The GODS OF WAR

[IamInuit]

Cont...

First, Ross assumed that his superior size would matter. It didn’t. The second was a question of pace. Henry could keep a hellish pace indefinitely. Barney could not. By round seven, the featherweight champion was overpowering the welterweight champion. Ross was still throwing that right uppercut-left hook combination, but he was wavering like a weather vane in November.

It has become a convention among boxing historians to accede that the twenty-eight year old Ross got old in that bout, that he could no longer move as lively as he once did. That claim ignores what the film confirms –Armstrong’s physical strength and pressure wore Ross out, just like it did Sarron. By the end of the tenth round, Barney Ross was in big trouble.

Only his heart and Armstrong’s favor allowed him to finish on his feet. Late in the fight, arguments abounded in both corners. Ross’s chief second had the towel in hand and was ready to throw it in when Ross warned “–don’t do it. I’m not quitting.” The referee came over and Barney had to make a promise to alleviate the official’s conscience. “Let me finish like a champion,” he said, “and I promise I’ll never fight again.” In the other corner Armstrong wanted to knock him out. “I don’t want to crucify him,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt him no more.”

Armstrong would later claim that his seconds had gotten a signal to carry Barney for the last four rounds, and that the two champions had a conversation during a clinch that went something like this:

Armstrong: “How you feel, Barney?”
Ross: “I’m dead.”
Armstrong: “Jab and run, and I’ll make it look good.”

As the last bell clanged, Barney embraced Henry. “You’re the greatest,” he said. Close to it… Armstrong emerged from a battle against one of the finest boxers of the Golden Era with nothing more than a bruised knuckle.

THE WORLD LIGHTWEIGHT TITLE, 17 August 1938
New York’s own Lou Ambers was as tough as old boots. Known as the “Herkimer Hurricane,” he was a trainer’s dream, sighed Whitey Bimstein, because the closest thing he had to a vice was going to the movies. Ambers was also a supremely skilled in-fighter whose pride still swelled his chest decades later, “Oh Jesus,” he said in retirement, “I loved to fight.”

Ringside seats for the Ambers-Armstrong title fight at Madison Square Garden cost $16.50, same-day admission was $1.15, and soon eighteen thousand were fidgeting in the seats. A collision of two hurricanes was imminent. Would Armstrong emerge with three simultaneous crowns? The odds said 3 to 1 that he would.

Al Jolson plunked down a grand that said Ambers wouldn’t even see fifteen rounds. But Ambers was ready. “I’ll cut up Henry Armstrong so badly,” he predicted, “the referee will have to stop the fight.” Reporters chewed on their pencils at this. “Don’t worry about me,” he snapped, “wait until we’ve gone 15 rounds and then ask Armstrong how he liked it.”

The two champions were standing toe-to-toe and slugging it out for a full minute by round two as the crowd screamed and hats flew. Ambers clinched effectively inside and landed sneak shots, but it was Armstrong who caught him pulling back in the fifth round with a long right. Ambers tumbled down. The referee counted to three when the bell rang and his corner men rushed out to revive him. In the next round, Armstrong threw combinations that didn’t end. Down went Ambers again.

He took an eight count but nodded to his chief second, who by now had the spit bucket over his head.

Then Ambers found an answer; as Armstrong bent forward and barreled in, he stood his ground and shot uppercuts one after another. Armstrong hurled punches low and the referee penalized him four rounds while Ambers knocked his mouthpiece out twice and severely split his lip. It was a war. In the fourteenth, Armstrong landed a right and Ambers reeled across the ring like a drunk chasing his hat, but he wouldn’t go down again.

Armstrong said it as the “bloodiest fight I ever had in my life.” The canvas, according to Henry McLemore in press row, “resembled a gigantic butcher’s apron” and the fight was almost stopped. “I’m not going to bleed no more,” he promised the referee, and then spat out his mouthpiece and got back to work. He ended up swallowing about a pint of his own blood along with the iodine and collodion used to congeal the cut in his mouth. Delirium set in sometime in round fifteen.

