Tilting at the Pittsburgh Windmill: 100th Anniversary of Harry Greb vs Mickey Walker

In 1984, Bert Sugar ranked the Irishman from Elizabeth, NJ, as the #7 greatest fighter of all time – above Muhammad Ali.

How do you get ranked so highly by the experts? With a resume that includes dozens – yes, DOZENS – of top ten opponents, that’s how.

Walker’s resume includes tilts at Lou Brouillard, Max Schmeling, Jack Sharkey, Young Corbett III, Lou Bogash, and Tommy Loughran. And wins over Maxie Rosenbloom, Jack Britton, Mike McTigue, Johnny Risko, Ace Hudkins, KO Christener, Tommy Milligan, Tiger Flowers, Paulino Uzcudun, Lew Tendler, Bearcat Wright, and plenty of others. In the ring, just as he was in the crib, Mickey Walker was “too stubborn to quit.”

One hundred years ago, on July 2, 1925, the Toy Bulldog faced his toughest opponent when he took on the reigning middleweight champion Harry Greb (109-9-3, 50 KOs).

By 1925, Greb was already something of a pugilistic legend with a record approaching 300 fights. He was willing to fight everybody, and this included Black fighters, at a time when many white fighters drew the “color line.” It also included a record 16 future Hall of Famers. Greb fought often, too, preferring to maintain his conditioning through ring work instead of road work. His fighting style, a frenetic offensive onslaught, earned him a nickname bestowed by sportswriter Damon Runyon: the Pittsburgh Windmill.

Of his hundreds of wins, one stood distinguished above the rest – his 1922 defeat of Gene Tunney, then the American light heavyweight champion. That win only got better as the years progressed. Tunney moved up to heavyweight, where he snatched the crown from Jack Dempsey and defeated him in the rematch. Greb was the only man to ever serve the Fighting Marine a loss.

Nat Fleischer’s ATG list, which placed Walker at #7, had Harry Greb at #3.

The fight was set for June 19, to be held at the Polo Grounds in New York. Organized by promoter Humbert J. Fugazy, the card included fights between middleweights Dave Shade and Jimmy Slattery and heavyweights Harry Wills and Charley Weinert. Proceeds from the night were earmarked for charity, the Italian Hospital Fund.

Promoter Fugazy was a character himself. As a young man, he’d been a prizefighter back when the sport was illegal. He fought as a lightweight under the name “Jack Lee” in clandestine rings across New York City and was once disqualified for biting an opponent. After retiring from the ring upon a physician’s advice, he found success in banking, yet was still drawn to the bright lights of the squared circle. With his fighting career long over, he now dreamt of becoming the next Tex Rickard. Pitting the reigning welterweight king against the reigning middleweight king – for charity, no less – would go a long way towards making the dream a reality.

In 1925, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey was on an extended layoff, and his absence left a vacuum at the top of the sport. Greb-Walker was just the sort of fight to fill that vacuum. Fans, bettors, and journalists discussed, squabbled, and tergiversated over the relative attributes of the two fighters. Many sportswriters believed Greb, then 31 (though often cited as only 29), may have already passed his peak. The combination of his near-constant appearances in the ring and his hard-living outside of it wore the champion down, they thought. Mickey Walker, on the other hand, was just entering his prime.

At 24, Walker was full of confidence, vigor, and ambition. Greb was known for throwing quantity but not necessarily quality, while Walker was earning a reputation as a strong-armed body puncher. People compared Walker’s style to Dempsey’s. Only six months prior, he had taken the durable light heavyweight titleholder Mike McTigue the distance, winning a newspaper decision after twelve bruising rounds.

Challenging a fighter of Greb’s caliber – and moving up in weight to do it – signaled that Walker was either very foolhardy or very game. Most observers were inclined to the latter opinion.

