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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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