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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

There's one simple way to drastically reduce the amount of brain damage caused by fighting: take off the gloves. Padded gloves and taped wrists allow fighters to throw punches that would never work in a real fight. Without gloves, punching someone in the forehead is a reliable way to hyperextend your wrist or break your hand. Taken in this light, gloves are a weapon. Remove them and fighters would be forced to avoid much of the head.

Of course, gloves won't go away. Boxing would be less entertaining without them. People don't want to see fights stopped due to broken hands. They don't want to see disfigured faces (which are practically guaranteed in a bare-knuckle stand-up fight). People want to see spectacular haymakers. They want to see punches flying left and right. Most of all, people want to see knock-outs.

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> There's one simple way to drastically reduce the amount of brain damage caused by fighting: take off the gloves.

Well, that and not doing the thing to begin with. This and almost all things to do with Everest are similar. They're non-problems.

I think this is too clever-its like the people who claim football will be safer without pads, just like rugby. It ignores that a lot of brain damage is apparently from sub concussive hits, like when two linemen collide into each other. Boxing sans gloves sounds like a solution, but I'd want to be sure there isn't any other way to get brain damage, and that its not just a feel good solution.

Nothing is going to eliminate risk in boxing. It's a dangerous sport and the audience likes it that way. There are several ways to reduce the risk, but boxers will still pay a high price with their bodies. Gloves change the risk from surface and flesh injuries to deeper harm, such as concussions.

Seriously ? gloves cause more damages than they avoid ? I'd never thought a fist would suffer against a skull, and that without gloves it would be a blood bath.

Not directly. Rather, gloves protect your hands, allowing you to punch much harder than you could without them. They don't do much to protect the receiving skull.

I'd really hoped they were design to limit damages, diffusing the energy on a larger surface. I was worried that wave could cause a different kind of harm, instead of breaking a jaw, you'd break a neck or cause brain movements.

Anyway, it's still disturbing.

Well, I'm sure there is an effect of diffusing the energy. However, it's completely cancelled out (and more) by making the puncher punch much harder.

They DO limit damage. They make cuts less frequent.

But they also increase the frequency of concussive hits.

Spreading the impact across a larger surface doesn't matter to the other guy's brain. His skull is rigid and is going to distribute the force across the brain anyway. What matters is the total energy transfer. The glove will dissipate some of he energy of the punch by deforming, but it's not rigid so that's not going to be much.

If you look at "old timey" boxing pictures, you'll see that their stance is very different. Rather than protecting their chin and their jaw, they're protecting their upper body because that's where most of the hits would go to. People ONLY started dying in boxing once gloves were introduced.

A punch against a hard surface -- like a skull -- not only conducts point impacts to fragile bone, but shear loads the proximal-interphalangeal joints, making it a good way to break bone and dislocate joints.

The padding of a boxing glove protects the hands, not the skull; the same amount of force is being transferred to the skull, so the brain undergoes the exact same impact as it would without the gloves. By making it safer for a boxer to strike the skull of an opponent, gloves are pretty much tailor-made for encouraging concussive injury.

It also seems that people think that Rugby is more dangerous than American Football, what with the general lack of protective gear. But that doesn't seem to be the case, either.

It's a well known fact that boxing gloves protect the hands first. Do they provide some protection to the head? Sure. Not really in terms of padding, but in making cuts less likely.

In other words, gloves prevent the two things that end boxing matches: broken hands and severe cuts, shut eyes etc, but do relatively little to prevent the actual impact of a blow to the brain

So it's no secret in the world of boxing that fights with gloves create fights that otherwise would be rare (12 rounds, back in the day even 15), radically increasing the damage that 'counts', which isn't the cut or the broken hand, but the permanent brain damage.

Everyone in boxing knows this. But to remove gloves is to turn it into a fundamentally different game, everything changes. It is truly a cruel sport, but also one that brings great enjoyment to millions of people including myself. It's definitely one of those things on my list of things where in 100 years, I wouldn't be surprised if we looked at it and thought 'man that was crazy, being gay was considered a psychological disease, we ran cars on oil and we had boxing gladiator matches? insane'.

> So it's no secret in the world of boxing that fights with gloves create fights that otherwise would be rare (12 rounds, back in the day even 15), radically increasing the damage that 'counts', which isn't the cut or the broken hand, but the permanent brain damage.

This is straight-up backwards, if you're arguing that gloves extended the length of matches. It was not uncommon for bare-knuckle boxing matches in the 1800s to go 30, 40, 50, even over 100 rounds, until someone collapsed in exhaustion or broke too many bones in their hands from badly-placed punches to the bonier parts of their opponent.

