| Boxing Essay, Research Paper
Olympic Boxing: A Brutal Sport Turned Olympic
Back in the Stone Age, thousands and thousands of years ago, the people didn t have much to do for entertainment so they invented a life or death sport which we know today as, boxing.
There is a lot of history on top of boxing. The sport started thousands of years ago, it grew and grew in popularity until it reached its peak in the 1930 s. Boxing was one of the most brutal sports ever played. Boxing used to be played by two men who would stand on large flat stones and throw punches at each other until on was knocked unconscious, after one was knocked down the opponent would continue to beat away and the helpless man until he was dead. Later in the years people started to put spikes on their gloves so the game ended faster (NBColympics.com:boxing).
Boxing is a very easy to understand sport, because the rules are just so easy to understand. Olympic Boxing is graded by a point system and the more successful punches you throw the more points you get and the one with the most points at the end wins. Points aren t the only way to win and certainly isn t the most popular, you can win by a knockout where you knock you opponent down on the floor for 10 seconds, a technical knockout (TKO) where the referee decides when a boxer is unable to continue fighting, or a draw. The matches and the titles are divided up into weight classes; they do it this way so that you don t have a massive two-thirty pound man fighting a one hundred pound featherweight. The basic rules of today s boxing are, obey the referee at all times, no punches below the waist line, and to throw clean jabs that are only necessary to win the match (Olympics.com:boxing)
There isn t a lot of equipment used in boxing, basically all the athletes wear gloves and shorts. The first thing that a boxer puts on his hands is a cloth wrapped around it for cushioning, then when that is done, a padded glove is put on over the cloth. The boxer wears a special headgear that pads him and makes sure his ears and jaw don t get hurt. Boxing is done in a square ring surrounded by elastic ropes; the ring platform is sixteen to twenty four feet on each side. The time periods in boxing are divided up into rounds. Each round lasts two to three minutes. There are six to fifteen rounds in a match with one-minute breaks in between rounds (World Book 436).
A good boxer has to have these special traits, strength, quickness, skill, and they have to be in top physical condition. They have to have the courage and determination to fight while enduring massive amounts of pain. One of the greatest boxers in all of history is Muhammad Ali, he acquired the famous phrase flies like a butterfly and stings like a bee. Another one of the great boxers of history is George Forman, who has been champion 3 times. A recent boxer who has been disqualified from the Olympics is Evander Holyfield. Some of the newer, younger boxers from this years Olympics are Michael Bennett, Felix Savon , Jose Navarro, Hicham Mesbahi, and David Jackson (Olympics.com:boxing).
Boxing, from which in the Stone Age was one of the most brutal sports around, today its popularity continues to grow more and more every single year.
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