As violent as boxing is, it's very rare for fighters to die. Same for Football. Mountain climbing, rock climbing, downhill skiing and snowboarding are more dangerous, but the dangers get much less media attention than the attention over football concussions.
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There's no way that those other sports are more dangerous than boxing. That's ludicrous. About 5-10 people die per year from boxing [1], while about 1 in 1.06 million people die per day of skiing [2]. That same source estimates that 1 in 1.2 million boxers die per minute in the ring.
1. http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_svinth_a_0700.htm
2. https://www.nsaa.org/media/68045/NSAA-Facts-About-Skiing-Sno...
I've been downhill skiing most of my life and in all that time on the slopes I've never once sustained an injury as severe as getting punched in the face.
You could very easily get hurt more in a minute of boxing than in a lifetime of skiing. It seems crazy to me too to state that the former is less dangerous than the latter. The statistics bear it out, too.
> I've been downhill skiing most of my life and in all that time on the slopes I've never once sustained an injury as severe as getting punched in the face.
I think you're right about injury rates of skiing vs boxing, but I don't find your anecdote convincing. One could just as easily say, "I've been free-solo rock climbing for a decade and I've never gotten more than a blister." Different sports have different distributions of injuries. In some, you're perfectly fine until you're dead. In others, you slowly accumulate damage. Because of this, it's better to ignore anecdotes (even ones involving lifetime experience) and look at stats.
I've read that bare knucke boxing has lower death rates compared to traditional boxing due to the addition of gloves.
FORCE = MASS X ACCELERATION.
The extra mass is something the skull and brain cannot take. Also, the protection of the weapon (hands) assures fights go on linger than in bare knucke boxing. There is conflicting evidence however.
The point of boxing gloves is to protect your hands, not your opponent's brain. Hands aren't meant for punching, and repeatedly smacking them with great force into the hard skull of your opponent can easily damage them.
I suspect bare knuckle boxing is less satisfying (and thus less popular) because fights can end merely because one person can no longer effectively attack, rather than when one person is conclusively defeated by being knocked out. The KO is always the most widely satisfying finish in boxing and MMA.
> Hands aren't meant for punching
Actually...
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-human-fi...
Very interesting. That's a hypothesis from just last year that doesn't yet have widespread scientific support though, so the jury's now out.
They are less satisfying, but not for that reason so much.
Bare-knuckle fights can go on for a long, long time. I can't find the source just now, but I recall some fights went on for up to 24 hours.
That doesn't televise well.
Not quite. When your hands are not protected you avoid hitting hard stuff.
Gloves allow head blows. Now the human body's ability to take blunt force damage is very high, when not hitting the balls or the head. So you get longer and not as spectacular fights.
Same with professional football compared to rugby of old. (although it seems rugby after 90s have similar problems after the sport tried to become more spectacular).
The explanation I heard for that is that a bare knuckle boxer would be a fool to aim for his opponent's skull, as it would more likely break their hand than knock out their opponent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer's_fracture)
There is an old brawler's adage that you should never hit somebody in the head with your fist unless you can't find something harder to use.
Bare-knuckle boxers trained to throw punches that wouldn't connect bone-on-bone, and thus end up breaking their hands. Barring that kind of injury, bare-knuckle boxing matches often went 20, 30, 40, 50 rounds, until somebody did throw a bad punch and disable themselves, or somebody fell over from exhaustion.
Not disputing the basic thesis here, but it's worth noting that comparing days skiing to time spent in the ring is somewhat specious.
As I understand it (boxing's not my martial art of choice but I know a bit about it), boxers spend most of their time training, not fighting competitively. Per year, you might well find a professional skiier spends more days skiing than a professional boxer spends minutes in the ring.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/Boxing/comments/24r83s/how_many_fig...
I am, of course, assuming that professional skiiers ski a lot, but that seems like a reasonable assumption :)
And they're also activities with significantly lower amounts of brain damage. Ignoring the fact that you're watching poor, likely minority kids give each other brain damage isn't part of watching a snowboarding competition.
Hmm, the lifetime expectancy for football players is surely lower than those others? Football doesn't need to kill you outright to harm you the most.
Killed by gravity versus killed by the other players, makes it much less a human story.