How (and why and when) did we start putting gloves on pro fighters?
Hint: It wasn't because anyone was really all that concerned with them injuring their hands. It was mostly because they were worried about making (and keeping) more of the money.
One of the most casually bad-ass quotes that also captures something ineffable and unchanging about the soul of combat sports comes to us courtesy of an Irish-born boxer named Paddy Ryan, who held the mostly unofficial but still very real title of heavyweight champion of America from 1880-1882.
Ryan (nicknamed the “Trojan Giant” because he made his home for a time in Troy, NY, and was all of 5’11) had been facing mounting pressure to defend his title against a new lad by the name of John L. Sullivan. The bout was slow in coming together, and some blamed Sullivan’s reluctance to fight with bare fists and under the London Prize Ring rules.
It was true that Sullivan preferred fighting with gloves and under the Marquess of Queensberry rules. This was partly because his whole game was built around aggression and power punching, which worked better when he had gloves protecting his fists and a rule set that didn’t allow for so much stand-up grappling. (Under the London Prize Ring rules, you could grab a man above the waist and throw him down, and it still counted as a knockdown that brought an end to that round.)
But there was also another reason he favored the gloves: Sullivan didn’t want to go to jail. There were laws against “prize fighting” on the books in almost every corner of the U.S. at the time, but most people interpreted that to mean the kind of fighting done for high stakes with bare fists. Gloves were often used in exhibition bouts, or even in “professional” fights of lower importance. But the heavyweight title? That could only be contested with bare fists, according to the boxing aficionados of the day. And Sullivan knew that if he fought Ryan in a bare-fisted fight, chances were very good that they’d both be arrested after.
When word got around to Ryan that this might be among the challenger’s concerns, he let fly with this classic bit of 19th-century pre-fight trash talk: “Any man who is so ambitious to become champion of America should not be afraid to take the chances of getting arrested.”
Which, when you think about it, ain’t that just like some shit a pro fighter would say? Like, how dare you even think about coming for this belt if you aren’t prepared to go to jail for it. It’s just hard to imagine champions in other sports framing it that way, as if accepting that the illegality of it all is built into the sport, and only a total weenie would complain about those potential consequences.
These days most boxing fans will tell you that the gloves exist to protect the hands of boxers – not their heads or faces. This is kind of true – gloved boxing does less cosmetic damage, but probably results in far more brain trauma – though it also misses the point of how we get there, and why the boxing world moved away from bare fists and toward the gloves that, in earlier eras, were only used as training tools.
Sullivan was a major part of that shift, eventually. He did eventually cede to the pressure and fought Ryan bare-fisted, under the London Prize Ring rules. The bout organizers had to move the location of the fight a few times precisely to avoid a crackdown from local authorities, eventually ending up in an empty field in Mississippi in February of 1882. Sullivan won the fight relatively quickly and easily, and soon became one of America’s first true sports superstars. He wound up touring all over the country, putting on gloved exhibitions and raking in money which he spent just as quickly in taverns and saloons.
What he wasn’t super eager to do was defend his title in another bare-knuckle bout. He later explained why he disliked that rule set in his autobiography:
“Gentlemen and business men of all vocations cannot afford to give up the time to witness fighting under the London Prize-Ring Rules, for the reason that it takes too long in the first place, and in the second place it is against the law, and every spectator, as well as each participant, is amenable to the law.”
In other words, gloved fighting with timed rounds was more fan-friendly, both because you could stage the fights in more locations without worrying about the police shutting it down (which happened often in the bare-knuckle days), and because it was more time-efficient than a fight that could easily go 70 or 80s rounds as increasingly exhausting fighters did more holding and throwing than punching.
Sullivan wasn’t exactly a brilliant businessman, but he did understand that more fan-friendly styles of fighting meant more money for the fighters. This point was further illustrated to him when he went back to Mississippi to defend the bare-knuckle title in an entirely illegal fight against Jake Kilrain in 1889, which resulted in both men being hauled through the state’s courts in a lengthy and costly ordeal. Sullivan later estimated that, between fines and legal fees (and bribes disguised as fines or legal fees), he spent $18,000 just to stay out of jail in Mississippi. That’s somewhere around half a million bucks in today’s money, more than he made for winning the fight. Afterwards, Sullivan announced that he would not participate in any more bare-fisted prizefights, heavyweight title or no.
