Harry Greb Print, Vintage Boxing Poster, USA Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

HARRY GREB — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Harry Greb, 1919-1926.

Harry Greb fought around two hundred and ninety-nine times. In one twelve-month stretch he fought forty-five times. He fought middleweights, light heavyweights and full heavyweights, and he did not turn anybody down.

And for a large part of it he was blind in his right eye.

It happened in a fight against Kid Norfolk in 1921. A thumb went into the eye and detached the retina. If a commission had found out, his licence would have gone, so he told nobody, had a glass eye fitted later, and kept fighting for another five years at the top of the sport.

The style came from the same place as the secret. They called him the Pittsburgh Windmill because he threw punches from angles that had no textbook name, hit on the break, used his elbows and laces, and gave opponents no still moment in which to aim at him. Some of it was foul. Most of it was simply relentless.

In May 1922 he fought Gene Tunney for the American light heavyweight title. Tunney, who would later beat Jack Dempsey twice and retire as undefeated heavyweight champion, described it as the worst beating of his life. His nose was broken in the first round and he lost around two pints of blood.

Greb won. He is the only man who ever beat Tunney.

They fought four more times and Tunney, studying obsessively, won the rest, but the first night is the one that lasts.

Greb held the world middleweight title from 1923 to 1926 and beat Tiger Flowers twice in the eyes of most reporters, losing both on decisions that were disputed at the time.

He died in October 1926, aged thirty-two, from complications during surgery to repair facial bone damage from a car accident.

Modern medicine would have stopped him years earlier. That is the honest thing to say about it. What he did was not admirable in the way we now want these stories to be, and it was still one of the most extraordinary careers in the sport.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.