Question regarding transition from bare knuckle to gloves

They existed side by side, as two separate sports, like boxing and MMA for a while. Gloved boxing had the advantage of being legal, but bare knuckle boxing still drew bigger gates. There was a debate as to whether boxing should continue as an underground sport, or embrace legality and regulation. The first champion to engage in gloved bouts seems to have been Jem Mace. What seems to have put the final nail in the coffin of bare knuckle boxing, is that Sullivan rounded up all of the title claims under both rule sets, and announced that anybody who wanted to challenge him would have to do so under Queensbury Rules. This left bare knuckle boxing without a champion, or a title claim. If Sullivan had favored bare knuckles, or if he had lost to Killrain say, then the whole thing might have dragged on longer!

 

Janitor said it all...

 

Yes, sparring with gloves, exhibitions, boxing schools were quite common prior to the changeover.

 

I've only a few thing to add, great job Janitor and Matt.

Firstly, let's define "bare knuckle" because OP did ask specifically about the US side of things I think it's worth pointing out the US had two forms of bare knuckle boxing at the time. There was the London Prize Ring Rules of course and Rough n Tumble today much more popular as "No Holds Barred". LPRR was comparable to Queensberry and for all intents and purposes was real boxing. RnT was Dixie's kind of ******* son of LPRR and like its name suggests there was hardly ever any agreed rules, they rip off genitals and eyes etc. While LPRR had a relative quick death after Sullivan announced he'd be fighting Queensberry rules RnT would hold on in the Dixie south until about the mid 20th century well into the Queensberry era. Rough and tumble is important to remember existed because our early champions like Molyneaux and Hyer were rough n tumble fighters prior to london ring fighters.

Another issue is I think maybe I'm just being a stickler about wording, but Jem Mace isn't close to the first champion to use gloves. Gloves have been used since the late 18th and early 19th centuries and were always an option in LPRR. It'd be fair to say Mace both popularized gloves and the Queensberry rules in the US through his exhibition tours of the US and tent boxing events around the US. Mace is the first to use gloves and exhibit queensberry that I know of, but not the first to use gloves by about a hundred years.

If you're more interested in the use of gloves during the LPRR era I'll expand, but in the name of not writing novellas to add to Matt's all of the above which is correct there were plenty of gloved fights during LPRR. It wasn't the norm but it did happen often enough for it to not be a crazy anomaly in history. If you look at Nonpariel Dempsey's record on Boxrec they point out a few instances where he fought gloved LPRR matches. He even wore gloves during the epic title fight with Reagan.

LPRR tended to opt for hardened gloves, but they were gloves all the same.

 

Not to mention that broken hands or fear of tended to slow fights down.....UFC adopted gloves to embolden fighters to punch and create excitement without the fear of course timed rounds upped the sport......

 

Both existed and were options.

I've only ever heard of leather being used, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of cotton or some such similar nonsense. The most used though would be hardened. It's difficult for me at this time to say how often they would use thick hardened gloves vs tight hardened gloves but I can safely say I hardly ever read or hear about soft gloves being used. That's not to say it didn't happen, it definitely did, just most fights would be bare, then after that you've hardened gloves, then finally for the few you had soft mitts.

I assume you're well aware of the uses of both tight and thick hardened gloves so I'll just get right into soft, but if you'd like more on the hard gloves I'm happy to ramble about boxing history.

Soft gloves, often referred to as mitts and mittens, were primarily used by the aristocracy. Champions in England trained kings in the fine art of pugilism. You'd not want to come off as a sissy, you have to make your king, prince, lord, whatevs proud of your pugilistic might without harming their ability to hold court etc. So not only were soft gloves used to protect the hands of the upper class when they played boxing, but also the champion wouldn't want to cut his master and soft padded gloves help with that while allowing them to feel some measure of power.

I think often people forget to regard 1720-1895 has a revival of an ancient sport, but just like America mimicking Rome sixty years later Figg was reviving Roman and Greek culture. Olympia used gloves as both protectors like the soft mitt and as weapons like the hardened glove. That's the core reason you see them in England's prize ring. The idea of the glove in general and in all its forms was not at any point alien to bare knuckle fighters.

 

Also, just saying, that Nonpariel fight I mentioned was fought using skin tight gloves. Maybe it's time to stop asking questions and do a little reading.

 

Ads in the Irish papers from 1864 for "Boxing Gloves".

 

I apologize for the long delay. I thought I had responded already and the thread just went away naturally. I didn't mean to end the conversation before it had finished, but that's 100% on me.


With that out of the way, let's get into the hard leathers.