“The country seems to be opposed to it, and there is no money it,” he told reporters.
But all this time that the mood was souring on bloody, bare-fisted fights, gloved boxing was steadily gaining popularity in America. It was a weird bit of psychological and legal maneuvering. If you held a bare-fisted prize fight, you had to do it in secret, hiding in the back of a saloon or on a river barge, and even then it was always subject to possible police raids, which meant no “decent” person would risk attending. But if you put gloves on the same two boxers and had them fight three-minute rounds? You could literally have the fight in Madison Square Garden – and you could sell tickets to members of some of the wealthiest families in New York City.
Once the sporting capitalists of America began to catch on to this distinction that existed both in the law and the minds of the public, it was only a matter of time before they learned how to exploit it. A little bit of massaging of local statutes here, an occasional newspaper editorial suggesting that maybe boxing wasn’t so bad after all there, and what had been a seedy business funded entirely by illegal gambling became a legitimate professional sport from which real money could be made. In an increasingly urbanized America, where the Industrial Revolution had changed the very nature of work and life for so many people, gloved boxing could even be promoted as a healthy, “manly” pastime, something to counteract fears about the effects of more sedentary lives in American cities.
Much as it was for MMA a century or so later, putting on gloves, adding rules, and generally rebranding the whole thing – boxing rather than prizefighting; mixed martial arts rather than no-holds-barred – was the key to going from controversy to cash cow. And the coronation to mark this change was Sullivan’s 1892 heavyweight title fight with “Gentleman” Jim Corbett in New Orleans.
This was the consensus heavyweight title, recognized and respected by all, being contested without controversy in a gloved fight under the Marquess of Queensberry rules. It was a huge deal at the time. The Olympic Club, where the fight took place, hosted a three-day “fistic carnival” leading up to the main event. Tickets for the fight were emblazoned with images of big sacks of money to underscore the huge financial stakes – a $25,000 purse, close to a million bucks when adjusted for inflation.
Just as importantly, the fact that it was all happening on the right side of the law and in a real arena with legitimate media attention that didn’t feel the need to apologize for or explain away its own coverage of the event, that brought an air of respectability which in turn gave people permission to be excited about it. More than 10,000 people packed the Olympic Club to see the fight, with even the cheapest tickets costing more than $100 in today’s money.
The fight signaled the end of the bare-knuckle era in boxing. It was also the end of Sullivan’s reign as heavyweight champ. He was an aging slugger feeling the effects of years of hard-living (Sullivan loved to drink, and training camp was as much about drying him out as it was whipping him into shape), while Corbett was more of a pure boxer with real art and science to his style. Because the bout had no limit in terms of rounds, Corbett spent the first 10 or so frames avoiding Sullivan’s offense and tiring him out without doing too much attacking of his own. People booed him for this, naturally, because some things in the fight game never change. Sullivan even allegedly yelled at him to “fight like a man,” at which Corbett openly laughed. But when he finally decided to turn it on he had no trouble picking Sullivan apart before eventually putting him down for good in Round 21. It was the first time Sullivan had ever been knocked out.
Corbett would later say that he was disgusted with the way the crowd went from cheering their hero Sullivan to immediately cheering him when he won and became champion.
“It struck me as sad to see all those thousands who had given him such a wonderful ovation when he entered the ring turning it to me now that he was down and out,” Corbett later wrote in his book.
These days Sullivan is typically thought of the standard bearer of bare-knuckle boxing. In fact, if you ask people to picture an old timey bare-knuckle boxer, the image that springs to their minds, whether they know it or not, is probably the one of Sullivan. In reality, he disliked those rules and played a pivotal role in ushering in the new ones that we use in a slightly modified form to this day. And the people who helped him do it weren’t concerned so much with boxer’s hands or their heads as they were their own wallets.