In Lou Amber’s dressing room, McLemore suspected that the fighter’s screws were punched loose. Lou sat naked, covered with welts, his eye an egg, croaking the old favorite “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad” –and talking ragtime. Swaying to and fro, he was still ducking overhands that weren’t coming anymore. “Whoop-a-doopy!” he said as McLemore made tracks for the other dressing room. Armstrong couldn’t even remember the fifteenth round. His handlers would tell him later how they had to peel him off of Ambers. A strange calm swept over him as he sat nursing a swollen left eye, five cuts over both eyes, and a mangled lip that would take fifteen stitches. Flashbulbs exploded in his face.

Hurricane Henry had reached his peak –the fistic equivalent of a category five. After storming three divisions and dethroning three champions in less than a year, the man was spent …and the boxing landscape would never be the same.

On 52nd Street the next morning, yellow cabs honk their discontent and clusters of pedestrians bustle to work outside Madison Square Garden. A gust carries a newspaper through space and time, sailing, swirling until it lands at the feet of a tall and rangy teenager in Central Park. “TRIPLE CHAMPION!” he reads, and his eyes flash with ambition. He finishes stretching and starts running down the winding bicycle path, against the wind.

[IamInuit]

The Second God Of War: Sugar Ray Robinson

By Springs Toledo




A junk wagon pulled by a clopping nag lurches down 110th street in New York City. Beside it walks a peddler whistling a Cab Calloway tune, his eyes jaundice yellow. In the distance a bouncing figure approaches out of Central Park. It is a young man about seventeen, boxing shadows in steady stride. He stalls and skips in place, shoulders hunched, chin down, and lets fly a shoe shine combination that ends with lightning left hooks. Spinning off the last of them he runs on into Harlem, into the morning sun.

In the afternoon, he heads over to Grupp’s gym on 116th street. Old-time fighters loiter there, bound together by an uncommon past –“All they did was talk boxing,” he would remember, “and all I did was listen.” Harry Wills would teach him balance, Soldier Jones the difference a good jab can make. Among them is William Ward, who fought under a name dreaded in the 1920s –Kid Norfolk. Ward regales him with war stories about the blood-spattered men of a bygone era.

The phenomenon that would become Sugar Ray Robinson began at the feet of masters, and was forged from the inside out. The future was his.

YEAR ONE~
He still had jumpy legs after his professional debut on the undercard of the Henry Armstrong-Fritzie Zivic title fight at Madison Square Garden. Showering quickly, he hurried upstairs from the dressing room to see his idol make the twentieth defense of the world welterweight title. What he saw he never forgot. Armstrong, the Triple Champion the press was calling invincible, was bludgeoned, jabbed blind, and cracked with short shots until he had nothing left but courage. Zivic was ruthless. “I pulled my trunks up and went to work on him,” he recounted, “I busted him up, cut him here and cut him there…when the eye was cut, I’d rub it with the laces to open it a little more.”

In the cab ride home to Harlem, the young lightweight had vengeance on his mind. “Mom,” he said “I want to fight Zivic. I’ll fix him for the way he beat Armstrong.” His mother was having none of it –“Junior, I don’t want you ever to fight Zivic.”

Four days later, Junior was in Georgia to add a second round technical knock out to his budding record, and after that he had matches in Philadelphia, Detroit, New Jersey, and Washington DC as often as three times a month. His opposition was unusually tough. His fifth opponent as a professional was Norment Quarles, a one-time protégé of Jack Dempsey. Quarles had faced several champions in 108 professional bouts –yet couldn’t finish half the eight scheduled rounds against this prodigy. Four days after that he was back at the Garden handing Oliver White his first stoppage loss in 50 fights.

It is said that in Philadelphia even the winos know how to hook off a jab. Robinson was already good enough to flatten Philly fighters like they were barley in a field or grapes in a press. Jimmy Tygh, an aggressive lightweight who had never been stopped in 60 bouts was stopped twice –once cleanly and once after falling down five times. Mike Evan’s career was in recovery when a left hook left him in a stupor in June 1941.

Robinson was back in Philadelphia in July to risk his 20-0 record against a seasoned veteran with 80 fights, the National Boxing Association world lightweight champion Sammy “The Clutch” Angott.

It should not have been so easy.