It didn’t help Greb’s case that in the days and weeks leading up to the fight, he seemed unfocused. According to the newspapers, he lived by “the notion that if life is worth living at all, it is worth living riotously and robustly.” Never one for austere living or Spartan training camps, Greb was “the perpetual midnight thrill in the white light districts of the land.” (“White light districts” being an upscale version of red-light districts.)  On June 2, Greb, along with a few friends, was stopped by Pittsburgh police. He fled the scene and jumped into a nearby taxi. Pursued by the officer, Greb told the driver to hit the gas. As the taxi pulled away, the officer fired four shots in their direction, a serious enough warning to stop the attempted escape.

Greb was also known to “train by fighting.” With the fight set for June 19, Greb fought three times in one week – on May 29, June 1, and June 5. Note that the police shooting incident also took place that same hectic week, in between fights.

When he finally relocated to New York to prepare for the fight, Greb reportedly moved into a hotel “close to the cabarets of the town.” However, the fight had to be postponed when Walker found that a toe on his right foot had become infected, likely due to an ingrown nail. This may have been Greb’s lucky break; the Pittsburgh Wildcat was gifted two weeks of unexpected rest.

The fight was rescheduled for July 2, a Thursday evening. Rain threatened to push back the fight again, but the weather held, and upwards of 65,000 people descended upon the Polo Grounds in NYC to witness Mickey Walker and Harry Greb’s big fight. The energy in the stands was fever-pitched. Around the country, too, people were eager for the fight. Newspapers advertised that they would be using megaphones to call out telegraph readings of the ring action to the streetside crowds.

Some of the top sports writers in the country were ringside, including Westbrook Pegler, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, and even W. C. Vreeland, the breathless horseracing correspondent. Pegler and Runyon picked Walker to win, with Runyon stipulating that even with a loss, Greb “will rank in pugilistic history as one of the greatest fighters of this or any other era.” Grantland Rice picked Greb, with the caveat that much depended on the older fighter’s stamina.

The referee for the night was Eddie Purdy. He had previous experience with both fighters, and those experiences had not been the most inspiring. He officiated a 1923 match with Walker in which both fighters were chastised afterwards by the state commission for “unsatisfactory” performances. Purdy also officiated several matches with Greb, including the Pittsburgh fighter’s 1924 bout with Jimmy Slattery. Purdy was none too taken with Greb’s roughhouse behavior in the ring. Before overseeing his second Greb bout, Purdy pulled Greb aside and administered a three-minute disquisition on fouling.

On the day, Greb weighed in at 159 lbs., Walker at 152. Greb was seven years older than Walker and seven pounds heavier. Despite the minor controversies and the uncertainty around Greb’s conditioning, he entered the Polo Grounds as a 7 to 5 favorite over his younger opponent. “Too fast, too active, too resourceful, and too great a ring general” was the conclusion of more than one newspaper.

Two kayos earlier in the card meant Greb and Walker were rushed in their preparations. At 8:25, ring announcer Joe Humphrey told the restless capacity crowd that Walker and Greb would begin in ten minutes. Walker was preparing without his manager, Jack Kearns, who also oversaw another tough guy, Jack Dempsey. A row with the New York Commission left Kearns banned from the Polo Grounds, even as a spectator. True to Humphrey’s word, Walker crossed the ropes at 8:35. He wore purple trunks. Greb walked out a minute later, wearing green. In Greb’s corner was his manager, Red Mason. Without Kearns, Walker had Teddy Hayes and Joe Blockson, with one of Kearns’ other fighters, a light heavyweight named Ernie Owens, carrying the bucket.

As the summer sun dipped below the western horizon, Greb and Walker lit up the Polo Grounds’ ring. The two men faced each other for 15 brutal rounds. The Associated Press (AP) called it “one of the fiercest and most thrilling fights since Dempsey and Firpo fought their thrilling bout at this same park two years ago.”

Harry Greb won by unanimous decision that evening, but he found himself extended by a rough-and-ready Walker. The young Irishman from Elizabeth was not put off by Greb’s sometimes dirty tactics and was more than happy to stand toe-to-toe and slug. “It was a meeting of modern cavemen armed with five-ounce gloves,” the AP continued. “They battered each other back and forth across the ring and out of it.”

Although no footage of the fight is known to exist – as is, unfortunately, true of all of Greb’s fights – what we have are contemporaneous ringside descriptions and round-by-round reports published in the newspapers.

