With very limited video footage coupled with the fact he mainly fought segregated competition, its hard for me to proclaim him as high as most.. He did have over 2500 fights, so that has to be taken into count.. But again, segregated comp with very little video footage to back up the legendary tales
Part of the problem with that line is that we can discern which of the legendary tales weren't legends. He did fight 45 times in one year and won them all. He did fight black fighters -and during an era when many name-white fighters were not. He gave Tiger Flowers a title shot when Dempsey was actively ducking Wills and even told Dempsey he should give Wills a shot. When he passed away, the black community in Pittsburgh sang his praises and called him "our man."
Based on his record, yes. If Greb faced a guy with a longer top jab, or big time puncher, did he beat either? I think Greb just had more energy and was too durable to hurt at 160 pounds. He has top speed. With his windmill style, he out worked guys. If a film is found, I don't expect him to look very modern at all.
I did not mean to infer he never fought any black fighters, and he should be credited with doing so.. My criticism is more of the era than it is of Grebb.. I am not familiar with everyone on his record, but if he fought 300+ times but only a handful were against black fighters that would feed into my segregated era argumemt. But I would never disparage the man or his career...i am simply saying I have not SEEN enough of him to have an honest opinion....and boxing historians are notorious for over exaggerating the fighters they like while downplaying careers of fighters they do not care as much about, so I do not put stock in what they say...Burt Sugar was a master of this tact
Legacy/resume wise i have no problem acknowledging him as a top 10-20ish fighter but even thats a bit iffy since even the opponents he beat we have limited footage of. And its for that same reason i refuse to engage in h2h discussions about him. I view him in the same category as ancient Greek boxers/pankration practitioners--fun to talk about but impossible to evaluate with no evidence.
I can simulate a battle on a table if I know the topography, the formations, the gameplay of each army, the pieces in play etc. I can't do the same with a boxing match, no ring report can provide enough detail. Boxing is a visual sport, no paper can accurately give all the details in play. You can't take a radio broadcast from the same era and use it to reconstruct Dempsey's style with pin point accuracy. That right there is the difference between you and me, you think you can estimate how a guy fought based on what a bunch of sports writers wrote about him and to me that's as sensible as saying you learned how to box by reading a few books. Bottom line, all we have about Greb are photos, training footage and hearsay, and we don't have much more of some of his best opponents either. We can't seriously evaluate his skill level or the quality of opposition relative to other fighters/eras, all we can do is guess. But you for some reason feel confident saying he'd whip SRR, Hagler, Monzon etc. Greb might have put up some of the best numbers of any ATG, but this is boxing not fantasy football. Again, I'm not attaking Greb, it just seems to me that some cynical boxing hipsters out there like digging up mysterious old niche fighters and pumping them up to GOAT status like they're the extreme opposite of Mayweather fanboys. If someone wrote a book on an old bare knuckle fighter who went 50-0 in a year, beat a bunch of big names that nobody remembers at multiple weights and had 1,000 or so bouts, I'm sure some of them out there would drop Greb in a heart beat.
This is getting ridiculous. I don't know how you allow yourselves to get drawn into such arguments. Mr Toledo wins the argument *convincingly*, but yet you don't defeat the specific man you're arguing with. That - cannot - happen so why go down that dastardly rabbit hole? Let's close this one. It's maddening.
It's almost impossible to overrate Greb. I suppose if someone was saying the prime version literally could not be beaten, that would be overrating him but i've never seen anyone say that. If you rate him GOAT, that's reasonable. How to overrate him, really?
Yes, your last sentence there is hard to contradict! As for the era, I'd only say that I'd agree with you, though before 1910. Enough fighters look very effective in my eyes in the 20s, and there was a lot of tricks back then that have been long-since forgotten. Consider that Freddie Brown and Ray Arcel came out of the 10s and 20s and they built Duran. Duran had moves that dated back to the 1910s and even before and those enabled him to see a whole lot of success against much larger men.
Well, to sum up, I can only say that given what I know about Greb's strengths, style, and accomplishments in terms of who he beat, and also given what contemporary fighters, opponents, trainers, and managers were saying right through the 1960s, I think he'd beat any middleweight in history. I wasn't saying that before researching him in depth. In fact, I used similar arguments to yours here on this forum arguing in favor of Robinson and probably Hagler beating him. I've since repented. I'm not lobbying to have Congress force compliance with my views, so feel free to have your own.
I do remember as a snot nose, 16 year old punk kid back in the 1990s, reading in either KO mag or Ring Mag, that Grebb would have KOd Roy Jones...because Jones would not know how to deal with Grebb's 'windmill style'... I have always considered Grebb to be overrated ever since reading that article, which was a bit dismissive of how much boxing style has evolved in the last 100 years.... If not, why wouldn't more modern fighters employ the 'windmill style'? I remember that's how girls used to fight in the 5th grade
Joe Calzaghe? Greb sounds like a cross between Calzaghe using the American bob n weave and a Ukrainian side stepping action. Not so hard to imagine. FWIW I don't think Greb is overrated. His record speaks for itself. We don't have footage of him but we have footage of his opponents and guys like Tunney look like very good boxers even to the modern eye.
Its simple. Most fighters don't have the gifts to fight this way. Combined with modern rule changes, there won't be many Greb's. I'll give an example of another fighter. Fighting Harada had an elite boxing / swarming style that allowed him to jab people to submission and batter them. It was extremely effective, so other aggressive fighters should copy it, right? His brother tried just that, and got destroyed.
I second Bill Smith here, boxing writers are notorious for bias, hype and not having a solid grasp of the actual mechanics of boxing. Their opinions don't count for nothing, but it's not great to rely on them either. I can find Greb contemporaries that didn't seem to think he was the greatest middleweight let alone p4p king, both Nat Fleischer and Charley Rose ranked Ketchel above him. And their descriptions are more drama than technical breakdown. A lot of writers described Jack Johnson as fast, slick and impossible to hit, a defensive counterpuncher with the stance of a fencer. Based on those descriptions many argued he'd beat modern heavyweights. The footage reveals that trapping biceps was a key part of his game, something that a 200 pound Johnson wouldn't be able to pull off on today's 230+ heavies. Without footage there's no way of knowing how Greb would fare against a Robinson or a Hagler, without substantial footage we don't really know if a Mike Gibbons or a Mickey Walker were as tough an opposition as Carmen Basilio or Mustafa Hamsho, it's difficult to even get a grip of how deep the talent pool of boxers at the regular or elite level really were. There'll always be that question marking hanging over Greb and because of that I don't see a solid case for him being the GOAT at middleweight, never mind p4p.
