Championship Streetfighting: Boxing as a Martial Art

heavy armor obsolete, they also made battle-axes, morningstars, and similar heavy, hand-carried weapons less desirable.What was needed were a fast and light sword and an efficientway to fight with it. Thus was born modern fencing; that is,swordfighting based not on the hack-and-slash tactics of a manin armor, but rather on speed, footwork, and, above all, thestraight lunge. From fencers, fistfighters in the West learned tothrow straight punches—the basis of modern boxing.James Figg, an 18th-century Englishman, is usually consideredto have been the first heavyweight boxing championand the father of modern boxing. Figg developed the fundamentalsof effective fistfighting: straight punches that landwith bone-breaking force and the skills of slipping andblocking necessary to defend against those punches.Figg fought not only in the prize ring for sport andmoney, but also in the streets for survival. His techniques offist fighting were as applicable in hand-to-hand combat asthey were between the ropes. It was no accident, then, thatJames Figg was a master of many forms of combat. Hetaught fencing, the broadsword, and the quarterstaff in additionto boxing.London in the mid-1700s was a big, booming internationalport, and there were no such things as policemen. Itcould be a dangerous place for those who didn’t know howto defend themselves. Figg realized that we don’t always havea weapon on hand, and sometimes we must fight unarmed.Therefore he developed boxing as an effective means ofstreetfighting without weapons. Figg made a good living byteaching English gentlemen how to defend themselvesagainst ruffians and riffraff by means of knockout punches.From those beginnings under James Figg, boxing grewmore and more popular, both as a sport and a practicalmeans of self-defense. In England and America, it alwaysused to be that when someone “knew how to fight,” thatmeant that he knew how to box.WHY BOXING?5