Yes good valid points here.. With the gloves - and the hand wrapping - you can throw full power to the head where you would mash hands doing that bare knuckled.. all is to protect the hitter at the expense of the fighter that is hit, but then boxing today is a sport and must cater for the spectators who would not want to stand around for hours for their satisfactory climax. Gloves make boxing perilous now and but then bare knuckle is still around plenty and it is brutal - you can surely not claim it as a safr alternative.. an alternative yes and but a SAFER alternative??? I do not believe that?? Good article though
thx for posting Jx
That is all to make your hands do what they were never designed to do.
Broughton. He killed an opponent in what was effectively a gladitorial match. He was a "Stage Gladiator" and fought Singlestick, Backsword, Boxing, etc. When he killed a man in a Boxing match, he wrote the first English boxing rules.
They were happy to do so during the Broughton era and the London Prize Ring era.
Feh. This is wrong. Mendoza's famous (and recorded) fight with Humprheys began with him knocking Humphreys down several time, first strike, by punching him in the face.
Sorry, friend, but that's just plain wrong. There were plenty of what they would sometime call the "rounding blow." In later periods (London Prize Ring era) they had great debates on the supremacy of the the Straight punches over "the Swing." Mendoza's Lessons describes "round blows" to both the body and the head. Further, footwork was pretty darn sophisticated, as was to be expected from people who didn't want to be punched in the head or the solar plexus ("the mark"). There's some indication that it was, early on, related to fencing footwork. Not modern fencing, historic fencing where getting "hit" meant getting stabbed or having bits of you lopped off. Remember that guy Broughton I mentioned above? He was a broadsword fencer (think a basket hilted, singled handed sword with two edges). The best evidence seems to indicate that the footwork had a common source but evolved separately.
Nope. Just not so. No one wants to get punched in the face, even if it "only" means a smashed up nose, cut up brows, and missing teeth, which did happen. IMS, it was James Figg who got "choppered" to the face and eyebrows so bad (late in his carrer) that that both eyes swelled shut and he elected to box effectively blind. Head movement was pretty darn important and you can see it in lots of the old manuals. Donnally's manual is probably one of the better showing body evasions and head movement, but my favorite is Defensive Exersizes, which shows, in the Simpler Method of Boxing (it teaches two different methods), a boxer fading back and directing the opponent's fist into his elbow.
Sorta. In the same way that MMA Combinations look like they came from another planet. Because the range tended to be further out. Grappling and throws were legal (and the fans loved 'em!). When you're at a range where you have to step or shuffle forward to make a hit you're not going to see Jab-Jab-Cross because, wait for it, it doesn't work at that range. And there's also the possibility that your opponent might say, "screw this" after eating a jab and clinch, then chuck you with a hip throw and "accidentally" land on top of you.
Feh. The danger of modern boxing is brain trauma.
He's a good guy. Nice fella.
When gloves ("Mufflers" or "Mittens") were first introduced to Boxing, it was for two purposes, first for "safer" (less obviously injurious) boxing among amateurs and second, for "safer" training for professionals who were then expected to fight bare knuckle. However, this theory wasn't universally accepted by all professionals, some of whom scoffed at the idea, one famously stating that he didn't see any point to doing the hand conditioning he'd done only to cover his fists with pillows; the idea being to hurt the other guy.
Actually, they kept quite a bit of good records. I republished one book which documented hundreds of fight records. Many of them were very interesting included fights by women against women. Further, how is off the books fights then any different from now? There are still plenty of off-the-books fights.
