Boxing & Combat Sports Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which American, an Olympic judo bronze medallist, became the first women's champion in UFC history and won her first several title fights in seconds, usually by a straight-arm lock, before a shocking head-kick knockout by Holly Holm in 2015 ended her aura?

Question 2

Which Olympic sport, contested since the first modern Games in 1896 on a narrow strip called a piste, has competitors score hits on each other with one of three thin swords, wearing wire-meshed masks and white jackets wired to an electronic scoring box?

Question 3

Which Canadian, one of the most complete mixed martial artists of all time, held the UFC welterweight title through nine successful defences with a game built on wrestling takedowns and control, then retired as champion and returned four years later to win the middleweight belt in a single fight?

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 1974 world heavyweight title fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, known, in which the 32-year-old challenger Muhammad Ali knocked out the fearsome undefeated champion George Foreman in the eighth round after soaking up punishment on the ropes for most of the bout?

Question 6

What is the name, abbreviated to three letters, for a stoppage win awarded when a fighter is judged unable to continue safely, whether because the referee steps in, the ringside doctor calls it off, or the corner throws in the towel, without a full count being completed?

Question 7

Which welterweight and middleweight champion of the 1940s and 50s, with a career record of around 174 wins, is the fighter for whom the phrase 'pound for pound' was originally coined, to rank him as the best regardless of weight?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

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.