Robinson was expected to be overmatched in close against a man with the fighting style of a squid, but he soon found answers. In the second round he sprang back and threw a looping right hand that parked on Angott’s chin. Down he went. His eyelids fluttered for six seconds before he got to his knees and then his feet as the count reached nine. Robinson said that the only reason Angott woke up was because his head was near the time-keeper’s hammer as it pounded on the ring apron. Angott had some success with left hooks to the body, but the long range blasts were too much and he lost a wide decision.

Many were now convinced that the victor, who had just turned twenty, was already the best fighter in the world. And despite his being acknowledged as the next logical challenger for Lew Jenkins’ lightweight crown, it was Angott who got the title shot, and the title.

With an uneasy crown atop his head, “The Clutch” whipped two top contenders and then got whipped himself in another non-title bout against Robinson. Angott tried again a few years later, and got whipped again.

By September 1941, the boxer the scribes were calling Ray “Sugar” Robinson faced U.S. sailor Marty Servo, who was undefeated in 44 fights. Like Angott, Servo was the boss on the inside, but Robinson slid back and lit him up at range. To the delight of the Philadelphia crowd, Servo fought as if Robinson was an English king and he a cranky colonist. Like the Liberty Bell Servo’s head was rung (though unlike that national treasure, it never cracked) and his revolution was thwarted.

On Halloween night, speed and talent glided into the ring at Madison Square Garden to confront a diabolical 142 fight veteran. The chance to beat the conqueror of Henry Armstrong had arrived.

No pundit worth his weight in smelling salts would have confused Fritzie Zivic’s style with artistry, while Robinson’s fights were already being compared to recitals. Barney Nagler quipped that he “boxed as though he were playing the violin.”

If he had a violin, Zivic would have snatched it and broken it across his knees.

To boxing historians, the mere mention of Fritzie’s name conjures up a rag-bag of felonious tricks. “I’d give ‘em the head, choke ‘em, hit ‘em in the balls… I used to bang ‘em up pretty good,” Zivic proudly conceded, “You’re fighting, you’re not playing the piano you know.”

In the first round, he scraped the inside of his gloves so hard against Robinson’s face that the laces felt like “steel wool.” He also had a way of uncannily forcing his opponent to head butt himself by looping his lead hand around the back of the neck in a clinch and jamming his opponent’s head into the top of his own. Then he’d looked to the referee with an unconvincing plea in his eyes. Robinson couldn’t believe what was happening. At the end of the round, he flopped on the stool in his corner. George Gainford splashed him with a sponge and said “don’t let him get close –keep him away with the jab.” He did as he was told and things got easier. Fritzie was impressed: “Everything I done, he done better” –everything legal that is.

Not only did Robinson avenge his idol, he began to outshine him. Henry Armstrong was fading while Robinson’s learning curve became a straight line pointing to heaven. “Year One” saw 26 victories, including the defeat of a world lightweight champion, an undefeated future world welterweight champion, and a former world welterweight champion. Two of them were Hall of Famers in their prime. Robinson wasn’t yet near his, but he didn’t have to be.
…
By the close of the decade, he would ascend to the welterweight throne. Jimmy Doyle would die at his hands, and traumatized, he would never again ignore his instincts or listen to anyone who disagreed with him. To insiders and former friends he became a prima donna, out of reach and obsessed by self-interest. More than a few hated his guts, though none could deny the greatness of a fighter whose record soared to a breathtaking 128-1-2 with 84 knockouts.

Sugar Ray Robinson is usually remembered today for winning the world middleweight title five times, but that accomplishment isn’t half the story. What prevented him from taking Joey Maxim’s world light heavyweight title on a blistering summer day in 1952 was nothing human. With an insurmountable lead on the scorecards after thirteen rounds, he collapsed with heat stroke. “God wanted me to lose!” a delirious Robinson declared in the dressing room at Yankee Stadium, “God beat me!” The truth wasn’t far off.

Had circumstances –boxing politics and the weather, been different, might he have been the first and only fighter in history to win the lightweight, welterweight, middleweight, and light heavyweight world titles? The answer is clear enough to force a startling conclusion.

Despite all his accolades, the man born Walker Smith Jr. is even greater than we know.

[IamInuit]

Cont...


~YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
“Whom Fortune wishes to destroy,” Publilius wrote, “she first makes mad.” At forty-four years old, Sugar Ray Robinson had his 200th professional bout. “I am telling you I am going to win the title again,” he insisted. He planned to do it the old-fashioned way, by challenging a top middleweight contender in fourth-ranked Joey Archer.

