Boxing was one of the most popular sports practiced in ancient Greece and was one of the ancient disciplines within the Olympic Games. The Romans adopted this sport as they did with almost all Greek culture, but in Rome, the contestants wore metal shields to fight in order to protect their hands. Said protectors were called “cestus” and had nails on the outside so that more than once the rival was killed during a boxing match.
Although boxing and fighting have always been confused as interchangeable terms, they are different sports, as what was generically called fighting more often refers to wrestling. However, boxing is more than 4,000 years before Christ. The first boxing records come from Egypt and the Orient before it became a classic sport in Greece. Today boxing appears in the records after the Duke of Alberman organized a fight in England between his butler and the butcher around 1681.
From then on, boxing only appears, as we know it today until the 18th century when it was practiced for money, but boxing gloves were not yet part of a boxer’s equipment. However, it is known that the money involved in those matches came from the spectators who placed bets on the contestants.
In 1719 boxing had its first heavyweight champion, the Englishman James Figg, and another champion, John Broughton, formulated the first boxing regulations in 1743, regulations that were modified and changed for about a century.
In 1865, the Marquis of Queensberry implemented regulations that remain to this day requiring the use of gloves, hence the last bare fit heavyweight champion was John L. Sullivan who fought Jake Kilrain in 1889. Even he thought, he lost the championship in New Orleans, Louisiana on September 7, 1892 when he was defeated by James Corbett in a fight where he had to wear gloves.
The first recognized lightweight world champion was the English boxer Billy Edwards who won the title fighting against the American boxer Tom Collins, in a historic fight that began on May 24, 1871 and ended on December 6 of that same year. On the day of the fighting the police appeared and the boxers were arrested, but two days later the fight was resumed after paying S1000, but then they were taken to prison and only after appealing to the court did they regain their freedom and the right to liberty . conclude the match that year.
With the turn of the century, boxing became popular around the world and the first notable fight of 1900 took place on Coney Island with a match between Jeffries and Corbett. In 1908, Jack Johnson defeated Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, and became its first black boxer to win a heavyweight title in boxing history.
