Lawrence Samuel "Larry" Gains (12 December 1900 – 26 July 1983) was a Black Canadian heavyweight boxer who was champion of Canada and the British Empire.

One of the top heavyweights of his era, he was denied the opportunity to become World Champion due to the bar on black boxers competing for the title.

[6][7] Many of his early fights were in France (where he befriended Morley Callahan and Ernest Hemingway, who at the time were working as newspaper reporters) and Germany, where he beat Max Schmeling in 1925.

[10] Noted primarily as a slick boxer, he KO'd Phil Scott in front of 30,000 spectators at Leicester Tigers' Welford Road ground in 1931, taking the British Empire title, although the colour bar was still in place.

[11] The colour bar was lifted in 1932, and Gains cemented his hold on the title with a victory over white South African Donald McCorkindale at the Royal Albert Hall,[9] the fight ending in an unpopular points decision for Gains, with his trainer Jack Goodwin collapsing and dying during the fight.

[9][17] He lost the British Empire title in 1934 to Len Harvey, and failed to regain it later that year, defeated by Jack Petersen in front of a crowd of 64,000 at White City.

This history traces the advent and demise of the Championship, the stories of the talented professional athletes who won it, and the demarcation of the color line both in and out of the ring.

[33] The amateur boxing HABC trophy that Gains won in March 1922 was restored in 2021 on BBC1 programme The Repair Shop by silversmith Brenton West.

On 1 November 2023, the Government of Canada commemorates the national historic significance of Larry Gains (1900–1983)[34] at a special plaque unveiling ceremony at the Cabbagetown Boxing Club in Toronto, Ontario.

[35] On December 12th 2024, a historic blue plaque was unveiled at the Shoeburyness Hotel in Essex to honour Larry Gains on what would have been his 124th birth anniversary.