I know you're asking about bare knuckle but I do honestly think some level of understanding Rome is important. The stories you may have heard about Roman boxing featuring cestus, leather strips filled with iron plates or fitted with blades or spikes or some similar weaponization, are true. So the idea of using gloves as weapons pre-dates English boxing by about one and a half millennia, but also is the main instrument in what got boxing banned by Rome and the Church. The official ban came out of something to the tune of Man is made in God's image and to disfigure the face of man is to disfigure the face of God himself, which is of course the work of the devil. These weighted and spiked strip leather gloves certainly must have disfigured God's face something properly ****ed up. Seriously, search cestus, you'll see a lot of imaginative recreations that are pretty obviously structurally unsound for punching, but the real deal will pop up too both as ye olde drawings and modern recreations and they're just as if not more terrifying because they've all the business and can strike you repeatedly without breaking.

Ok so why I feel it's important to note is because boxing went through a millennium and a half of persecution as a pagan practice before Figg was able to change cultural opinion. Obviously Figg didn't do this alone or overnight. Martin Luther and King Henry VIII for a pair did loads to change how the public viewed the Church and Pope's authority in Christendom way before Figg was around, but did nothing to address the tenets of what it means to be Christian. What I mean to say is guys like Henry and Marty challenged the Pope not God and that allowed for Figg's boxing to exist because Figg was doing nothing to challenge God, which is super important in the 18th century. Yes it is the industrial revolution and people in power may challenge God and people are becoming secular, but it's also just one lifetime away from the witch hunt years and those feelings are still around. Super strict versions of Christian is the major audience. The practice of dropping weaponized gloves for no gloves at all was to appease the Christian audience. Disfigure is a relative term, and no one was going to go to bat against fencing. Fencing was better than tits back then. So the pre-Figg era fellas come up with this idea called fencing with fists. It's not the pagan ritual, it's a strictly British event where men would simply fence but use the far less deadly fist to assure they don't cause any serious harm to their opponent. Fencing with fists would get incorporated into boxing or pugilism as a whole by virtue of damage. It was ok to box provided you didn't disfigure the face of God but rather displayed skills like in Fencing. It seems to me at it's inception, like the very first few years the sport existed, it became conflated with the ancient Greek sport.

 

Hit the word cap, here's the rest:


So ironically gloves left boxing for the same reason we bring them back, to bring down the level of obvious bloodlust and bring up the level of obvious sport to appease the market.

If they got rid of glove to make boxing less violent why would they use hard gloves during the heart of LPRR right? Well, because Dixie. Don't mistake me, they've always used two different sets of hard leather gloves in English boxing. One was hardened thick leather for extra weight and the other was skin tight hardened leather. The heavier pair would be for concussive damage, the leather is not nice and will cause more cuts than a fist would, but the reason they're heavy is to add a little bit of mm-pop-pop like loaded gloves would. The skin tight pair have always been used for cutting, making the opponent bleed. If you're in skin tight gloves you're not bothered by going late rounds and bleeding your opponent out. However, even though they're ever present they're always rare because most of the public didn't want to see that ****. They went with hardened leather over cestus because a hardened leather blacksmith style glove was about the closest thing you could get away with and not be considered a murderer. So in England in the early days from 1720 to about 1840s you only ever really see hardened leather being used when it's a grudge match or being held by some sort of criminal element.

But in America, in Dixie America, they had this form of boxing they called Rough and Tumble. Dixie was, well, just not England in the least. The English trained with Kings. The Southerners trained with slaves. The English fought in front of royalty and war heroes. Dixie fought in front of criminals and gangs. It was the total opposite culture. R&T is where the term " No holds barred" comes from. They liked to win by castraition or by taking your eye. This is where hard gloves really come into major use. Dixie has a chip on it's shoulder. They don't care about being the best looking or the smartest or the most talented, just being able to take more damage and give more damage than their opponent. That's why when you look at CBZ's bare knuckle champions you'll notice the number of gloved fights really picks up around the mid 19th century and even though England will participate it seems largely an American feature. So from about 1790-1830 in America they're breeding the polar opposite culture. During the 1830s-50s in America is probably the dirties time in boxing history. Fixed fights held at gunpoint, gang violence, hard leathers being thrown, sometimes loaded, sometimes dipped in some nefarious substance. Just like with civil war sentiments of the time, Dixie pushed west and along with it, it's culture. You'd find the worst of the worst around California. Just all sorts of dirty mean nonsense that lead to a bit of a backlash by the next generation. The fans in the US, the metropolitan fans in places like NY didn't care much for Dixie's ****, and Guys like Jem Mace would gain popularity in England in the 1860s and tour the world offering a more sporting outlook on boxing similar to how Figg toured England for the same reason. All int the English spirit of Fair Play and what have you. It's around Mace's time, just after the apex of rough bloody boxing in LPRR, you see the us of English training mitts really starting to take hold in boxing. Mace's part of this can't be diminished, and most know his story fairly well. He was one of the first to push for rule changes, the Queensberry rules of course, and to push for the use of gloves that limit cuts while allowing the opponent to feel power. More or less the same type of gloves I described when talking about English champions training lords and such while covering soft leather, but like with Figg you can't give all the credit to Mace alone.

