It’s long been assumed that we’re stuck with this amount of risk, and that current levels of brain trauma are intrinsic to boxing and MMA. I don’t think that’s true at all. A huge percentage of this head trauma goes back to a single, simple mistake. In an effort to civilize combat sports, authorities mandated padded gloves and instantly made the sports far more savage. Granted, putting gloves on the hands seems like a nice thing to do. If you were being punched in the brain by a powerful man, wouldn’t you rather he strap a pillow around his fist? But the glove doesn’t do anything to diminish your brain damage. In fact, it magnifies it massively, because your opponent can then throw his hands around with wild abandon, punching from all angles — using the kinds of punches that you could never throw with bare fists without destroying your hands and crippling yourself in the course of a fight.
If you took the gloves off, you’d change the sport. You’d no longer see windmilling, Roy Nelson-style overhand rights being thrown. You’d see far fewer hook punches thrown. It would revert to a much simpler bag of techniques that was closer to the repertoire of old-fashioned bare-knuckle, and you would see a lot more grappling.
So BJJ guys, for instance, would be much more competitive, because you couldn’t just beat them to death from the top position. And BJJ guys could also attack more effectively, because bulky gloves make for clumsy grappling and give the opponent a good handle to grab onto. (Just to give one example, the rear naked choke has become harder and harder to finish in MMA because defenders just grab onto one of the attacker’s hands with both of theirs and hold on for dear life. The glove provides the grip that makes this defense possible.)
Fighting bare-handed would also move the UFC back to what it originally was — a pretty good simulation of an actual fight. Putting on gloves is completely artificial. You are basically giving the fighters weapons that allow them to do more damage, and this completely changes the character of a human fistfight.
[...]
It was a great PR move, sort of like the football helmet. The football helmet was a way of making kids safer, or so they thought. It was a well-intended humanitarian gesture, but it was a horrible mistake. It made football more dangerous.
You would diminish the risk in MMA to an acceptable level if you just took off the gloves. This would reduce the violence from an insane, NFL level to a rugby level. You would still have a rough, tough, bloody sport that really tests its fighters, but you wouldn’t introduce silly risks that don’t need to be there.
In the bare-knuckle era, championship fights were scheduled for 45 rounds. Very few head shots, mostly body shots. The liver was a favorite target. Of course, you wouldn’t have the erotic pleasure of a Tyson or Foreman crushing an opponent.
I agree with you on football, too. Get rid of the pads and helmets, and use Rugby type uniforms. You can still have blocking and tackling, and long runs and passes. In fact, football without the pads and helmets would almost certainly be much more open and fluid game, with deep plays and higher scoring.
Non-grapplers don’t like to watch grappling.
UFC rules are about making grappling as unappealing an option for the fighters as possible. Fighters use the cage to avoid grappling and the refs stand the fighters up after a very short amount of time with no “action” (there could very well be plenty of setups for submissions or position advancement and the fighters will still get stood up).
Stuff that I thought that everybody with any interest in the topics knew.
Yes, MMA fans in particular have been pointing out that boxing gloves are more dangerous for years.