Because those fights are fought under different rules and with different styles because of the gloves. Many bare knuckle fights that'd last hours were because they lasted until either someone was dead or unconscious or quit, the notion of a ref stopping the fight once someone got a harsh cut didn't exist. Beyond that, because of the risk of punching e.g. the jaw without gloves (it'll break your hand fairly quickly) punches were directed more at the body, hence the boxing stance where the hands weren't close to the head as much to protect it as it wasn't necessarily the prime target in the bulk of the match.

Of course it'll last longer, doesn't mean it'd last longer under similar rules and fighting styles as boxing is today.

My point is that 15 rounds of the type of punch volume to the head simply wouldn't occur without gloves. It might still be a long fight, but you won't get anywhere near the same type of volume to the head. Hell back in the day there was grappling, kicks and arm locks back in the day. Similar perhaps to MMA, punching the face wasn't nearly as big a thing as it is in boxing today, and a big part of that is because of modern rules as well as boxing gloves.

And again as I mentioned earlier, it's not the broken hands that count. (they can cause permanent damage, yes). It's the permanent brain damage that is the biggest concern, and that risk has increased much more now that gloves make it possible to throw hundreds of punches to the jaw and not injure your hands.

If you're trying to argue that I said that gloves extend fights longer than they did under bare-knuckle rules, you're right, that's not true and that wasn't my point. What I meant to say is that they extend the fights in which fighters mostly punch to the face much longer than they normally could, and radically increase the volume of punches to the face (without reducing the impact to the brain, instead, increasing it, as the weight of the gloves increases the impact).

Although I think it's probably possible to contest the following quote, it's not far from the truth and illustrates the differences a bit:

> As the bare-knuckle campaigner Dr Alan J Ryan pointed out: "In 100 years of bare-knuckle fighting in the United States, which terminated around 1897 with a John L Sullivan heavyweight championship fight, there wasn't a single ring fatality." Today, there are three or four every year in the US, and around 15 per cent of professional fighters suffer some form of permanent brain damage during their career.

Timely vine : https://vine.co/v/e7VX1W1OOVv (yes, mayweather/pacquiao)

This is a variation of "driving would be safer without seatbelts" argument. I.e. because you'd be forced to drive more cautiously.

Problem 1: You don't know what the other guy would do (they might be a "crazy" outlier) and it protects you from them.

Problem 2: Probably people would drive a little more cautiously on average, but not a LOT more cautiously. (As evidenced by historical behavior before seatbelts were required.) Whereas the severity of injuries would skyrocket.

> This is a variation of "driving would be safer without seatbelts" argument. I.e. because you'd be forced to drive more cautiously.

No, it is not a variation of that. Your argument relies on a change in behavior in response to increased risk. (A change that may or may not occur.) The OP's argument does not require a change in behavior. The point is that boxers without gloves could go on behaving as though they have gloves on and then they'll break their damn hands (preventing 12 rounds of concussive blows to their opponent's brain).

As others have argued below: gloves protect hands not heads.

"Without gloves, punching someone in the forehead is a reliable way to hyperextend your wrist or break your hand."

That is precisely an argument that relies on a change in behavior in response to increased risk. I think you misunderstood the OP's argument.

No, without the glove a boxer cannot do as much damage. The glove makes the hand much more powerful. Now a punch is only limited by arm strength and skill. Take the glove off and the boxer can either wreck his hand, or punch differently, which he would have learned in practice.

"Take the glove off and the boxer can either wreck his hand, or punch differently"

That is a change in behavior to avoid risking injury to the hand and face! Can we agree on that?

You are arguing that overall injury is increased by using gloves because of the greater frequency and magnitude of punches, despite less severe injury per punch. But that is precisely the no seat belts argument too.

Gloves reduce the risk of injury to the hand and disfiguration of the face, just as seat belts reducing bodily injury in an accident. The argument then goes, seat belts encourage us to drive faster and increase the overall number of accidents, which in the end cause a greater amount of injury. That is the parallel with gloved punching. If we didn't have seat belts, we'd drive slower, because you'd get so messed up if you had an accident. That is the parallel with OP's no-gloves argument.

That argument seems plausible on the surface but as we know from seat belts, it has some problems which I've stated earlier.

Without gloves you could only punch someone in the forehead so many times before your hand starts to hurt/gets injured. With gloves you can go all day.

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