The Cruelest Sport (1992)

There&#x27;s one simple way to drastically reduce the amount of brain damage caused by fighting: take off the gloves. Padded gloves and taped wrists allow fighters to throw punches that would never work in a real fight. Without gloves, punching someone in the forehead is a reliable way to hyperextend your wrist or break your hand. Taken in this light, gloves are a weapon. Remove them and fighters would be forced to avoid much of the head.<p>Of course, gloves won&#x27;t go away. Boxing would be less entertaining without them. People don&#x27;t want to see fights stopped due to broken hands. They don&#x27;t want to see disfigured faces (which are practically guaranteed in a bare-knuckle stand-up fight). People want to see spectacular haymakers. They want to see punches flying left and right. Most of all, people want to see knock-outs.

The article recommends the Ali-Williams fight of 1966:<p>&quot;These early fights, the most brilliant being against Cleveland Williams, in 1966, predate by a decade the long, grueling, punishing fights of Ali’s later career, whose accumulative effects hurt Ali irrevocably...&quot;<p>I just took a look at that fight, which is on YouTube (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;oJUzl0aFHZw" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;oJUzl0aFHZw</a>). It lasts only 8 minutes. The opponent is clearly a slugger who is baffled by Ali&#x27;s style. Ali moves very fast, and fights with his gloves down. I&#x27;m not a fan of boxing, but she&#x27;s right, that fight is an amazing spectacle.

The killing blows at the end of the Griffith-Paret fight mentioned in the article are worth watching.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vBNQNwCyYqk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vBNQNwCyYqk</a><p>Cranial trauma is frightening to behold, but it probably can&#x27;t be separated from the sport.

I think it&#x27;s worth noting that MMA fighters don&#x27;t tend to suffer as many injuries. Boxing&#x27;s strict ruleset forces fighters to beat eachother into putty to win, but other fights can be won without (as many) concussions.

I&#x27;ve boxed exactly twice in my life. Neither time was against a trained boxer, it just so happened that someone had a few pairs of boxing gloves lying around. My main take away was that getting punched in the face sucks way more than you think it would. Counter-intuitively, if you get punched in the face enough it eventually stops hurting at all. Time slows down. Your arms drop. Your mind drifts to thoughts totally unrelated to boxing. During the first &quot;match&quot; my opponent, also a friend, left me a gentle nudge away from getting knocked out. Although not quite enjoyable, I am glad to have had the experience.<p>All other sports are now erring on the side of caution when it comes to concussions, especially American football. In boxing the whole point is to give the other guy a concussion. You don&#x27;t fall down from getting knocked over, you fall down because your body forgets how to stand up. And once that happens, which is some form of minor (or major) concussion, everyone cheers you on, encouraging you to stand back up so that you can get concussed again. Amazing.

You can&#x27;t consent to being seriously injured by someone else. (Medical treatments not only require written consent when possible, but are based on competing harms.)<p>Why is there an exception for letting someone try to hit you in the head, repeatedly, for &quot;sport&quot;?<p>It seems like the only reason it&#x27;s legal is that it wasn&#x27;t really acknowledged until recently that repeated blows to the head (and the resulting brain and neck&#x2F;brainstem trauma) could cause serious long-term cognitive deficits, and the legal system hasn&#x27;t caught up with that yet.

Reminds me of another recent take - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewinquiry.com&#x2F;essays&#x2F;fist-to-brain&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewinquiry.com&#x2F;essays&#x2F;fist-to-brain&#x2F;</a>

A rather strange choice of words:<p>&quot;.... boxing’s very intentions are obscene, which sets it apart, theoretically at least, from purer (i.e., Caucasian) establishment sports ...&quot;

This article is ignorant of the history of boxing as it relates to duels. For centuries a serious affront called for a duel of some form: glove thrown, pistols or foils at dawn, all that shit. Not even slightly rare; it happened constantly. The point of boxing&#x27;s queensberry rules was no guns or swords or deliberate maiming, may the best man win and the loser sulk off alive with humility. Boxing was a force for civilization. For many years the brits derided the french and germans for still resorting to lethal duels whereas proper englishmen settled things with fists.<p>As recently as the 1920s dueling was still a big thing in much of the white world. Many places you had a legally protected right to challenge. It&#x27;s kind of still a big thing in the black ghetto leading to many deaths. I think they need a more proper and formalized social outlet than street-stompings and shootings.<p>Personally, I think it&#x27;s a widespread problem that you can&#x27;t ask a man way over the line to shut up and apologize or step into the ring. People talk about the decline of manners. The essential reason for that is if you went well over the line back in the day you had to be ready to get punched in the face.

At least any brain trauma Pacquiao sustains will be consensual. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.sportingnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;4643166-floyd-mayweather-domestic-violence-son-mother-letter-police" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.sportingnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;4643166-floyd-mayweat...</a>