In preparing this summary, I consulted eight round-by-round newspaper descriptions. They are fascinating, thoroughly human documents: They are vivid, creative, and sincere. They are also sometimes confusing, always subjective, and occasionally contradictory.

Eyewitness reports warrant a healthy skepticism, and the natural human tendency to error was only exacerbated by the furious pace maintained by the two combatants. More than one reporter conceded that the punches were coming too fast and too regularly to be perceived, let alone recorded. “It was impossible to count the punches as the round ended,” wrote one at the close of the second, “and the crowd was on its feet shrieking like maniacs.”

What follows is my own interpretation, however fallible. It represents my best attempt to convey the broad consensus based solely on the descriptions provided by those who were there reporting at ringside a century ago.

At the opening bell, the younger, smaller Walker rushed at Greb. A pair of hooks to the jaw moved the bigger man into the ropes. Walker was firing his left “like a machine gun.” Greb took a beating but succeeded in turning his man with two right hooks of his own. In-fighting was wild in the center of the ring. Greb was landing uppercuts while Walker responded furiously with left hooks to the body. It was nonstop action from bell to bell, with Walker generally believed to have won the round.

After the impressive opening round, both men came charging into the second, determined to redouble their efforts. Greb rushed at Walker, who landed a pair of beautiful shots to Greb’s midsection but was rocked by Greb’s return fire. A left hook to the head left the young Irishman slumped. Then Greb did something tactically unexpected.

The Windmill stopped spinning, or at least he slowed down. He chose to stand toe-to-toe with Walker, trading heavy blows and slugging away instead of moving and dancing around the ring. Greb was known for the quantity of his punches, not their intensity, but here was proof that the Pittsburgh native possessed some of that hometown steel. He staggered Walker, who rose quickly enough that Referee Purdy did not initiate a count. The Pittsburgh Post declared this round “the greatest slugging match ever staged” and that they fought “like demons” right until the bell.

They carried this pace into the third, but the exertion was wearing on both. Greb missed with a jab, and after a clinch, Walker missed with a wild left as well. In close, they traded shivering blows to the kidneys. Walker continued working the body, and when his leather began to land a little low, the Pittsburgh Wildcat responded sharply with a chopping blow to Walker’s left ear.

By the fourth, the AP observed that “the maddening pace was slackening.” Greb continued fighting flat-footed and slugging, determined to assert his muscular dominance and remind the welterweight Bulldog that he was still, indeed, merely a Toy. Walker was reddening his foe’s trunk with body blows when Greb fired a stinging clout to his chin, staggering Walker. He launched a right in return beneath Greb’s heart, but Walker was weakened, and Greb was seen laughing when Walker tried to clinch. Greb controlled the ring, punching from a distance at will. “He [Greb] varied this sort of attack by holding his left arm out straight,” wrote W. C Vreeland, “and then planting his right like a matador stabs a bull. It wasn’t a punch. It was a thrust.” By the end of the round, both men were bleeding, Walker from the mouth and Greb from under the left eye.

Newspapers had the contest fairly evenly scored by the end of the fourth round. But the tide was turning, and it turned in Greb’s favor. The middle rounds belonged to him, and it was then he returned to his frenetic, milling style. It was physical and assertive, and Walker found himself overwhelmed. Greb would shove him, push him, turn him, spin him – then launch light, slapping punches, often as many as five or six in rapid succession, from these sudden, cattywampus angles. “He could hit from impossible angles,” Walker later recalled. “I still don’t know how he did it, but he hit me while his hands faced in the opposite direction.”

In the sixth round, “Greb was giving Walker a boxing lesson,” wrote one ringside observer, “catching his punches, blocking them and stepping away from them.” In the seventh, Greb was walking his opponent back, pushing him into the ropes. In the back half of the round, Greb managed to push Walker halfway out of the ring, between the top two ropes. But Greb wasn’t done with Walker just yet. Some reports claim Greb pulled him back in; one even states they shook hands afterward.

