A Tragic Ending at 32 for a Legendary Brawler

He exists today only in yellowed scrapbooks, old boxing books and in barrooms where old-timers gather to talk about great fighters.

He was from Pittsburgh, and when Harry Greb, 32, died suddenly 73 years ago today, sports followers of an entire city mourned.

He was born Edward Henry Berg and became a tough street kid. When he became a fighter, he reversed Berg to Greb and took the first name of a deceased older brother, Harry.

His style was once described by 1920s fight writer W.O. McGeehan, who called it “The Manly Art of Modified Murder.”

With the artful use of glove laces, low blows, tripping and general mauling, Greb never let the rules stand in the way of victory. And no one, old-timers said, was better at thumbing an opponent than Harry Greb.

He earned more than $1 million in his career, spent mostly on booze, women, suits and new cars.

He was a middleweight for most of his career, but his most famous fight was a 15-round victory over Gene Tunney for the vacant American light- heavyweight championship in 1922--four years before Tunney beat Jack Dempsey for the world heavyweight crown. But the Greb loss was Tunney’s only defeat.

And he fought often. Sometimes three times a week. He had 294 fights in 13 years--44 in 1919 alone. He lost only eight times.

On Oct. 22, 1926, having told friends he was about to quit boxing, he had surgery on his nose in Atlantic City, N.J., to repair a broken bone suffered in an auto accident and also for cosmetic purposes.

Afterward, he began hemorrhaging, fell into a coma and died of a heart attack. An autopsy revealed Greb had been blind in one eye, probably for years.

Also on this date: In 1975, Joe Morgan’s two-out single in the ninth scored Ken Griffey and the Cincinnati Reds beat Boston, 4-3, to win their first World Series since 1940. . . . In 1975, the World Football League suspended operations with eight weeks remaining in its second season and disbanded.