The books had Robinson a 2 to 1 underdog against Archer for the Pittsburgh bout. It was his fourteenth fight in 1965, four of which he had lost. Nat Fleischer said what is always said at the end of a boxer’s professional life: “His legs are gone.” Once rivaling fellow Harlemite “Bojangles” Robinson, those gams still looked good, even if they were about as light and lively as the winter blues. That aura of beautiful danger surrounded him as he ascended into the ring, conked and svelte like the days of old …but Robinson knew better.

Aging ex-champions always know, even when they lie to themselves, or go mad with delusions. Grandeur seems to dangle over their graying heads like a star on a string, but they can’t jump anymore to reach it, and their gloves, like arthritic hands, can no longer hold it. It all slips away; until the earth-bound god-in-denial is publically humiliated.

As the bell tolled the end of ten one-sided rounds in the Civic Arena, a battered Robinson embraced Joey Archer. Archer escorted him to his corner and he stood facing it with his head bowed. And then something happened. The fans at ringside who had been hollering “Joey! Don’t hit him!” over the last few rounds began standing up and drifting over to Sugar Ray’s corner. First a scattered few and then dozens of fans gathered beneath him, applauding with something that approached deep reverence. Robinson’s eyes met theirs and the ovation washed over him. His defeat was being sanctified.

Fickle Fortune had changed her mind… this fighter would not be condemned to humiliation, not now, not ever.

The next afternoon he was stretched across a bed at the Carlton House Hotel, his aching head propped up on a pillow. No man had ever stopped him. The time had come to stop himself. With reporters scribbling on notepads, he quietly concluded his career.

Harry Markson, the director of boxing at Madison Square Garden called him a few weeks later. “Ray,” he said, “it just doesn’t seem right that a man of your stature should be allowed to retire so quietly… we’d like to throw a farewell party for you that will pay you the tribute you deserve. What do you say?” It was dubbed “Farewell to Sugar Ray” and scheduled just before the main event on December 10th 1965 at 9:30pm.

“He’s the greatest fighter there ever was, and for me that’s saying something.” Muhammad Ali said that night, “When I was a little kid I’d watch Sugar Ray Robinson on the TV, and when I started fightin’ I copied his moves …and I still do. When I go into the ring now he’s on my mind.”

The crowd was on its feet as he made his way down the aisle. They were still cheering as he climbed into the same ring where he began his career twenty-five years earlier, where he avenged an idol and became a greater one.

Four former middleweight kings were announced and soon they stood in the corners surrounding their common opponent. Among them were Carmen Basilio, Gene Fullmer, Carl “Bobo” Olson, and Randy Turpin who flew in all the way from England. Barbara Long of the Village Voice mused that they “could have rushed him and got him good,” and “tough old Carmen looked like he was entertaining the thought.” They closed in on him slowly –or warily, and lifted him up. Sugar Ray’s smile reflected the lights; and he extended his open hands not unlike a messiah.

At the end, he stood illuminated in a single spotlight, his terrycloth robe dazzling white. All were moved. The African Americans scattered throughout the crowd were more than moved. For them it was a spiritual experience. The man had his faults, to be sure, but the image of this champion was a reflection of something larger than himself –the strength and passion and brilliance of his people. It still is. With tears streaming down his face, he began to speak, and then faltered. A young man in the crowd was heard to whisper “Talk to me, daddy.” An elderly man said, “Let us hear you son,” and wept openly. The boxer’s voice trembled as he spoke into the microphone: “I’ll miss the applause that makes a guy get up off that stool one more time.”

Ducking his head, Sugar Ray Robinson slipped through maroon ropes that served as boundaries for his kingdom. He stood on the apron staring at the top rope for a moment, then kissed it and descended from the ring.

The gods themselves throw incense.