Just before the bell, the fighters clinched into a knot and, while twisting, fell to the floor. The third man in the ring, referee Eddie Purdy, moved in to separate them but became tangled himself, and Purdy fell to the canvas. It was the referee who actually got the worst of the tumble. Purdy had wrenched his knee and had to be helped up. The ringside physician offered services but was waved off by Purdy, who continued to referee the bout while limping and holding the ropes for support.

Between rounds, the cornermen were dousing their warriors with water in an effort to wash away the blood and exhaustion from their faces. The syndicated sportswriter known as Fair Play wrote that when Walker absorbed a particularly forceful blow, the water “spattered out as it does from a setter dog’s back when he shakes himself after a plunge.”

Few had gone into the fight expecting a kayo from Greb. The knockout had never been his specialty, especially against someone as game as Walker. W. C. Vreeland, one of the top horseracing writers, offered the observation that for Greb, the kayo stood not for “knock out” but for “knock on.”

“Time without number,” he wrote, “Greb grabbed him by the shoulder, gave him a twist, and then hit him a blow that was a combination of grapevine, a loop-the-loop, and nosedive.”

Greb’s ring generalship allowed him to control the distance and set the pace throughout the middle rounds. At the end of the eighth, Walker was so flustered he returned to the wrong corner at the bell. Still, he was a game and dangerous opponent, and a few papers declared rounds eight and nine even. Although ahead on points, Greb was not out of the woods yet.

Walker rallied during the eleventh, catching an extraordinary second wind that allowed him to throw punch for punch with Greb. Walker caught his man on the jaw with a vicious right. Greb was staggered by the unexpected blow. They clinched, and while separating the two fighters, Referee Purdy slipped and fell again. Greb used the opportunity to foul Walker with impunity and survived the round.

In the twelfth, encouraged by his success in the previous round, Walker staged a late-round comeback. He bore into his man with every iron ounce of strength he could muster. A short left hook to the jaw was followed by a wicked left to the body, “the sound of which could be heard all over the park.” It was Greb now who was on the defensive, and Walker began out-landing him for the first time in recent memory. Greb re-adjusted, forgoing his pell-mell slapstick offense and returning to the flat-footed, power-punching attack that had worked early in the fight. The two traded furious blows. A long right from Walker staggered Greb, who was forced to hold on. Greb returned fire, staggering Walker with a right hook to the head.

If the crowd had thought they were seeing a good fight, they now understood they were witnessing a great one.

Most of the papers gave Walker the twelfth round, but his second wind was spent by the thirteenth. Greb’s superhuman stamina allowed him to maintain a faster pace – landing first and avoiding retaliation. Walker stood up through the onslaught but returned to his corner at the bell with his face puffed and bleeding.

At the start of the fourteenth round, Walker’s corner knew a decision on points was unlikely. They implored him to “take the fight away” from Greb, crying out, “You must!” as Walker stood up from his stool. In the center of the ring, the two traded blows early. Walker came in for a one-two but missed, and Greb made him pay with a stinging right hook to the jaw. Walker was pushed back to the ropes, where Greb unloaded upon him. The Wildcat was dominant and overpowering. Walker was helpless, out on his feet. The audience sensed the end was near. Greb couldn’t miss, but Walker wouldn’t be put down. “Gamely Walker fought on badly battered but taking everything Greb could throw and standing upright under the tremendous punishment,” wrote one reporter, astonished at Walker’s durability. The shocking violence of the round “actually made some of the men at ringside shut their eyes on the spectacle,” noted Westbrook Pegler. Only the bell saved a nearly senseless Walker from further punishment.

A minute’s rest was all Walker needed, however, and he returned for the fifteenth and final stanza. All 65,000 in attendance were up on their feet. The fight had gone from good to great to legendary before their eyes.

The two men touched gloves at the sound of the bell. Walker appeared to have his senses back, and the two began trading blows. A right from Greb sent Walker reeling back into the ropes. Things looked bleak for the boy from Elizabeth. He caught a break, however, when he caught Greb momentarily off balance, and Walker began “a furious rally that brought the crowd to its feet.”  A left to the jaw staggered Greb. He grabbed hold of Walker and, regaining his balance, let fly hooks to the face that gashed the Irishman under the eyes. The two traded blows as Walker’s blood flowed freely from the cuts. “The two fighters could hardly stand up. They were both groggy and swinging.” They fought this way, like untutored brutes slashing back and forth from pillar to post, until the final bell sounded its merciful ring.

