Boxing & Combat Sports Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What name is given to the disputed seventh round of the 1927 world heavyweight rematch between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, in which Dempsey floored Tunney but, by not walking at once to a neutral corner as a new rule required, gave his opponent several extra seconds on the canvas before the referee began the ten?

Question 2

What is the medical name, more commonly called being punch-drunk, for the progressive brain damage, with slurred speech, tremor, memory loss and personality change, caused by repeated blows to the head over a fighting career?

Question 3

Which Japanese wrestling sport, deeply tied to Shinto ritual, is contested in a raised clay ring about 4.5 metres across, and is won by forcing the opponent out of the ring or making him touch the ground with any part of the body other than the soles of the feet?

Question 4

What is the name for the procedure by which a referee, judging that a boxer has been badly hurt by a punch but has not been knocked down, can step in, hold the action, and take a mandatory eight-second pause to look the fighter in the eyes and decide whether they are fit to continue?

Question 5

By what name is the 1997 world heavyweight rematch between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield known, which ended in the third round when Tyson was disqualified for twice biting Holyfield's ears, spitting out a piece of one of them?

Question 6

Which flamboyant British featherweight of the 1990s, who fought under a princely nickname, made elaborate ring entrances on a flying carpet or descending from the ceiling, held his hands by his waist, and knocked opponents out with freakish power from awkward angles?

Question 7

Which British boxer won super-heavyweight gold at the 2012 London Olympics, then as a professional unified world titles and knocked out Wladimir Klitschko in a 2017 thriller in front of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium, rising from a knockdown to win in the eleventh?

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About Boxing & Combat Sports

Fighting is the oldest sport there is, and this quiz covers its modern forms in eighty questions: boxing above all, but also mixed martial arts, wrestling, judo, sumo and the rest. Each describes a fighter, a bout, a weight class, a rule, a promotion, a discipline or a piece of jargon, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains what it is and the record or the row attached to it.

The first pack is the essentials: the boxing giants Ali, Tyson, Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Mayweather, Pacquiao, Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Leonard; the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila; the knockout and technical knockout; the weight divisions; the Queensberry rules that brought in gloves; the punches; the split decision; and the founding of the UFC and of mixed martial arts.

The second pack widens out. More boxers, Frazier, Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, Duran, Hagler, Hearns, Chavez, De La Hoya, Hopkins, the Klitschkos, Canelo, Fury, Katie Taylor, Christy Martin, Lomachenko. The mixed martial artists McGregor, Khabib, Anderson Silva, Ronda Rousey, GSP, Jon Jones and Royce Gracie. The other combat sports, judo, sumo, Greco-Roman wrestling, professional wrestling, Muay Thai, taekwondo, fencing, kickboxing and kabaddi. And the furniture of the business, the Octagon, the promoter, pay-per-view and the Mecca of boxing at Madison Square Garden.

The third pack is history and infamy: the first Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson; the Long Count and Jack Dempsey; the brain injury called being punch-drunk; Duran's 'no more' surrender; the rope-a-dope; the trainers Cus D'Amato and Angelo Dundee; the ring death of Benny Paret; the ancient event pankration; The Ring magazine; the bare-knuckle champion John L. Sullivan; the paraglider crash known as the Fan Man; the standing eight count; Prince Naseem Hamed; the tale of the tape; the tradition of megafight nicknames; the confusing interim title; the robbed Olympian Roy Jones Junior; and the Bite Fight.

Every answer is a single name, and the three wrong options are always names too, so the game is recognition rather than trivia recall: you match the description to the fighter, the belt, the venue or the rule. The explanations settle a few things fans get wrong. Rocky Marciano, not Floyd Mayweather, was the first heavyweight champion to retire unbeaten; Mayweather chose to stop at fifty wins to claim the record on paper. The Marquess of Queensberry did not write the rules that bear his name, John Graham Chambers did. Greco-Roman wrestling, despite the classical title, is a 19th-century French invention. Pro wrestling's scripted nature was an open secret for decades before the industry admitted it. And the ancient Greeks had a near-anything-goes ring sport, pankration, more than two thousand years before the UFC.

Because a photograph of a fighter almost always gives the answer away, images are used only where a neutral object or scene does not, and every figure and date has been checked.