拳击规则的起源

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries boxing was huge, but it was bare-knuckle boxing, prize fighting or "pugilism", from the Latin for "fist". Professor Robert Coles of Leicester University explains.

Prize fighting was, of course, extremely violent and punishing. But it is hailed by press. It wasn't as bad as some historians and certainly some journalists have accused it of being. Firstly, there were rules to prize fighting. And the first rules were drawn up by a man called Broughton who had a ring near Oxford Street and those rules were brought up in 1743. There were seven rules. The two that count, are that you couldn't hit a man below the belt or the scarf, and the second was you couldn't hit a man when he was down. Those rules were revised in 1839 to include the banning of any kind of gouging, biting or strangling. Thank goodness for that. The second thing I'd like to say about prize fighting is that although we read the counts of many, many dozens of rounds, you have to remember that under the London rules, a fighter could go down on one knee at any point as if by a blow, and that would allow him a 30-second breather before coming back to the mark. This is important because it allowed the fighter to dictate the pace of the fight which Queensberry which insisted on the three-minute round did not do.