[IamInuit]

The God of War

By Springs Toledo





Next him… [a] scepter’d king,
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest spirit
… now fiercer by despair.
~ Paradise Lost, bk. II, l. 44

19 April 1924, Boston. Trolleys spark and screech as they rumble down the split on Huntington Avenue. Fedoras bob past the Boston-Albany Railroad yard and darkened storefronts, clamber out of Model Ts, and hurry across the street after dinner at Sunning Restaurant. Everyone seems to converge at the main entrance of the Mechanics Building where they funnel in like sand through the narrow of an hourglass. Inside the sprawling Victorian façade is a great hall. There, beneath the balconies and sloping orchestra sections, a boxing ring looms in the light. The buzzing crowd glances downward as they squeeze between rows.

Tension is building around that empty ring.

Three preliminary bouts opened the card that cool spring evening. Local boys duked it out until bragging rights belonged to Somerville, East Boston, and South Boston. Chances are excellent that all six of them were white. William Ward wasn’t. He was as black as Newgate’s knocker, and about as ominous as the old English prison behind it. At the age that you were building forts in the woods or playing stick ball in the street, he was blindfolded, fighting and bleeding against a dozen other black boys in battles royal. As an adult, he lived to knock heads –black, white and every hue in the middle in undocumented contests down in Panama before punching his way through American ranks.

He was dangerous, this man who fought under the name “Kid Norfolk.” He trained at Grupp’s gym on 116th street in New York and was a superior counterpuncher with a piston jab. His back was a wall, his legs stout, and he understood leverage as well as future juggernauts Marciano, Frazier, and Tyson. Despite blasting his way up to the third rung of the light heavyweight ladder, insiders knew that Gene Tunney wasn’t going near him. Hall of Famers Billy Miske and Tiger Flowers took a risk and were defeated. Former white hopes Arthur Pelkey and Gunboat Smith joined them. Standing only 5’9, he was strong enough to whip Big Bill Tate three times. Tate was 6’6½ and 235 lbs. Only five months earlier, Kid Norfolk manhandled the world-famous Battling Siki before a crowd of 12,000 at Madison Square Garden. By fight’s end Siki was choking on his own blood.

Every eye in the house is on him as he emerges into view and walks down the aisle, deadly serious. He is aware of the crowd’s thoughts, their prejudices, but after putting his life on the line ninety-six times in similar venues, he has learned to detach from such incidentals and disconnect fear. Kid Norfolk stands in the middle of the ring bowing low to the crowd …then waits.

Two nights before, he stepped off the New York train at South Station. A large contingent of African Americans from the South End stood on the platform waiting for him. Harry Greb was on the same train. The middleweight champion probably saw the cheering crowd as he walked by carrying his own bags, unnoticed. He wouldn’t have cared. Greb feared no crowd, no color, and no man. Like Norfolk, he was unconcerned with weight divisions and found it amusing when he was afforded an opportunity to attack someone he stood eyes-to-chest with. Greb had already thrashed several heavyweights. Within two months he’d face a fighter who stood 6’6 and win every round.

These giant-killers had already crossed paths in August 1921 for “one of the fastest and most grueling” battles that Pittsburgh ever saw. Norfolk outweighed Greb by 17½ lbs and landed shots with such force that the iron-jawed champion was spinning on Queer Street in the opening minutes. A manager of a preliminary boxer who had come upstairs for the main event was astonished: “Never before have I seen two first-rate boxers rip and tear as they did,” he recounted to the newspapers, “how Greb ever survived that first round is beyond me.” Norfolk dropped Greb in the third “like a sack of oats” and both men were cut and bleeding as they came out for the last round. But that was the least of it. The victory may have cost Greb an eye.

In those days, boxing gloves resembled leather mittens; barely five ounces with movable thumbs. Bill Paxton identified the first Greb-Norfolk bout as the one where the Pittsburgh native first suffered an injury to his retina. Medical science hadn’t advanced enough to prevent eventual blindness, so Harry kept it a secret and fought on –ruthlessly, to offset his handicap. Since then he had fought forty times and defeated three of the greatest light heavyweights who ever lived, ruining the virgin records of Tommy Gibbons (39-0-1) and Gene Tunney (41-0-1), and defeating the great “Phantom of Philly” Tommy Loughran. The right field of his vision was swimming when he seized these victories. By the time he arrived in Boston for the rematch against Kid Norfolk, he was completely blind in his right eye.

No one else knew what Norfolk had done. But Greb did.

