Captain Barclay and Training During the Bare-Knuckle Era

Fighting comes naturally to the human animal. But that hardly means that fighting is easy. Regardless of innate athleticism and explosive strength, sincere application of study is required to master techniques and patterns of movement. Anybody who has spent any time…

The Battle of Hastings: Tom McCoy’s Tragic Death

By the early 1840s, boxing had become a critically important part of the working man, saloon culture of New…

Modern Bare-Knuckle Boxing

As a general fan of the combat sports, I will occasionally run into information about the modern, bare-knuckle boxing scene. As a…

Tom Hyer vs. Yankee Sullivan: The First American Championship Fight

The Great Mendoza-Humphries Trilogy

“It was the best of times, it was the worth of times,” Charles Dickens wrote at the start of his novel of the French Revolution, The Tale of Two Cities. And indeed, even as the French Revolution kicked off in Paris, igniting a 10-year reign of chaos and terror which…

Jack Broughton: The Father of Prizefighting

In early 18th century England, the very idea of child labor laws was still decades away. It would be another…

The Bareknuckle Rise of the Irish

This year, I happened to be in Manhattan on St. Patrick’s Day. The entire city that never sleeps was Irish, at least for the space of 24 hours. The Big Apple has been a racial melting pot since its inception, and at this point, the Irish are a well-simmered flavor in…

From Slave to Immortal to Palooka: The Triumph and Tragedy of Tom Molineaux

In early 19th England, the boxing sub-culture was an arena of radical equality and meritocracy in a world that was otherwise socially stratified to the extreme. The members of the Fancy came from…

James Figg and Prizefighting’s First Rivalry

It was the Georgian era, when the last vestiges of medieval England were crashing head on into the emerging modern world. The reigning King, George II, was the last monarch born outside of Britain, and did not even share his subject’s native tongue. He…

Characteristics of Bare-knuckling Prizefighting

The pilgrims would start their journeys days, even weeks, ahead of time. And often, as they hit the road, the ultimate destination still remained a mystery. Despite being patronized by some of the elite members of English society, even the Royal…