I can safely say in America the black community has trained and fought with English mitts since the start of the 19th century. When Mendoza trained Richmond and cut him loose he set in play a path for Black America to inherit English boxing traditions nearly a hundred years before White America would get with the program. Guys like Jemmy Johnson and Tom Molyneaux Hewlett had the black boxing community in America using mitts for training and fights in full effect like it's common place by the mid 1800s right around the time when white boxing community in America is causing so much violence the sport itself is under serious threat.

The one thing that united Dixie, England, and Black America was God. They all believed in God and all wanted to appease an audience that believes in God. So in a weird way boxing was a battleground for Christian values. Disfigure being relative and now the addition of allegory Christianity whose to say what is and is not Christian?

So when Mace was touring his sporting side of boxing the black community was already game and ready to go, the only demographic that needed convincing was the White American community and Mace had more than enough respect to get it done.

By the 1890s it's almost as if there's a culture war going on. Mace's affect on the sport can be seen right along side with Dixie's lingering culture. the 1890s is probably the gloviest time in all of LPRR because both sides are trying to prove their point. On one side you have the belief that boxing is a man's sport and should not be softened for any reason. Better to go down with the ship sort of mentality. On the other side you had new marketing strategies and a viable career as an expert in retirement. John L. chose to fight under Queensberry mostly to increase his pocket size, but that act did solidify soft padded gloves being used. Well, that and then his final LPRR defense of course. Once the bare knuckle champion had been beaten by the gloved champion the argument was over. The baddest man on the planet uses soft gloves to prove how bad he really is. Jake was no easy customer either. He had defeated Godfrey, the Colored Champ, and a man John had ducked for years just a short time prior to losing to John so a lot of people put a lot of faith and importance behind Jake and paid for it when he lost to John. With the fall of Jake Kilrain Queensberry had won its last challenge. Well, until the future comes up with something, or maybe if you count MMA.


I know this was long, and unproofread, sorry, I'll write a summary for folks who hate to read. I did try to keep it short... I left out quite a bit. Like how Americans largely saw boxing as a violent import taking over good American sports due to immigration and how metropolitan America didn't care for boxing much and cared least for the more harmful and bloody aspects of the sport. I did that for time, and because work is picking up and my focus is waning at the moment. if you've or anyone else has any questions feel free to ask and if I don't respond in three days go ahead and get me because I probably forgot. I admittedly rushed John L and Mace. I'll probably add to this in a bit, when people go home and I can remember easily.


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Summary: Hard leather is for ****ing you up. Soft leather is for displaying skills without completely nerfing the ****ing you up aspect. Bare knuckle came because weaponized boxing is not Christian enough for the old literal-christians, and bare knuckle left because bare knuckle became too violent for the secular/modern allegory christian community.

 

For sources go with the following:

Boxing: A Cultural History. Boxing: A Concise History. Boxing's Strangest Fights. and Bare Knuckle 1722-1889. Bare-Knuckle 1722-1889 would without a doubt be my first choice. Also, Boxrec and CBZ. Just start clicking on those champ's names and reading.

Kevin Smith's Black Genesis and Sundowners is pretty good for the black community but it is frustrating because it assumes you know what's going on in the rest of the world at the same time. So even when you have material on that you tend to read his then check with another book for the full perspective.

Finally, if there's more interest in 1720-1880 than the ancients I'll stop filling in the ancients for a while and do more LPRR focus on my own threads.

https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/heavyweight-champions-from-ancient-to-present-wip.597272/

If you click on an ancient era it'll take you to a rules, equipment, and legends thread. I'll do the same for the English Era here in a bit, probably use quite a lot of this but I'll add to it the rules and other bits like what those sashes were all about, and you can't forget the steel cleats. Maybe grab a bit of the Lineal thread I did in General. Either way it's clear to me the forum is less interested in Theaganes than Cribb so I'll get on that and come back to the ancients. After I get Theaganes done, can't leave him out now that I've Euthymos, but once he's done I'll switch it up to LPRR years.