Harry Greb at his Greatest.

Again, you are lying to cover your ass. You know you originally said that your dad picked up Greb and Olive Thomas in his cab in the mid 1920s. You never said you read it anywhere until you got caught in that lie. I dont give a **** what you want to pretend your age is just like I dont give a **** about your bull**** little stories until others start believing them and then Ill start calling you out on them. Next time at least do your homework before you make something up.

 

Funny. I always think it patently obvious that he is easily among the greatest who ever lived. I have him in the top three all time with Langford and Robinson… the order switched according to the whims of the day.

Our dear, enraged Klompton here has written the definitive book on him. While he cites the contemporary estimations of Greb, including the thoughts that he deserved a shot at the heavyweight title, I don't recall a lot of writers and commentators claiming him to be as high in the pantheon as I place him.

I am curious as to how the estimation of his greatness has changed over the decades. As the many often remind around here, in a poll in 1950 Dempsey was labeled the greatest fighter of the first half of the century. Thanks to modern objectivity we know this to be farce. I am not sure where Greb ended up in the poll. But it is interesting to note the evolution of his ranking.

 

Sir if you don't want to believe my age, and refuse to wager on my age, you are nothing but a bully and an egotist...I have written over 7000 posts on ESB and you bring up one item of this meaningless post...You are a cruel
and vindictive man sir...I might be an old codger sir, but I don't fear you one iota...So do you still insist I am lying about my age, but refuse to
put your money where your mouth is ? The silence is deafening...:hi:

 

Agree with most but I don't think MW was prime then.. I think he would become better later imo

 

Greb was ranked very highly during his lifetime in some places but it was spotty. I think the reason why he has come to be ranked higher over time is the fact that he fought so often, in so many places in the no decision era and then died so young (allowing others to pretend they defeated him) that it took a long time and a lot of scholarly research to really uncover his record and just how stellar he performed in all of those fights and then just how many guys really didnt want anything to do with Greb because he was so consistently good.

 

K,if you mean that Mickey Walker who was 24 years old when he lost to
Greb in 1925, was not in his "prime" then, you might be correct...But
Walker was most likely closer to his prime than the 31 year old fading Greb was in his prime...At any rate, it was a great victory for Greb, and Walker
would later on make a great legacy for himself...

 

Can we expect a certain Lisboan to throw some petrol on that fire ?

 

When I read these threads I'm always reminded of the saying "be careful what you wish for because you just might get it."

If you go back and read boxing magazines from the '40s and '50s, the writers are always talking about what a "boxing master" Jim Corbett was. And how guys like Rocky Marciano would be embarrassed by a "boxing master" like Jim Corbett.

Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, Jim Corbett film started showing up on television. And old boxing fans thought there must be some kind of mistake. I even remember reading about Jim Jacobs showing a group of fight guys a film of Corbett at a party, and not telling them who it was, and they were laughing at how awful the two boxers were in the film. When he told them one of them was Jim Corbett, they didn't believe it. That couldn't be the "boxing master" Jim Corbett.

Everyone's dying to see "the great" Harry Greb in action. If we haven't seen any by now, we probably never will. Unbelievably, half of every motion picture ever made no longer exists. And film preservation societies have worked feverishly to restore the old films that still do exist.

If a Harry Greb film was sitting in a film can for 90 years, it's powder now. If it wasn't transferred to another type of media years ago, it's gone. And for some die-hard Greb fans, that's probably a good thing. Because he's never going to live up to what everyone pictures in their minds.

 

The difference is at the time nobody had seen Fitzsimmons either. We have seen many of the fighters in action that Greb defeated such as Tunney, Walker, Loughran, Levinsky, Ratner, Moody, Chip, O'Dowd, McCoy, Gibbons bros, etc etc. Some of them look fantastic, others look adequate. Very few look clueless. The bottom line is regardless of how Greb looks what he was doing in the ring was good enough to beat these guys and usually multiple times. You cant argue with results. I always think of Forrest-Mayorga when such a discussion comes up. Who would have thought that smooth boxing, classicly trained, fighter who was coming off two big and clear wins over the P4P best fighter in the world would lose to a crude, wild swing guy like Mayorga? Doesnt matter because he did...

Sadly the statistics are far worse than this and something like 90% of all films made before WW2 have been lost.

Incorrect. Just a couple of years ago I found a film which had never been preserved or transferred of Jimmy Clabby which was from 1910, nearly a decade older than the earliest known film of Greb. I was able to salvage the entire thing. This film had essentially sat in a basement or attic for nearly 100 years and was still watchable. Such cases are rare but it is possible.

 

Do you know you can easily verify it via video? You can even hide the part of your ID # there and only show your date of birth. Excuses about lack of camera/microphone will most probably prevent it.

 

You're right. Greb could have defeated all those top guys because he was just a very awkward person to fight, not because he was so incredibly great that no one could match him.

However, if Harry Greb fights like Ricardo Mayorga, we aren't going to be seeing him at the top of anyone's lists for anything. That's all I'm saying.

People are going to want him to look a lot better than that because they've built him up so much in their minds.

Before films of old-timers were widely available, there were epic stories about what great fighting machines they were. When we saw them, they weren't. (Or at least they weren't how we imagined them to be based on the reports.)

Since there's no film of Greb fighting someone, people can still imagine him to be something he likely wasn't. But, who knows. Maybe he was the best ever.

That's the point. Nobody knows. Based on the guys who beat him that we have seen, I'm leaning toward the real possibility he looks about the same as they do. And nobody has them at the tops of lists anymore.

 

Dubblechin...

you are both Right and severely Wrong here...

right about myth, legend and era's, BUT wrong, Wrong and WRONG again about film.

your are neglecting to account for 'Not just poor film quality' But actual **** Filming Technic and Proficiency in using the devices...

MOST Old Film is ****, especially from the turn of the century and you can see the improvement by the 20s... there is almost NO great footage from those early periods but there IS some from the 20s & 30s where the fighters look great and NORMAL as you would expect to see them, i.e Cazoneri, Steele and Benny Lynch just for sample purposes. At the VERY Same periods there are Loads of ****.

so do you think ALL these hundreds of Same Period fighters were terrible and only handfuls were as you'd expect to see great fighters. NOT at All, don't be silly (expression, not literal).

as BB said people used to walk, run, work, eat, sleep, **** and **** the same back then as through every age - It's the Film(ing) that was/is **** in most of these cases. They did EVERYYTHING quite normal and that includes FIGHTING!

Seriously man, it's the filming, Greb and his contemporaries were the real deal and it grew and escalated peaking into the mid 50s and beyond and beginning declines to what were left with today among far too many fighters from about the 80s give or take.

Look at the Film footage I've mention and compare ALL the **** from the same time and ask yourself were all these fighters contemporaries worse than them, or were they the same?

 

As I said in the other topic: What does it matter what he looks like in accomplishing his task? Who cares if he was extremely awkward? He was. So what? He still beat who he beat. I ask again: If a guy runs the 100 in 5 seconds and beats Usain Bolt by a country mile but does so with a limp does that negate his accomplishment?

 

It would be interesting if any of the old camera equipment was around and still workable, how modern day day fighters would look filmed that way.