and so on.

It's a miracle any fights from 100+ years ago are still around. Even the dull ones. But particularly the dull ones. Boxing isn't a sports league. There was no League archivist.

Individual people saved fight films because they wanted to watch them again.

 

I would think even if the fights were boring surely it would be beneficial to at least keep a handful of them. It's possible but it seems like kind of a loss to not have a fight on somebody like Greb knowing the future exposure that could bring.

Wouldn't surprise me if someday we found some semblance of footage either. Either way I am not really too fussed because get a lot of discussion on Greb on here.

 

I wouldn't call myself a real collector, but I do collect fights - yes. I don't keep everything - I'm not as commited as some. Although I keep a lot what would be considered "boring". I keep fights that I find interesting - and since majority of them I don't think I'll ever watch again (There's only that much time one can spend watching fights), by interesting I mean for other people in the future. By interesting I don't mean exciting, rather historically meaningful. I also keep fights that I'm not sure others will keep, so fights that could become rare, with time.

Many people don't bother collecting fights in the first place for many reason, We know that. Yet, if someone is already commited enough to put his time, effort and money into it - I find the idea of person like that discarding a tape of a great(or considered great) fighter because it was "boring" very far-fetched. I don't believe people with that mentality become collectors.

I mean, someone even saved and preserved that famous(or infamous) training clip of Harry Greb. Is that suppose to be more interesting than actual fights?

 

Like I said, many films on all sorts of topics from the early 20th century didn't survive because the films deteriorated.

From a collecting standpoint, I'm just offering the fact that if a fight bored you out of your mind, preserving a terrible fight isn't top of mind.

There wasn't an internet you could talk to other fans on until the 1990s. People weren't saying "you save this one and I'll save this one." Guys who managed to keep fight films that were shown in theaters 100 years ago did it because they wanted to show them again to friends or keep them themselves.

The Canelo-Scull fight Saturday was "IMPORTANT" historically. According to the punch stats, it was close. A difference of ONE punch landed. I'm sure folks where Scull lived certainly thought he did enough to win. Hell, one judge had it 7-5.

But that fight has no visual redeeming value at all. Zero. None. They basically kicked Scull out of the ring postfight.

If Canelo-Scull was shown in theaters, and that was the only way you could see it unless you bought a ticket, and it SUCKED as HARD as it did, no projectionists are going out of their way to save it for "future fans."

It blew. And, by every description of him, Greb was one hell of an awkward, frustrating, not particularly hard puncher. Like I said earlier, Greb fans don't like hearing that.

But from this collector, the odds are more likely some films simply deteriorated and others were boring, and people didn't want to take the time to save his fights because there wasn't anything on them they wanted to watch again.

 

None of this really tracks with how films as a whole were preserved/lost from this era. Its a very narrow view to assume that any film was lost because it was deemed “boring” by a boxing fan. Which would also completely ignore the fact that several of the fights we know were filmed in which Greb took part were not boring.

 

I never said all were boring. Thousands of films over time were lost simply because the film deteriorated.

But, you keep what you like. I keep what I like. And people back then kept what they liked.

And if nobody kept it ...

 

So, long story short, I think what we learned in this thread is that someone will have to raise their hand and be the guy who saves all the worst, more boring, tedious, awful fights ...

And continue to maintain and preserve them until they die ...

Until the next guy raises his hand to dedicate his life to preserving garbage fights ...

Because someone one day may want to see it ... so, they can say for themselves, "that fight sucked."

I'm NOT IT.

 

My apocalypse vault is ready to receive its copy of Ruiz/Holyfield III at any time.

 

Unfortunately we dont know that nobody kept it. You are assuming that these films were held in the hands of private collectors and no longer exist because those collectors thought they were boring. Thats not really how any of this worked though. These werent private VHS tapes some fan recorded off the television. They were owned and distributed by promoters or film companies that had no secondary market and a difficult time getting their product into other states. Once that initial exhibition period was over the films were expensive to store, took up space, and were combustible. No real mystery why most didnt survive and no conspiracy either.

 

We owe you a debt of gratitude, my friend.

As Sonny Corleone said to Michael, "we'll get a message to your girl when we think the time is right."

