THE FIGHT GAME

Boxing is considered to be one of the oldest known sports, with Two Thousand year old paintings on the walls of tombs in Egypt and stone carvings showing  that ancient Sumerians, who lived in what is now Iraq, boxed at least Five Thousand years ago.

Boxing began as a brutal and exhausting spectacle. In ancient Greece, 2 men would sit face to face with their fists wrapped in strips of leather. They would strike each other until one of them fell to the ground unconscious--or dead. Roman fighters wore cestuses (leather straps plated with metal) to help shorten the length of the bouts. Shortly before the birth of Christ, Romans banned boxing, because the sport had become so brutal.

Boxing all but disappeared until the late 1600s, when it re-emerged again in England. Modern boxing was introduced there in the early 1700s, with bare-knuckle bouts that continued without respite until one fighter could no longer keep going. Boxing was made a bit less savage in 1743, when the London Prize Ring Rules were enacted. The bouts were still continuous, but a fight ended when one competitor was knocked down and could not get up within thirty seconds.

In the mid-1850s, British boxers visited the USA and tried to create interest in the art, but many Americans opposed the bare-knuckle sport, and the last such fight, a seventy-five round main event, took place in 1889. A British sportsman, the Marquess of Queensberry, formulated a set of tournament rules in which boxers were required to wear gloves and fight 3 minute rounds with a 1 minute rest period between rounds.