Whatever the cause, it is difficult to use findings of the past to determine the safety of the sport today. So much constantly changes within the sport of boxing that trying to compare between eras is essentially like trying to compare completely different sports. Perhaps then a better approach is not to look at the sport’s past, and instead on its present and foreseeable future.
Probably the best contemporary example of bare-knuckle boxing is the BYB Extreme Fighting Series, the most recent organized attempt at reviving bare-knuckle fighting to become a sanctioned sport. Followers of the subject may recognize the league as the evolution of the principle subject matter in Billy Cohan’s documentary “Dawg Fights”, a film following the lives of fighters and promoters of an underground bare-knuckle boxing league in West Perrine, Fla. Most recently, the league had its first pay-per-view event called Battleship 1, where competition rules included no holds, no breaks, and of course, no gloves.
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“We believe the gloves cause more long term damage over a bare-knuckle punch, which causes superficial injury, and all the fighters that we’ve talked to, they all say that they’d much rather fight without the gloves,” says Mike Vazquez, president of BYB. Vazquez further advocates for the league’s safety by pointing out that less punches to the head are thrown in bare-knuckle fights due to fear of breaking one’s hand on an opponent’s skull.
“[The boxing glove] was made to protect the hands, not the person being punched. It was made to extend matches and for people to be able to throw more head shots, because back in the 1800s and all the centuries before them that were before them, bare-knuckle matches results in more body blows than head shots,” Vazquez continues. “So a promoter in the late 1800s says, ‘Well, people love head shots and I want this fight to go longer, so I’m gonna pad their hands, so the guys can throw more head shots.’ So it was a promoter, a marketing gimmick, it was not a safety issue, and it’s literally gone over a century unchallenged.”
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The first notion of the gloves being introduced into the sport to protect the fighter’s hand and not their opponent’s head has some truth to it, at least if one reaches back far enough in history. Strips of leather binding the hands of Ancient Greek fighters constituted the world’s first recorded boxing glove, and was introduced to make punching safer for the attacker. The second notion of gloves creating more exciting matches for the audience has some truth as well. Back when pugilism first entered the Roman Empire, the notorious “caestus”—a glove made of leather strips and at times filled with iron plates, blade and/or spikes—was used to intentionally make contests between combatants more bloody and violent for spectators.
But boxing gloves today are hardly made with such material, and instead commonly filled with a composite of foam and animal hair. Their primary use may still be to protect a fighter’s hands, but there are no longer the lethal additions to further the injury of an opponent. It is also important to consider what other purposes the hands serve in a boxing match aside from being a method of attack. Utilizing blocks, parries and other mechanisms of defense greatly determine a fighter’s safety, and the presence of gloves increases those defenses substantially. Plus, arguing that a hand will break before the head isn’t exactly the most appealing approach to advocate for a safer sport. That is, at least, the view of Dr. Larry Lovelace, president of the Association of Ringside Physicians, one of the leading international organizations that sanction ringside physicians in combat sports. Lovelace has been president of the association for a year, and a ringside physician for more than thirty.
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