That doesn’t make sense to me. They wear pads and gear because checking is an integral part of the sport. Dropping gloves to pound on each other does not sound safer than something designed in.
Just as a friendly reminder: this thread is about the expressions “handle with kid gloves” and “take off the gloves.” And about the Staff Report (brilliant, just brillaint) thereunto. OK, we’re not against tangents and asides, but a genuine discussion about boxing and refs and rules enforcement probably belongs in the forum called The Game Room.
You guys lost me with hockey. 
I can’t believe I’m actually defending fighting in hockey, a practice I deplore. But these are the arguments in favor of it:
A) The people involved in a fight tend to be the ones most experienced in such matters; several teams employ players whose hockey skills are somewhat lacking but whose fighting skills make opposing players think twice about committing a violation.
B) The most skilled players on the team tend to be the least durable, so if two teams can settle their differences by letting their enforcers duke it out, it’s a hell of a lot better for all parties involved than risking superstars being seriously injured by a retaliatory hit.
C) A player engaged in a fistfight knows he is about to be punched and can prepare accordingly; a player blindsided into the halfboards by a charging opponent risks significant injury, both short-term and long-term.
If you wish to further respond to these issues, perhaps we ought to take it to another thread.
Powers &8^]
The primary purpose of boxing gloves are to protect the hands. This isn’t really in question.
The problem is comes when people go from this point to assuming that boxing gloves don’t also cushion the force of the punch for the person receiving the blow, because they most certainly do. The question should be in what ways do punching with a boxing glove alter the mechanics of the punch itself (acceleration, mass, velocity, momentum are all changed), the mechanics of the collision (properties of the collision surface, through another medium) and how it affects the individual receiving the blow. There’s not much in the literature and what there is isn’t very rigorous.
So here’s a post based on anecdotes and personal experience instead. 
The statement that it hurts more to be hit with a glove than bareknuckle. This kind of notion can only be held by someone who’s never been hit hard bare knuckle or have much of a basis of comparison versus gloved hits. A bare knuckle punch to the same part of the body by the same fighter, gloves vs no gloves? No comparison - bare knuckle hurts a hell of a lot more. 8 oz competition gloves still hurts, though less of an edge. 14 oz training gloves is a pillow fight. Though I’ve never competed in kyokushin style knockdown (the most widespread form of bare knuckle fighting) I have been getting beat up boxing, kickboxing and other martial arts for almost thirty years; there’s a lot of crossover in training methodologies, particularly in Japan and Holland, where competitors more or less come from the same pool of fighters so I’ve gone against the same guys with different equipment. Three minutes of kyokushin bareknuckle knockdown is much harder on your body than three minutes of muay thai or kickboxing.
As for doing more “damage,” that’s a matter of definition and perspective. Hard weapons (knuckles/elbows) against a hard target (skull) means a lot more superficial damage. In the early, bare knuckle era of MMA, we didn’t like sending guys down to certain Brazil vale tudo events because a lot of early Brazlian vale tudo/MT guys were infamous for being able to open up dangerous, potentially fight ending cuts; a combination of hard hands and their punching style.
This point - the “hardness” of an individual’s hands is an important one. After a certain point, the brittleness of a fighter’s hands will affect his glove selection. Generally, you want the least amount of hand protection possible and there’s a wide spectrum of manufacturers and glove fittings. Reyes 8oz competition gloves are more compact, have less and denser padding on the knuckles with more weight on the wrist than the average glove. Same guy in a pair of Windys feels like he’s wearing pillows in comparison. But, these are puncher’s gloves for guys who don’t have hand injury issues. OTOH, if you’ve got brittle hands, these are definitely not the gloves for you.
To put it another way, I can tell the difference when my sparring partner is wearing 16oz instead of 14oz generic training gloves even when no one tells me. After a while, everyone can. At the 4-6-8oz level, 2 oz of padding make a tremendous difference, particularly for lower weight fighters. Anyone who’s spent some time in a ring understands, the lighter the glove, the heavier the hit. You know this because you’ve taken the hits. You can’t eat the same shots from a guy wearing 4oz MMA gloves that you can if he were wearing 8oz gloves without going down. The real interesting question is where the thresholds are. IME, 8oz is too much cushioning. They allow the recipient to eat punches that should have otherwise put him down, contributing to cumulative traumatic brain injury. 4-6oz seems to be a better compromise. Just enough to lessen the force of the impact for the fist so it doesn’t break, but no enough to cushion the blow like boxing gloves do.
Anyway, the question of whether or not a fighter “hits harder” with a glove, enough to exceed the amount of cushioning the glove provides, depends on the individual (size, build, bone structure, punching style) and the glove (brand, padding material, distribution of the padding and the weight of the glove itself).
A lot of things changed in the sport of boxing between the days of bare knuckle and now. Then, fights lasted forever and a day because of the risk of damage to their hands. Now, the fighter who wants to draw the match out longer negotiates for heavier gloves.
Re: topic, I always assumed taking off the gloves had something to do with duels and challenges. I always picture some angry, foofy haired nobleman whipping off his gloves and issuing a challenge to some other white wig wearing dude.
Note: while anecdote and personal experience are certainly relevant to boxing, they are usually NOT relevant to finding word and phrase origins. Memory is a tricky thing, and tracking down phrase origins is made much more difficult by the numerous invented stories – often very reasonable – that seem to float around. So, if we’re talking “taking off the gloves” as a phrase (which should be the topic of this thread), then personal anecdote isn’t going to be convincing.
Again, please, let’s put discussion of boxing techniques and the physics thereof in the Game Room forum.
Agreed. Especially with taking the empty glove, slapping the other party in the face, then throwing the glove in front of the challenged.
Has anybody in this discussion ever actually been in a boxing ring and/or a street fight?
One thing that is missing from the discussion is the size of the gloves. Boxers sparring in the gym use 12 or 16 oz. gloves and hand wraps as that does soften the blow to the opponent while protecting the hands. In an actual fight they use 8 oz. gloves and hand wraps. A punch that lands with an 8 oz. glove protects the boxer’s hand but has the force that any bare fist would have. Still, broken hands in fights are not uncommon. To boxing trainers the wrapping of the hands is a science. The referee has to examine the wrap before the fight and sign it with a pen.
Throw a punch to someone’s head in a street fight and you will probably sustain a fractured knuckle, a “boxers knuckle”, if not a worse fracture to the wrist. In a street fight if you throw a punch it should be to the liver. You might not break your hand and most guys are not well developed in the abdomen.
Did you even read the comments? Because apparently, you didn’t.
Louis L’Amour was the author of “The Sackett Brand”, apparently required reading for the Aryan Brotherhood AKA ‘The Brand’.
Just saying like…