 

Correct. It takes a unique type of mindset - but people like that are out there, which is why You can go to Youtube and watch Jack Johnson wrestle with Tommy Burns, or some random Japanese title fight from the 90s recorded privately from the stances.

 

Recording stuff in the 90s was easy. And the Johnson-Burns fight was a global, cultural event.

What actually supports the argument that people weren't that interested in preserving Greb fights is newsreels routinely included fight footage. You see them all the time online. Some fight films from those newsreels are only a minute or two minutes long. Newsreels were dropped off and picked up all the time. And fights weren't the only thing on them.

Take it from someone who worked in a movie theater when projectionists were union workers, and the reels were on enormous spinning plates that actually threaded into film projectors (I even did it a few times).

You could easily snip out the "fight" from a newsreel, keep it, tape the rest of the film together (because all film in theaters from reel to reel was taped together) and hand the reel back when the new one was delivered. Nobody was going to sit there and replay the whole reel from every theater to make sure all of it was there.

So, if anyone actually WANTED to snip out the fight film of Greb from a newsreel, it wouldn't have been difficult at all. It could've been done about as quickly as pulling out a piece of Scotch tape and cutting it off.

(By the way, my cousin still has Reel 2 of the 1977 Star Wars film that we found in the projection booth at the theater we worked in as teens.)

 

This is demonstrably false, I have a book titled Boxing's Greatest Middleweights that was released @ the very start of the 80s & includes an intro from Billy Conn, who asks, "when will the world be treated again to the sight of another Harry Greb, perhaps the greatest middleweight of all time." The book's section devoted to Greb also says, "Many a boxing buff will aver that he was the best middleweight who ever climbed through the ropes."

 

Boxing's Holy Grail.. unfortunately I don't think any footage will ever surface now.. old film deteriorates, especially if not stored correctly... Greb fought 100 years ago.. the likelihood of salvaging anything from an old film cannister if one turned up now would be minimal.. its just one of boxing's great enigma's .. why no one thought to properly archive footage of arguably the greatest fighter of all time.. only adds more mystique to the whole Greb legend tho..

 

Curtesy of Pittsburgh Boxing on Facebook:

“Greb doesn’t box. That’s why he can beat the boxers. They know what a boxer ought to do, and that’s just what Greb never does.”—Robert Edgren

“Boxers are lost before Greb because he doesn’t respond to the usual boxing movements.”—Arkansas Democrat

“There’s no use trying to be scientific with Greb. He pays no attention to it. He hit me so often I didn’t see anything but stars, and there wasn’t a punch that came over the way it ought to.”—Gene Tunney, 7/2/1922

Greb is far different from the average boxer. He does things that others tried. When the average boxer maps out a campaign for a contest, he bears in mind the strong points of his opponent and how he does this or that thing. Any boxer, however, who sets out to line up methods to thwart Greb will have his hands full.

“I saw him have even that super-boxer, Mike Gibbons, tied into a half dozen knots one night in Pittsburgh and you know that anybody who can treat Mike in that scandalous manner must be pretty much of a fighting article.” –Ed W. Smith

“Greb is fast and bounds like a kangaroo all over the ring, hitting from awkward positions. One can never tell when he is going to let fly a solid punch or a light tap….No matter how good a boxer may be he will have a hard time figuring out Greb.”—Mike Gibbons

“How can you make a good showing against a fellow who does everything backwards?”—Jeff Smith

“He is the hardest man in the world to fight, because he does everything wrong and shows a fellow up.” –Tommy Gibbons

He was the windmill, shooting punches from every angle, catapulting himself at the other fellows with a ferocity and suddenness that could not be handled by pure boxing skill.”—Ed Hughes, Brooklyn Daily Eagle

“Greb was a puzzle to all boxers, trainers and managers….When his opponent thought Harry was about to lead, he would jump back out of range and make the other fellow look silly. Then, when his rival thought he was about to rest, Greb would cut loose with a volley of blows which came from every direction with the speed of a hurricane and landed on every vulnerable spot of his rival’s anatomy from the waistline to the top of his head.

“He always kept his adversary guessing on what he would do and usually did opposite to what the other bucko expected.”—George Barton