Modern Boxing Stance Tied to Filipino Martial Arts

STYLES, techniques, and movements evolve in any sports, from basketball, football, to boxing. We learned something new and improved ways to play the sports from watching others who played the sports before us. In boxing, the influence in today’s boxers’ stances may have been influenced significantly by another type of fighting or sport, Kali. Kali is a weapon based Filipino martial arts with the use of knives. There are other weapon based types of fighting in the Filipino martial arts like the Eskrima, which uses sticks, but one that really had a greater influence in today’s boxing stance is Kali.

The early influence may have occurred as early as 1899 during the Philippine-American War, when Americans observed how Filipinos fight with a knife, with knuckles up, and how effective it is to defend and attack with more possible movements and land more powerful hits.

Its certainly befitting that one of the greatest fighters of our lifetime, Manny Pacquiao, is from the Philippines and will be in what’s already being dubbed as the fight of the century. However, there were other Filipino greats that came before Pacquiao, one of them is Francisco Guilledo, better known as Pancho Villa, who lived around the time when the boxing stance transformed to what we know today. Despite racial discrimination at the time, Pancho Villa rose to become the first Asian/Filipino World Flyweight Champion in 1923.