THE 100 GREATEST BOXERS OF ALL TIME #4: HENRY ARMSTRONG
“HOMICIDE HANK,” “HAMMERIN’ HANK,” “HURRICANE HENRY”
150 WINS (101 BY KO), 21 LOSSES, 10 DRAWS
World Featherweight Champion 1937–1938
World Welterweight Champion 1938–1940
World Lightweight Champion 1938–1939
The Ring Fighter of the Year 1937
BWAA Fighter of the Year 1940
International Boxing Hall of Fame Inductee 1990
Three championships in three weight divisions at the same time. It’s the first thing anyone learns about Henry Armstrong. That feat, never accomplished before or since, is the cornerstone of his legacy, but it is far from its entirety. There is more to his dazzling, unprecedented career than holding the featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight championships simultaneously, as impressive as that badge of honor is.
“Hurricane Henry,” “Homicide Hank,” “Hammerin’ Hank,” “Perpetual Motion,” “The Black Blitzkrieg,” “The Human Buzz-Saw.” Sportswriters continually tried to outdo each other in inventing nicknames to describe the most ruthless pulverizer of champions and challengers the sport has known, but they all fell short of the truth.
Armstrong was beyond aggressive. Not since Harry Greb a decade earlier had the boxing world seen such a fearless and effective brawler, and it has not seen one since. Bobbing and weaving in a crouch, he bulldozed consistently forward, jutting his head into his opponent’s chest and unleashing hook after hook to the body and head. Unlike many inside sluggers who tire as the fight goes on, Henry’s work rate often seemed to improve round by round. In the era of fifteen round championship bouts, some of the greatest fighters to ever set foot in a boxing ring withered away in fights with this punishing phenom.
Born a sharecropper’s son in Jim Crow dominated Mississippi in 1912, Henry learned to fight in the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, where his family had moved when he was a child. A bright student, he planned to be a doctor or a lawyer, but the struggles of the Great Depression killed his hopes for college and sent him into a less respectable means of financial uplift. Starving and impoverished, Armstrong got off to a mediocre start to his pro career in 1931. But five years later, with financing from Hollywood big shots Al Jolson and George Raft and food in his belly, Henry transformed into a world beater. Put on a strenuous schedule against every possible opponent, he fought as often as five times a month, even during his time as champion.
Between January 1937 and May 1939, Armstrong went undefeated in 46 fights. In that time, he strung together 27 consecutive knockout wins between January 1937 and February 1938, one of the longest knockout streaks in the sport’s history. It was also the time in which he knocked out tough Petey Sarron for the featherweight title (the only knockout loss of Sarron’s 135-fight career), jumped up two weight classes to send living legend Barney Ross into retirement and take the welterweight title, and wrested the lightweight crown from the hard head of Lou Ambers in a thriller. Sarron, Ross, and Ambers were all future Hall of Famers.
The Ross and Ambers fights in particular were historic, not just because of Henry’s impressive accomplishments against naturally bigger men, but because each was an epic battle. Ross — at the time considered by many to be the best fighter in the world — took such hellacious punishment in his fight with “Homicide Hank” that he never set foot in a prize ring again.
Both Ambers fights were bitterly contested, foul-filled wars. The first was named one of the dozen greatest title bouts in history by The Ring in 1996. To keep the fight from being stopped, Henry swallowed his own blood for multiple rounds, yet wound up victorious. In the equally brutal 1939 rematch, he lost a widely derided decision thanks to the overzealous referee Arthur Donovan taking away rounds for questionable low blows.
Henry was the fourth man ever to win championships in three divisions, and the first (and last) to hold them all at once. This at a time when there was only one recognized champion per weight class, and only eight classes in the sport, versus the four recognized belts across sixteen divisions that exist now. His one-man blitzkrieg through the weight classes so shocked the boxing establishment that a call was made for a rule to prevent such achievement again, as having a black man as the world champion in nearly half the sport’s divisions was seen as bad for business and not at all what mainstream America wanted.
On March 1, 1940, he battled crushing puncher Ceferino Garcia in a bid to take a fourth crown at middleweight in the Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles, but had to settle for a disputed draw. Had the decision gone his way, he would have won half of the sport’s existing lineal titles.
Armstrong went on to defend the welterweight championship sixteen consecutive times, which still stands as the division record — and he did it in just two years’ time!
Armstrong’s busy fight schedule and punishing style took its toll and shortened his prime. By the end of 1940, he had lost all his titles, yet he remained a ranked top ten contender as late as 1945 before retiring that year after fourteen years as a pro. Seventy-eight years later, even with the plethora of belts available, no other man has held three championships in three weight divisions at once.
Henry Armstrong’s Record vs. Hall of Famers & lineal world champs:
11/4/1934 — L 10 — Baby Arizmendi
1/1/1935 — L 12 — Baby Arizmendi
11/27/1935 — W 10 — Midget Wolgast
8/4/1936 — W 10 — Baby Arizmendi
5/4/1937 — W (TKO) 4 — Frankie Klick
7/27/1937 — W (KO) 4 — Benny Bass
10/29/1937 — W (KO) 6 — Petey Sarron
2/1/1938 — W (KO) 3 — Chalky Wright
3/15/1938 — W 10 — Baby Arizmendi
5/31/1938 — W 15 — Barney Ross
8/17/1938 — W 15 — Lou Ambers
11/25/1938 — W 15 — Ceferino Garcia
1/10/1939 — W 10 — Baby Arizmendi
8/22/1939 — L 15 — Lou Ambers
1/24/1940 — W (TKO) 9 — Pedro Montanez
3/1/1940 — D 10 — Ceferino Garcia
7/17/1940 — W (TKO) 6 — Lew Jenkins
10/4/1940 — L 15 — Fritzie Zivic
1/17/1941 — L (TKO) 12 — Fritzie Zivic
10/26/1942 — W 10 — Fritzie Zivic
12/4/1942 — W (TKO) 8 — Lew Jenkins
6/11/1943 — W 10 — Sammy Angott
3/8/1943 — W (TKO) 2 — Tippy Larkin
4/2/1943 — L 10 — Beau Jack
8/27/1943 — L 10 — Ray Robinson
