Bare Knuckle Boxing - The Gentlemans Sport
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We often hear calls for a ban on boxing due to the number of tragic incidents that occur in the ring. The list of victims is testament to the very real risks of permanent brain damage and even death.
Has boxing always been this dangerous? The answer is arguably no.
Ancient boxing was indeed far more brutal with fighters wearing crude coverings on their hands, sometimes with spikes embedded in the knuckle area, to protect the hands and maximize potential damage to the head and body of the other fighter.
It wasn’t until the 18th century in England with the introduction of bare knuckle fighting or "prizefighting" that the safety of boxing from the fighter’s point of view was really addressed. The London Prize Ring Rules (1743) were introduced by bare knuckle heavyweight champion Jack Broughton and gave the fighter two clear safety advantages over their ancient and modern counterparts.
Firstly, each fighter was allowed at any time during the fight to drop to one knee for 30 seconds. During this time the other fighter was not allowed to attack and the resting fighter was allowed to regain composure and continue, if he could. Today the referee is the only person that can stop a bout and only then if he feels that the fight is unfairly matched or one fighter is unable to continue due to injury or cuts, or if one fighter cannot defend himself. As we have seen this can often result in fighters taking too much punishment before the ref steps in and by then the damage can already be done.
Secondly and most significantly, the fighters wore no gloves which meant that they were far more cautious when going for head shots due to the damage that it did to the hands. Today’s modern game has more in common with its ancient ancestors in this regard as gloves now facilitate multiple head shots and the scoring system used also favors head shots.
Looking at these facts it is hard to justify the set up of modern boxing when talking about safety of the fighters. Would a return to bare knuckle boxing see a reduction in injuries or a reduction in ticket/pay per view revenue? This is possibly where the real issues lie in the modern game.
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Comments
This is interesting. I didn't know that boxing had such a history. I thought it was much more of a modern sport, with ancient peoples always using swords to hack their opponents to pieces :)
There is much more to the history of boxing than meets the eye. Bare knuckle boxing also played a part in the development of martial arts, but thats another article!!
There's a song by Robin Williamson on his album The Island of the Strong Door entitled Willy and the Scrapper with the line: "Bare-fist fighting, knock-out or yield, seen the money changing hands in Jenkins field."
Sounds about right. It is stil as popular today, although very much "underground".
This article is flawed; the first point the author gives is simply wrong. Broughton's rules said that fighters COULD NOT simply fall without being struck by their opponent, as before they would drop to a knee only to have that thirty second rest. His rules basically saw this as cheating, as really it was; you shouldn't be able to rest whenever you feel like it. Having said that, I do agree absolutely with the general message presented by this article. Would we cast aside gloves, we'd have a much safer sport indeed. Better to break your hand quickly than break your brain slowly, no?
EYEAM4ANARCHY says:
10 months ago
Some of the debate over the safety of MMA has actually spawned quite a bit of research into the effect of head trauma during a bout. There's been several studies that concluded that less padding is actually better. Reason being that someone absorbs significantly more cumulative damage than they would if they were simply knocked out.