The God of War

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.

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.


***************
HARRY GREB’S SCORECARD
-25 points-
Experience: 25

-15 points-                               
Ring Generalship: 14
Longevity: 15
Dominance: 13

-10 points-
Durability: 10
P/LO: 10
Intangibles: 10

TOTAL: 97
…..
The photograph of Harry and Mildred Greb was taken after Greb’s defeat of Tommy Gibbons at Madison Square Garden on March 13th 1922. It appears with permission from Antiquities of the Prize Ring.

The author would like to acknowledge Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s by Peter Benson and The Pussycat of Prizefighting: Tiger Flowers and the Politics of Black Celebrity by Andrew M. Kaye. I am indebted to the generosity of Bill Paxton, author of the landmark biography The Fearless Harry Greb. His website, www.harrygreb.com is also a great font of information. Thanks also to the Boston Public Library Microfilm Department and the Widener Library of Harvard University. Special thanks to William H. Hooke.

The Gods of War series has fingerprints on it that deserve to be acknowledged. These include but are not limited to boxing historians Danny Trihas, Matt McGrain, and Dan Workman. Boxrec.com was an excellent resource for this series.

Without Editor Michael Woods' patience and support, this series would not have been possible.

The graphic enhancements for The Gods of War are the work of Jason McMann of Plymouth, MA. He can be contacted at jasonmcmann@comcast.net.

Springs Toledo can be contacted at scalinatella@hotmail.com.