Fighting in clinches should be universally allowed

Ward or Klitschko fan?

Great way to make boxing 20 times more boring

 

No, if clinching becomes a habit,then headbutts and elbows will be next in line

 

Excessive clinching and holding should be severely penalized. Boxers who resort to it do it because it almost never gets penalized. 3 warnings and disqualification. It all comes down to the evils of professional boxing. If a ref disqualifies Floyd, Ward or Klitschko for excessive clinching, he will be instantly out of job.

 

Then you should tackle that problem instead of learning to live with it. Golovkin vs Lemieux was a fight with very few clinches, as such it was a great fight for the average audience. You need more fights like that to make boxing mainstream again. Allowing clinches will do nothing but further diminishing the popularity of the sport.

 

Fighting in clinches has always been a part of boxing; go back and watch and learn. The problem is guys that grab, hold and don't fight in close, and referees that break it too quickly.
Getting in close, then grappling for position to throw punches is a good way to impose your strength and to wear the other guy down.
Watch Luis Rodriguez vs Emile Griffith, first fight, to see this.

 

You should watch Lennox Lewis vs Henry Akinwande. That's exactly the kind of fight you'll get whenever there's a slight mismatch. People will try to survive through clinches and we'll see less and less knock outs if it's completely allowed. It's just a terrible, terrible idea.

 

Clinches ruin boxing and should have pts off if more than 3 in one rd

Fighters like Hopkins, Floyd, klitchko, ward abuse them and make fights/boxing boring and ugly.

 

no bull**** when mayweather started using kenny bayless every fight he went from a decent pro ref to an amatuer olympic style ref who broke fighters as soon as they touched. thus allowing mayweather to do the john ruiz jab and grab strategy without penalty for whole fights. in the process making excessive clinching a viable gameplan and boring viewers to death

 

I agree, I've thought this for a long time. It's too natural a part of the sport and its consistently and unavoidably done. The fact that its illegal, but so natural a part of the sport and so hard to penalize and control just detracts from the sport

 

But didn't they start banning it after Johnson kept uppercuting faces?

I say some kind of wrestling thing, whether a toss or dominant position in the clinch might be better

 

I think they should foul the guy who is clinching them. Clinching is a foul, but it never gets called. If someone is fouling you then you ought to be able to foul them back. The ref should give a warning after five clinches and deduct a point after ten. The rule needs to be clear and objective so that every ref knows exactly how to act.

Clinching is such a terrible plague on the sport right now thanks to Mayweather, Klitschko, and others. It's gotten so that people don't even know how to infight. If someone gets inside they just hold on until the ref separates them. It slows down the action and makes the sport dull. But I do agree that in examples I've seen where the ref separates two clinching fighters, that's exactly what the clincher was hoping for and part of his game plan. If they had to fight out of a clinch you couldn't get away with that style. It only works because the ref can break the boxers up, which makes it artificial, a phony kind of fighting, a fraud on the spectators.