BOXING

                         BOXING

BOXING

BOXING  sport, both amateur and professional, involving attack and defense with the fists. Boxers usually wear padded gloves and generally observe the code set forth in the marquess of Queensberry rules. Matched in weight and ability, boxing contestants try to land blows hard and often with their fists, each attempting to avoid the blows of the opponent. A boxer wins a match either by outscoring the opponent—points can be tallied in several ways—or by rendering the opponent incapable of continuing the match. Bouts range from 3 to 12 rounds, each round normally lasting three minutes.

The terms pugilism and prizefighting in modern usage are practically synonymous with boxing, although the first term indicates the ancient origins of the sport in its derivation from the Latin pugil, a boxer, related to the Latin pugnus, fist, and derived in turn from the Greek pyx, with clenched fist. The term prizefighting emphasizes pursuit of the sport for monetary gain, which began in England in the 17th century.

The man who made boxing into big business was George (Tex) Rickard, the sport's first great promoter. After staging the world's lightweight championship bout between Joe Gans and Oscar (Battling) Nelson to publicize the mining town of Goldfield, Nevada, in 1906, he realized the potential of prizefighting. Rickard made an art of boxing publicity, playing on the public's prejudices to boost interest and ticket sales. Five of the bouts that he promoted for Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion from 1919 to 1926, each grossed more than $1 million. In the Great Depression years that followed Dempsey's retirement, receipts from boxing dwindled. Then in 1935 promoter Mike Jacobs signed Joe Louis to a contract, launching a new era of prosperity in the sport. Louis's career purses totaled more than $5 million.

After World War II television took on an increasingly important role in professional boxing. Because of its popularity and relatively low production costs compared with other sports, professional boxing became a regular feature of network programming throughout much of the 1950s and early '60s. The televising of boxing led to the demise of many boxing clubs, which had been the training ground for young fighters. Therefore, in place of carefully trained boxers brought up slowly through the club system, televised boxing led to a preference for sometimes poorly trained, stylish boxers who had a showy knockout punch but fewer defensive skills. Mismatches were inevitable, which further harmed the sport. Eventually, there was so much televised boxing shown that it led to saturation and created a dilution of the talent pool; that is, there were not enough gifted boxers available to appear in the many bouts scheduled. Moreover, the televising of boxers being beaten into a coma, sometimes fatally, especially in the instance of Benny (Kid) Paret, further damaged the sport with the viewing public. After a period of decline, boxing enjoyed a television revival when five American boxers (Leo Randolph, Howard Davis, brothers Michael and Leon Spinks, and Sugar Ray Leonard) won gold medals in the 1976 Olympics and turned professional following those games. The success of the 1976 movie Rocky, the widespread popularity of Muhammad Ali, and the advent of cable television in the United States also greatly increased boxing's presence on television.