He walks toward the ring, steps up the stairs and slips through the ropes. A corner man stands behind him and takes his robe as the fighter scuffs the soles of his shoes in the resin box. Greb is wearing green trunks, his hair in well-oiled retreat from the mug below.

Had Harry stayed employed at Westinghouse and become an electrician he may have been passable as a Rudolph Valentino stand-in. Alas, as it was, old scar tissue swelled his eyebrows, his nose had more dents than a backyard jalopy, and the rare times that he smiled for a photograph he looked like he was about to eat your liver with fava beans. Valentino may have had the “look-at-me” physique of a movie star, but the cabled muscles up and down Greb’s arms, and a torso like ribbed plaster made it clear what he was –a fighter not a lover.

He was also a widower. This night marked thirteen months and one day since Greb’s wife Mildred died at home in Pittsburgh. He stood by her bedside, watching her go.

Referee Jack Sheehan stands between both boxers and eyes them nervously. Both Greb and Norfolk look right through Sheehan, one glaring at the other and the other glaring back. They know who the threat is in this ring and the bespectacled guy in the middle, in the way, ain’t it.

What follows is less a match and more a firestorm. The most feared light heavyweight in the world rushes out of his corner and forces the middleweight champion into the ropes. Greb clips him with a short hook to the chin. They clinch. Norfolk’s strategy becomes clear early: he’s shooting to the body to slow Greb’s demon speed. Two go south of the beltline. Regis Welsh of the Pittsburgh Post is ringside watching Greb retaliate “by clubbing and mauling [Norfolk] about.” In the second round, Greb is swarming all over his man from every angle and turns Norfolk around with lefts and rights to the body. Norfolk suddenly puts his head down and charges, ramming Greb headlong through the ropes and out of the ring. He lands sideways in the press section.

The crowd is beside itself as Greb climbs back into the ring and tears into Norfolk. In the third, Greb realizes that Norfolk is too strong and tries boxing at range, jabbing hard and landing the better shots, though he is still being forced backward. It’s an alley fight in the fourth round. State boxing officials in attendance don’t know what to do –both men are “wrestling, clubbing, charging, and butting” and the referee is losing control. The African-American’s mouth is running red as the fifth begins and the crowd is standing on chairs yelling “let ‘em fight the way they want!” Norfolk bangs the left side of Greb’s ribs while Greb attacks at full speed. Welsh watches Norfolk hook three hard shots to Greb’s groin though he carries on as if waiting for a chance to get even. Norfolk is now holding and hitting as Greb tries to wrest free and attack from the outside. Soon Greb is doing it too, grabbing Norfolk by the neck and punching the daylights out of him with his free hand.

The bell –which Welsh notes might have been salvaged from some old church belfry, clangs, and Norfolk throws a left hook anyway. Greb responds in kind before walking back to his corner, looking menacingly over his shoulder.

The old church bell clangs again. Norfolk drives the smaller man to the ropes when Greb suddenly spins off and lands a combination upstairs. Norfolk again tries to physically prevent Greb from getting outside, holding and whacking away while Greb mauls and maneuvers. The referee is now impotent in his attempts to prevent what has become a free-for-all. After the sixth round ends, Norfolk half-turns toward his corner and then unleashes a right hand. It’s a flagrant foul and the third such offense. Greb has had enough. Enraged, he whirls in with punches flying while Norfolk gets down low and rips shots to the body. A pop bottle flies in from a balcony and shatters at their feet as state officials and policemen jump into the ring to break the fighters up and escort them to their corners.

[IamInuit]

Cont...

The great hall shakes as thousands of feet stamp and the largest indoor crowd in Boston to date howls to the rafters. Greb is content. He knows he won at least four of the first six rounds. The referee seems to climb out from under the ring and hastily announces Norfolk as the winner “due to a foul by Greb” –then flees the scene. A wave of humanity surges forward demanding to know what happened. The boxing commissioner stands up, spreads his arms and states that it was Norfolk, not Greb who was “the real offender” and plans to override the verdict. Meanwhile, Norfolk takes his gloves off and moves toward Greb, who is still seated on his stool.

