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.