Steve James wrote:Thai boxers use contact to clinch and throw, and they use gloves.
So? They have their own rule set and fight within that frame work.
...The old days were better. No gloves. Almost no rules. Head buts and even biting allowed...
Gloves help if you hit with your knuckles. Bas Ruten illustrated that it's not necessary to hit with them in order to knock people down and out. Even so, not having gloves on will not necessarily offer any advantage at all against a good boxer with gloves on. It will still be a question of what he can do versus what you are able to do.
Why would you want to spar without gloves against someone who has gloves? It doesn't make sense.
The point I tried to make is not about using gloves or not. It's about the mind-set and the strategy. If you like the point chasing game, gloves is fine. If you want to stand a chance against a good boxer or someone with good sparring knowledge, you either need to be better at his game (which can be hard to predict) or you need to find another rule set (or another way to fight) where you stand a better chance. The old original UFC has a lot of good examples. What did the Gracies do? They just ran people down with take-downs. It worked almost every time just because everyone already had the common ideas about boxing/kick-boxing rules fixated in their heads. So if you want to stand a chance against a good fighter, then it's better to get away from those fixated ideas about how fighting should look like. If you always spar in the common, point chasing traditional way, then even if you become very good at it, there's still a chance that you'll get stuck with a limited and limiting rule-set.
...Just IMHO.