According to Graeme Kent ,in his book "The Great White Hopes ," Sam Langford's gloves were tampered with when he fought Bill Lang in London 1911. Kent says Langford put Lang down in the 2nd ,3rd & 6th rds,then moving in for the kill he swung his right hand missed and overbalanced and fell to the floor,reflexsively Lang returned fire and grazed the floored Langford's head Eugene Corri the referee ,immediately dsq'd Lang, who then promptly collapsed in his corner. After the fight Langford, puzzled as to why he had not been able to ko Lang, examined his gloves , splitting them open with a knife, he found the padding had been stuffed with rabbits fur. Langfrod walked into the promoter Hugh D McIntosh's office threw the gloves on the table and said,"Oh Mr McIntosh,you are a wicked man". Fight below. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SvbTck039Y[/ame]
Not for me. A fighter's glove is an extension of his fist. He knows what is going on with them, and the lighter they get the easier it is to detect strangeness.
I have my doubts too , but thought it was worth posting. The gloves do look to be rather big , but that might just be because they are white.
Didn't Clay write about this? I don't have the book at hand, but supposedly McIntosh explained that he used "patented" stuffing for gloves to avoid a trick where fighters' seconds would push the stuffing inside the glove from the knuckles, so the punches inflict more damage.
Here's some information I found among my notes concerning this issue: Sam was dissatisfied with himself, because he felt he should have whipped Lang earlier. He couldn’ t understand why his punches seemed to lack something of their deadly efficiency. He had noticed when he entered the ring that the gloves provided for the bout were white. He guessed the reason for that. Hugh McIntosh had ordered white gloves so that Lang’s punches would show up better against Sam’s dark body in the pictures taken of the battle. (The Knockout magazine – McIntosh for his part said that while making final preparations for the fight he decided the fight would make a more attractive spectacle and would be easier for the audience to follow, if the contestants wore gloves of white leather. (Note: Seems like it would only be easier to follow against the darker mans skin!) He did notice during the fight that between rounds Sam intently examining the gloves.) There was a mystery somewhere and Sam’s curiousity led him to hang on to the mitts he had used and take them to his hotel room. There he cut them open and discovered that the wily McIntosh had had the gloves stuffed with rabbit fur instead of hair, a substitution which robbed Langford’s punches of much of their sting. “I nevah knew till I licked Lang how many ways there was to work the rabbit punch, Mistah McIntosh!” “What do you mean, Sam?” queried the promoter in apparent surprise, but Sam only grinned and strolled away. After all, he had won decisively, and was content to let it go at that. ))) (The Knockout magazine – McIntosh later claimed that because fighters had a bad habit of working the padding back off their knuckles to give their blows more dangerous effect, he had the ones for this fight filled with a patent stuffing.)
Interestingly, though, I wonder if the rabbits fur was also used in Langs Gloves and if so what sort of effectit might have had on bluntening the impact of Bill Lang's blows. Probably it helped him i know, but it can work both ways for both of the fighters. I do think that the effect of things such as padding in gloves, spiked shoes, hard canvassas, fighting in the hot sun etc are very often overlooked when people consider fantasy fights. It is not that modern fighters would fold in these conditions (even though they have never faced them and their styles dont optmimise them) but, they would have effect on fights. And not just the inter time fights. Wlad vs Byrd or Liston vs Patterson with rabbit's fur gloves could easily produce a different result to what we all expect.
Wouldn't suprise me,Hugh McIntosh sounds like a real piece of sh*t, Ended Les D'arcy career in the US because he wanted to promote D'Arcy(Used his political connections during WW1 to makes American governors of state ban him and call D'arcy a coward when in fact he wanted to earn big money set his family up and then join the war)
