The trainer then made a tear in one of his fighter's gloves, delaying the start of the next round and allowing Ali to regain his senses.
The bell rang; the fighters touched gloves.
The trainer Teddy Atlas said boxing insiders debated whether fighters loaded gloves back in the 1920s, even enlarging grainy photographs.
Round 3. The fighters touch gloves and do a mini-embrace at the start of the round, after a war of words before the fight.
All were wearing the new Blaze Fighter model of gloves; in each instance, the gloves themselves were not damaged.
Mr. Johnson, a longtime boxing fan whose father had been a Golden Gloves fighter, said he froze.
Also, the promoter had given his word that he would pit Kostya against a young fighter, a Golden Gloves champion, handled by smart people, expected to go far.
But for Kaine, who has never had much of a reputation as a street fighter, pulling the gloves off seems a bit of a struggle.
It's still funny because there is an implicit setup: our default condition of how the world is usually ordered, in which fighters have boxing gloves only on their hands and there are no maze taxis for mice.
Two other events were especially violent: boxing, for which the fighters wore not gloves but tightly wrapped leather thongs, and the pankration ("total force" or "no holds barred"), in which the only tactics forbidden were biting and eye-gouging.
