>>5728882>boxingIt is interesting you mention pugilism, a lot of famous authors / artists all studied it extensively, either working as journalists covering boxing or photographing it, writing about it or even fighting themselves. Some random people who come to mind include Hemingway, the Conan author Robert E Howard, and I think Kubrick also covered boxing when he did photography for magazines. I believe also the British fantasy author David Gemmell cited his youth boxing experiences as influencing his fiction (his writing style reminds me of Hemingway sometimes)
Not sure what the contemporary equivalent of boxing matches and bouts would be. 1v1 shoutcasted Quake 3 arena deathmatch?
>>5729021>prison fightingTrue story: when I was a child the primary school had some strange scheme where the police brought in two ex-convicts to "scare" children away from misbehaving by informing them of their prison experiences. I do not remember much about any warnings or dissuasion concerning crime, but one of the convicts discussed in detail how difficult it was to improvise weapons with prison items. Nonetheless, he related some ideas / experiences: first of all, a sock. Yes, a sock is the ultimate weapon. Because what you do is use it to construct a primitive flail / morning star. Any items with any weight placed into a sock converts it into a blunt flail / club, and afterwards it is easily disassembled with few traces remaining. Secondly, tea. They apparently do give out tea, boiling water, but this alone is not that dangerous. So what they do is collect sugar cubes, saturate scalding water with sugar, so that the sugar water solution retains far more heat and becomes sticky when it burns. I don't know if any of this is practical, but I remain impressed by his devious ingenuity.
