Boxing: From Bare Knuckles to the Queensberry Rules

On 8 July 1889, in a field at Richburg, Mississippi, John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain fought for the heavyweight championship with their bare hands: 75 rounds, two hours and sixteen minutes in the July heat, until Kilrain's corner gave up. Both men were arrested afterwards. Three years later Sullivan put on five-ounce gloves, stepped into a ring in New Orleans opposite a bank clerk named James J. Corbett, and was knocked out in the 21st round. Sullivan was the first American sports celebrity and the last man to defend the heavyweight title with his bare hands. Corbett's sport is the one we still watch.

The short answer to why boxing looks the way it does is three sets of rules, each built on the last. Jack Broughton wrote the first in 1743, after killing a man in the ring. The London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 tidied up bare-knuckle fighting without changing its nature. And the Marquess of Queensberry Rules of 1867, drafted by a Cambridge athlete for amateurs and named after a nobleman, put gloves on the fighters' hands, a clock on the rounds and a ten-second count on the floor. The road runs from a Sumerian relief to that night in New Orleans, and the frame it ends with is the one every ring sport still uses.

Key facts

Oldest evidence

Sumerian relief, c. 3000 BC; Egyptian tomb paintings, c. 2000 BC

Ancient Olympics

Boxing added 688 BC; fought with leather thongs (himantes)

First champion of England

James Figg, recognised 1719

First written rules

Broughton's Rules, 16 August 1743

Modern rules

Marquess of Queensberry Rules, 1867: gloves, 3-minute rounds, 10-count

Last bare-knuckle title fight

Sullivan v. Kilrain, 8 July 1889, 75 rounds

The ancient world: fists, thongs and the caestus

The oldest picture of a boxing match is about five thousand years old. It is a Sumerian relief from Mesopotamia, carved around 3000 BC, and it shows two men squaring up with clenched hands. Egyptian tomb paintings at Beni Hasan, from about 2000 BC, show boxers and wrestlers in rows; a Minoan fresco from the island of Thera, painted around 1600 BC, shows two boys boxing with what look like gloves on one hand. People have fought with their fists for as long as they have had fists. By then, other people had started watching.

The Greeks made it a sport. Pygmachia, fist fighting, joined the Olympic Games in 688 BC, and the first recorded champion, Onomastos of Smyrna, is credited by later writers with drawing up its rules. Greek boxers wrapped their hands and forearms in leather thongs, the himantes, soft at first and, by the fourth century BC, hardened. There were no rounds, no weight classes and no ring; a fight ended when one man raised a finger to concede or could not go on. Homer put a boxing match into the Iliad, at the funeral games of Patroclus, and the philosopher-boxer became a Greek ideal.

Rome kept the fights and lost the ideal. Roman boxers fought with the caestus, a glove of leather strips that could be loaded with metal, and matches in the arena were often to the death. When the Christian emperor Theodosius abolished the Olympic Games in AD 393, boxing went with them. For more than a thousand years the sport left almost no trace in Europe.

Georgian England: the prize ring

When boxing came back, it came back as a joke. In January 1681 a London newspaper reported a match “between the Duke of Albemarle's footman and a butcher”. The butcher won. Within a generation fist fighting for money was a fixture of London life, staged at fairs and in yards, backed by gamblers and, increasingly, by aristocrats who liked to see their man win.

The first name in the story is James Figg (c. 1684–1734), a swordsman, cudgel fighter and boxer from Oxfordshire who opened an amphitheatre off Oxford Road in London around 1719 and advertised himself as “master of the noble science of defence”. He is remembered as the first champion of England. Figg fought perhaps 270 times and claimed to have lost once. His pupil George Taylor kept the amphitheatre after him, and it was there that the sport's first lawgiver made his name.

Jack Broughton (1704–1789) was a Thames waterman, champion from the 1730s and, by every account, the best fighter of his age. In 1741 he beat George Stevenson so badly that Stevenson died a few days later. Broughton, shaken, sat down and wrote the rules. Broughton's Rules, published on 16 August 1743, gave a fallen man thirty seconds to come back to the mark in the centre of the square, forbade hitting a man who was down, and banned grabbing below the waist. He also invented the mufflers, padded gloves for his academy, so that gentlemen could learn without “the inconvenience of black eyes, broken jaws and bloody noses”. Championship fights stayed bare-knuckle. But the glove had entered the sport, by the back door, for the pupils.

Broughton's reign ended in 1750, when he lost to Jack Slack in front of his patron, the Duke of Cumberland. The Duke had bet heavily on him and, furious, had Broughton's amphitheatre closed and boxing declared illegal. It stayed illegal, technically, for a century. This changed nothing, except that the fights moved to open fields beyond the reach of the nearest magistrate.

The scientific school: Mendoza, Cribb and Molineaux

Until the 1780s the champion was usually the strongest man in the ring. Daniel Mendoza (1764–1836), a Jewish boxer from London's East End, weighed around 73 kilograms and could not out-muscle anyone, so he learned to move: side-stepping, ducking, the straight left, the guard. His three fights with Richard Humphries in 1788, 1789 and 1790, lost, won, won, were the first great boxing rivalry, watched by thousands and reported like news. His book The Art of Boxing (1789) taught the “scientific” style to a generation, and he was champion from 1792 to 1795. He was also the first fighter the English public knew by name.