After “fifteen wild rounds of plugging, clinching and dock-side roughing,” the victory went to Greb on a points win. Brave though Walker had been, the decision was not controversial, as Damon Runyon noted. “There was little demonstration when Joe Humphreys, the veteran announcer, raised Greb’s soaked glove.”

This was a very good win for Harry Greb, all the more considerable because it served as a retort to those sportswriters who had written about Greb as a fighter in decline. The win over young Mickey Walker not only proved his vitality, but he had also demonstrated his ability to adjust in the ring and make the necessary alterations to his signature style in order to secure the victory.

Like all good fights, this one spawned a chattering brood of rumors, gossip, and post-fight controversy. Just how much fouling Greb committed was always going to be a topic of conversation. One particular claim, that Greb thumbed Walker’s eye in the fourteenth, though not recorded in the round-by-round newspaper descriptions, has always persisted. Another controversy stems from the fourteenth round. The fight had been broadcast on the radio, still a new phenomenon, and more than one person claimed to hear a voice, presumably Walker’s, begging to be “carried” through the round.

Nat Fleischer recounted a tale in which Greb, seeking to influence the betting odds, made appearances at the Broadway bars the night before the bout. There, he made a raucous and drunken spectacle of himself, with drinks in hand and women on his arm. Seeing this, members of the fancy thought they had the inside dope on the contest. But the women were paid actresses, and the “champagne” was only ginger ale. Greb reportedly laid down a wad of cash on himself and made a bundle.

The most persistent yet least likely story is that Greb and Walker, out on the town that evening after the big fight, ran into each other and got into a street fight. Tantalizing to believe but impossible to verify, these kinds of stories are vital to the spirit of boxing, especially as it existed in the Roaring 20s.

After a grueling battle like Greb-Walker, most fighters would have enjoyed a little R & R. Not Harry Greb. He was back in the ring just two weeks later and facing another up-and-coming star – Maxie Rosenbloom.

Although the newspapermen couldn’t have known it, Greb’s career was indeed nearly over. He retired just over a year later. Unbeknownst to anyone except those closest to him, Greb had gone blind in one eye. Likely due to injuries suffered in the ring, Greb’s right eye had been deteriorating for years. He had resorted to memorizing eye charts to fool the medical boards that sanctioned his fights. His win over Mickey Walker had been achieved with the use of only one eye. After his retirement in 1926, he had the bad eye replaced with a glass one.

That wasn’t the only work he needed done. A combination of punches and car accidents had left his nose a shapeless lump of scar tissue and unconnected cartilage. A month after the eye replacement, he went in for work on his nose. However, Greb suffered complications with the anesthesia. The champion never regained consciousness. He died on October 22, 1926, at the age of 32.

In the year since their fight, Walker and Greb had struck up a sincere and persistent friendship. “One of the few times I ever cried in my life,” Walker wrote later, “was when he [Greb] died.” Former foe Gene Tunney served as one of Greb’s pallbearers.

One hundred years after their incredible cross-weight contest, and on the eve of matches like Taylor-Serrano III and Canelo-Crawford, it seems natural to take stock of the sport and the century that separates us. We are on the bumpy end of the road, to be sure.

Many view the 1920s, and bouts like this one in particular, as the Golden Age of boxing. That would place us, I suppose, in something like a Bronze Age by comparison. But that’s hardly the lesson to take from it all. Despite our conjecture and armchair theorizing, boxing always returns us to the concrete fact of two fighters sharing one ring. It is a sport that endures because it requires a combination of muscle, brains, and, most of all, heart. Its lesson is a powerful antidote to cynicism.

It is an affirmation from out of the darkness: If you fight, you are not alone.

And that little son et lumière of truth, when we have the courage enough to hold it, courage enough to admit that we are vulnerable and pierced by the sting of the world, is a lesson worth learning, wherever and whenever we find it.