Harold "Wheezy" Brown

From The Great Outdoor Fight

Full Professor of Mathematics at the University of Northern New York and author of the exhaustive (some would say turgid) The Great Outdoor Fight: Compiled Statistics. This huge undertaking is the definitive collection of fight statistics, elimination information and statistical analysis of the Fight throughout its history. A project that goes well beyond ambitious and straight into ridiculous, Brown's initial publication of the first twenty three volumes (covering 1851-1983) was published in 1987 by Oxford University Press's United States branch. Since then, Brown has released twenty-four through thirty (covering the Fight up through 1995, published in 1999), and The Great Outdoor Fight: Revised and Reconciled Statistics and Annotations 1851-1995 (published 2004), an eleven volume series of annotations, elaborations and corrections revising the thirty volumes of Compiled Statistics.

Since 2004, Vance Eggbert and Wilton Rowley have been actively lobbying Oxford University Press to release a DVD-ROM edition of both Compiled Statistics and Revised and Reconciled Statistics and Annotations, arguing that a searchable database would be an invaluable tool (not to mention vastly easier to work with than the unrelenting pages of numbers and footnotes Brown has become famous for). Brown has been resistant to date, so Eggbert and Rowley have been lobbying UNNY to pressure Brown.

In the meantime, the prodigious cost of the work (purchasing all forty-one current volumes costs in excess of $3,800) means that to date, only seventy complete copies have been purchased. Of those, one is now housed in the Library of Congress, one is housed in the Great Outdoor Fight Museum, seven are owned by Fight Studies researchers with expense accounts, and the remaining sixty-one copies are in various college and university reference libraries.

Brown is currently working on compiling statistics from 1996 until 2004. This is expected to take until 2008 and is estimated to be a thirteen volume addition to Compiled Statistics. When asked if this truly is a productive research project for a university professor, UNNY officials respond "he has tenure. Our hands are tied."

Brown is an Associate Curator at the Great Outdoor Fight Museum, not in residence.