Generally the majority of people have make assumptions that the whole boxing glove was made to protect the person being hit. The bones in the hand however are small and incredibly fragile so the padding providing the gloves is as much as protecting the person being clobbered and person doing the clobbering – fighting, martial arts and boxing are pretty much two way – you cannot fight with yourself!

Following the end of the Greeks, we saw the Romans pick up on boxing as form of entertainment, a form of a sport – the passion died down though when it was turned into a life and death type sport in the gladiator empires. They did however continue to use leather strips as gloves – being Romans though, they decided to take it another level – metal studs, spikes, were attached to the metal as replacement from the leather strips, resulting in boxing match matches that had the losing fighter ending up dead or completely torn apart with injuries, scars and terrible long lasting effects.

In the year 30 BC boxing was made illegal by Romans in all Roman cities and provinces. The distaste for boxing was so passionate that entire Roman Empire had it banned, resulting in all Western civilization following this concept for nearly 1500 years.

Towards the start of the 1700s and the late 1600s boxing started to reappear. It was mostly however bare knuckled and boned fighting, this did not last long though, in fact during this development we slowly saw the adding of padding and safety was consider.

Jack Broughton was the first British boxing champion – the first icon you could reference in British Boxing history in the early 1700s. He is considered by many to the inventor of the modern day boxing gloves – not forgetting that during his time in pioneering boxing (the development of gloves and boxing equipment slowly developed after padding) that the major public eye fights were still non glove assigned fighters and were fighting bare knuckled – going all out.

Due to the amount of casualties and deaths in these matches, a decision was made and boxing fans and communities started to apply rules – in the year 1866, bare knuckle fighting was over and boxing gloves were put in to practice. There were a lot of fanatics out there, who did not like the idea and were still passionate about the raw fighting.

Tags: Boxing History, Boxing Glove, Online Boxing

This entry was posted on September 2, 2009 at 9:33 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.