The next great rivalry crossed the Atlantic. Tom Molineaux, a former slave from Virginia who had won his freedom, it is said, with his fists, came to England and challenged the champion, Tom Cribb. Their first fight, in December 1810, is one of boxing's disputed decisions: Molineaux had Cribb helpless in the 28th round, the timekeeping was stretched in Cribb's favour, and Cribb recovered to win in the 35th. The rematch at Thistleton Gap on 28 September 1811 drew a crowd estimated at 20,000 and ended when Cribb broke Molineaux's jaw in the 11th round. Molineaux died in Ireland in 1818, poor and forgotten. The fight is remembered as the first international championship.

By then boxing had the shape it would keep for seventy years: a ring of ropes and stakes, seconds and bottle-holders, the “scratch” line in the middle, betting on every round. The Pugilistic Club of 1814 supervised the prize ring, and in 1838 the London Prize Ring Rules replaced Broughton's: a 24-foot roped ring, rounds that ended with a fall, thirty seconds' rest and eight more to come up to scratch, and a ban on kicking, biting, butting and gouging. It was still a sport in which a round could last five seconds or half an hour.

1867: the Queensberry Rules

The rules that ended the prize ring were not written for prize fighters. In the 1860s a Cambridge-educated athlete named John Graham Chambers, founder of the Amateur Athletic Club in London, drafted twelve rules to make boxing acceptable as a gentleman's sport. His friend John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, a sporting nobleman later notorious for his feud with Oscar Wilde, put his name and his patronage to them, and the Marquess of Queensberry Rules were published in 1867. Chambers did the work. The Marquess got the title page.

Their content is the sport as we know it. Fighters wear “fair-sized boxing gloves of the best quality”. Rounds last three minutes with one minute's rest, so the clock decides when a round ends, not a knock-down. A man who is down has ten seconds to get up unaided, or the fight is over. Wrestling and hugging are forbidden, and the fight takes place in a 24-foot ring. The rules also, for the first time, imply weight classes, which were formalised over the following decades.

They spread first through amateur clubs, then through the Amateur Boxing Association, founded in England in 1880, and through the National Sporting Club, founded in London in 1891, which ran professional boxing under Queensberry Rules with a referee, a timekeeper and the decorum of a gentlemen's club. The prize fighters resisted. The public still paid to see bare-knuckle fights, and gloves and short rounds favoured a different kind of fighter: faster, fitter, more technical. That fighter was on his way.

Sullivan, Corbett and the end of bare knuckles

The matter was decided in America, where the prize ring had migrated with Irish and English immigrants and where the sport was, in most states, illegal. John L. Sullivan (1858–1918), the “Boston Strong Boy”, won the heavyweight championship from Paddy Ryan in 1882 in a bare-knuckle fight and then spent the decade touring, offering money to any man who could last four rounds with him under Queensberry Rules, with gloves. He was the first American sports celebrity, and he fought both ways.

Richburg, 8 July 1889, was the last time he fought the old way. Sullivan against Jake Kilrain under London Prize Ring Rules, bare knuckles, 75 rounds, two hours and sixteen minutes, until Kilrain's corner gave up and the law came for both of them. It was the last bare-knuckle heavyweight championship fight. Three years later, on 7 September 1892, at the Olympic Club in New Orleans, Sullivan met James J. Corbett under Queensberry Rules, with five-ounce gloves and three-minute rounds. Corbett, a bank clerk who had learned the scientific style, boxed circles around the older, heavier champion and knocked him out in the 21st round. The bare-knuckle era was over. From that night on, the gloved champion was the champion.

The sport takes shape

Everything since has been refinement. Boxing entered the modern Olympic Games at St. Louis in 1904 and London in 1908, and, apart from Stockholm in 1912, where Swedish law banned it, has been on every programme since; women's boxing joined in 2012. The eight classical weight divisions, from flyweight to heavyweight, were fixed in the early 20th century, and the National Sporting Club's belt, first awarded in 1909, became the Lonsdale Belt.

The professional sport grew its own governance. New York's Walker Law of 1920 legalised boxing with a state commission and made the state the sport's capital. The National Boxing Association, founded in 1921, became the World Boxing Association in 1962, and the World Boxing Council (1963), the International Boxing Federation (1983) and the World Boxing Organization (1988) followed, which is why one division can have four “world champions”. Championship fights were fifteen rounds until Kim Duk-koo died after a fifteen-round title bout in November 1982; the WBC cut its title fights to twelve rounds, and the other bodies followed by the end of the decade.

What has not changed since 1867 is the frame. Three-minute rounds, the minute's rest, the ten-count, gloves, a referee who can stop it: a member of the National Sporting Club would recognise a bout in Las Vegas tonight. Muay Thai, kickboxing and mixed martial arts all borrowed that frame when they wrote their own rules. A history of boxing is also the first chapter of the history of every modern ring sport.

Where to go next

• The boxing discipline hub gathers training articles, workouts and gear.
• Technique that Mendoza would recognise: The Jab: Five Most Common Mistakes and Shadow Boxing With Purpose.
• Conditioning: Heavy Bag Intervals.
• How Siam wrote its rules in the same decades: The History of Muay Thai.