298 fights, from welterweight to heavyweight ...they don’t make ’em like Harry Greb anymore

HARRY GREB once fought 45 times in a year – 1919 – and he missed the first two weeks of January and clocked off three days before Christmas.

The man was a machine. He began at light-welterweight – 140lb – and ended it beating heavyweights. Weight was just a number. Height, 5ft 8in, a mere detail to him.

He inflicted the only career defeat on the great Gene Tunney, America’s light-heavyweight champion at the time, and beat heavyweight Willie Meehan in the same year that Meehan had defeated Jack Dempsey.

Greb didn’t just beat

Tunney (above, right), he worked him over, breaking his nose in the opening round and leaving him a bloody mess after 15 in a bout judged 1922 Ring Magazine fight of the year.

Nine months later, after squeezing a dozen fights in between, Greb met Tunney a second time at Madison Square Garden and inflicted the same damage, though Tunney got the decision this time.

They would meet five times in all, Tunney winning three, though

Greb was only a year from retirement and a fading force the last time they faced off in 1925. No discussion about boxing all-time can take place without mention of Greb.

He wasn’t a puncher. He was relentless, as his moniker, the Pittsburgh Windmill, suggests.

And for the last five years of his career he fought with limited vision in his right eye, courtesy of a detached retina. I first learned about Greb from old copies of Ring

Magazine and my dad’s boxing books that were dotted about the house.

I was an insatiable reader about boxing as a kid, helped by the fact we lived next door to Clones library.

Greb fought during a period when boxing was the dominant sport in America and heavyweight champion, Dempsey, the most famous person on earth. Fighters such as Greb (left, in a publicity sparring shot in 1925) oozed glamour and status, especially in the industrial east.

Pittsburgh was at the heart of the fight scene, and Greb one of its great heroes with his bulldozing, bring-itgreats on style. He was just a ball of excitement, non-stop aggression and took on allcomers. Heavyweight contenders Gunboat Smith, Billy Miske and Bill Brennan were also among his victims.

It is just incredible that he should rack up a total of 298 bouts and box at the end of his career blind in one eye.

I was done at the age of 28 after 35 bouts.

What’s more he left us at just 32, dying in hospital following an operation on his nose and respiratory tract.

When they say they don’t make ’em like that anymore, they are talking about Harry Greb.