What if boxers fought with those 4-ounce MMA gloves?

Well your wrong for a start.....12oz gloves aren't a symbol of boxing in anyway. The 12oz gloves are actually a recent adition
Before it was 10oz gloves in the 80's and before that 8oz gloves.
20's,30's and 40's were 6oz i believe.

the 12oz glove is something recently added, there are even calls to make heavyweight gloves 14oz.
Which is just ridiculous.

 

Boxing would turn skill wise back into the early 1900's imo. Boxers be fighting with the same size gloves that Gans or Dixon fought.

 

Some factors are being overlooked;

1/ Fighters will be able to throw a lot more punches
2/ Fighters will be able to throw faster punches
3/ Facial mutilation would increase signficantly - Remember how Joe Louis made his opponents look? We'd be seeing that a lot more often.

In terms of overall safety I'm not convinced boxers will be better off with smaller gloves.

I say stick with 8-12oz

 

Fighters would be breaking their hands all the time

 

Boxers need to not go past 8oz gloves upto 154 and 10 oz up to heavy. If it gets past that boxing will begin to die. Hatton wearing 10oz gloves looked awful.

Gloves need to stop becomign even more protective. Even with not changing weight they are becoming huge i.e. grant, winning and now reyes and everlast have done it too.

 

yeah, wladimir wouldnt have a glass jaw cuz it wouldve been knocked into the stands in the first brewster fight

 

There would be a long list of deceased fighters, aka Wlad's resume :deal

 

Brewster didn't land a punch until the last round! Brewster would have been dead after the first :deal

 

How is everybody missing this? The reason there is not brain damage in MMA matches is because of the RULES, not the GLOVES. It's not like people who get knocked own in boxing are somehow "less knocked down" in boxing than in MMA because of the gloves, it's because once they're knocked down they're no longer hit and given around 15 seconds from the time they're knocked down to the time they have to worry about getting hit. They recover, the fight goes on, and they take more punishment and get brain damage. The same thing would happen with smaller gloves if the rules stayed the same. Imagine if the ref had to stop the fight every time someone got knocked down and so hurt just enough to not be able to fend off more punches. Boxers would hardly get knocked down more than once in a fight.

In terms of how fighting would change, I think it would be a lot slower paced and would look more like Cory Spinks or John Ruiz than anything. If individual punches carried so much more power and were so much tougher to see/block then guys would be a lot less willing to take punches to give them and would be a lot more defensive/clinch minded. The boring 150 round style of the olden days would be back again.

I think they should be smaller than they are now, but I don't think they need to get THAT much smaller.

 

the preferred boxing stance would return to the old school styles of jack johnson and Co.

the stance would be almost facing completely sideways to your opponent, and with your weight on the back foot, your head and torso slightly tilted backwards and with both arms positioned around the ribs area.

one punch stoppages would be more common. a peek a boo style wouldnt work that well anymore. fights would have a slower, more defensive minded and counterpunching pace. potshotting and 1-2s would be more common, instead of 5-6 punch combinations. and all out slugfests would not be used as a tactic unless absolutely desperate.

it would look a bit like james toney's style.

 

Some great posts at the end...

bulakenyo, can I ask why the stance would change in that way, especially with the arms around the ribs? Do you mean that fighters would start relying on head movement now that the gloves are not big enough to cover the head?

 

absolutely. head and body movement.

PBF and JToney employ this stance (sideview) so they have less areas exposed to be hit. the only areas completely exposed are his shoulders.

his jabbing arm can block the body shots, his shoulder rolls can deflect head shots, and with his weight on his back foot, he can lean his whole upper body backwards, with only his hips and part of his back exposed (below the belt and kidney punches are illegal, right?)

the lead right straight would also have more snap and quickness using this stance. look at PBF and Toney.

 

beautiful, thanks for that.

 

Aside from facing almost completely sideways it sure does sound exactly like Chuck Liddell's style....