Greb gets up to meet him…

Greb got up to meet him. As rough as he was on anyone who got into the ring with him, Greb’s willingness to meet African-Americans on equal terms was unusual. Tommy Loughran and Gene Tunney were not so willing; both publically upheld the unofficial color-line. Jack Dempsey declined to risk the heavyweight title against a black man, despite his posturing about fighting Harry Wills when fans wondered aloud what the problem was. Jack Johnson himself ducked those contenders who shared his complexion when he was champion. Greb was an exception. The middleweight king was not only half-blind, he was color-blind. “All men,” he may have quipped, “bleed equal.”

The next morning’s dailies declared his clash with Kid Norfolk to be “the fastest and most curious contest ever in a Boston ring” and “one of the toughest, roughest, and ugliest battles ever staged here or elsewhere.” A breathless Regis Welsh called it the “grandest, roughest, go-as-you-please milling anyone has ever seen anywhere.” For Greb, it was nothing new. Greb turned professional in 1913, when boxing only wished it could crawl up from the cesspit into the red-light district. Hell-raisers like Battling Nelson and Ad Wolgast fought that year, after going forty rounds in perhaps the most vicious brawl of the 20th century. Leather mittens, no groin protectors, no mouth guards, twenty rounds –there were few cuties in the sport during those days.

Greb came out of that era, enduring hardships that would dissuade many boxers today from leaving the dressing room.

Earlier in his career, Greb was kneed to the genitals during a bout and had to be carried from the ring; he was once assaulted by a corner man, and bitten on the glove by a frustrated opponent who plum ran out of ways to cope with his windmill attack. Another opponent’s teeth missed his glove and clamped on his arm. A headcase entered the ring with a live boa constrictor draped around his neck and then proceeded to aim for his eyes with both thumbs. He fought with a broken bone in his right hand and a broken arm five fights later. In 1916 he fought the second round against Kid Graves after the radius in his left arm had been broken in half. He couldn’t continue, but won that round.

The year after he faced Kid Norfolk in Massachusetts, he fought not only his opponent but the referee as well. The referee was Marvin Hart –former world heavyweight champion. Greb got himself arrested and fined $100.

Trolling three divisions looking for fights over a thirteen year career, he got them, 300 of them. That’s 2,595 professional rounds –three times as many as Roberto Duran, and more than Julio Cesar Chavez, Oscar De La Hoya, Pernell Whitaker, Ray Leonard, Larry Holmes, and Lennox Lewis combined. The heads that sat on his mantle included approximately twelve world champions, nineteen title-holders, and thirteen inductees of the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

He was a formless fighter of the nightmarish strain. In his prime, opponents found themselves beset on all sides by what seemed to be three attackers at once. When punched at, he seemed to be nowhere, but when punching, he seemed to be everywhere. No film of Greb in action has been found, but there is the testimony of witnesses. John Van Swearingen, who died in 1983, worked as a second in Greb’s corner during the early 1920s. He never forgot the spectacle of Greb’s shots coming in so ferociously and “with such accelerated velocity that you could not see the punches being thrown.” All that anyone in the audience or in the corner could see “was the head of the opponent ratcheting backwards from three to five times incrementally.” Swearingen tells history that Greb was “absolutely the most lightning fast man with his fists that I, or anyone else I've ever talked with, has ever seen."

…
Forty minutes after Greb-Norfolk II, the great hall of Boston’s Mechanics Building is quiet. A janitor pushes a broom before crumpled programs, whistling “Tin Roof Blues.” Two officials stand murmuring at ringside, one of them running his fingers up under his hat. He shakes his head in disbelief at the night’s carnage and the other sniffs a response; his shoe grinding the end of a cigarette into the floor. They bid each other goodnight and depart.

An invisible hand switches off the overhead lights; a full moon peers through arched windows cutting the darkness and illuminating dust. Footsteps fade and then a door clangs shut, echoing off elegant walls. The empty boxing ring looms in the stillness… a pagan shrine splashed with blood.

The great and terrible Harry Greb would be dead within three years.

[scribbs]

Excellent thread, I will read the rest of this at my leisure. Springs Toledo is a absolute beauty when it comes to writing pieces like this, an good historian!

[Master]

That is a brilliant read and very well written. Loved Robinson even more and now respect Burley. Really sad story about Ezzard Charles and it was a class thing Rocky did as well as Joe Louis. They were real boxers who lived, breathed and ate boxing.

[beenKOed]

Great, glad I finally read it.