At a car boot sale today I picked up a pair of large, old-style lace up boxing gloves which I thought about using as part of a handcuff escape, to prevent me using my fingers (sort of like a more comic, familiar and surreal alternative to McKenzie Mitts). Playing around so far I've a few ideas of methods and presentations (I'll discuss these more when I've had more of a chance to play with them), but would love to know what else has been done with boxing gloves in an escape context.

Any other EA pugilists here?

Your vision of love wearing boxing gloves,

Err... What's that? You're going to play with Chance? Come again?

Helen-

I would love to hear what you come up with! I have been looking at the Posey Rigid Hand Control Mitts and seeing if there was a way to incorporate those into my act. I think the boxing gloves sound like a great idea though!

Allan

Norm Bigelow's routine of having the hands sealed in baggies before escaping from Hamburg-8s was originally intended to use boxing gloves rather than baggies.

Steve

A problem I have found with boxing gloves is to do with the wrist guards on them, which extend over the wrists and therefore also the handcuffs. The handcuffs are still on, just not visible enough to spectators (the look I want is an intimidating mass of metal and locks holding the gloves in place), and placing them higher up the arm makes them too obviously loose. One solution is using ankle cuffs over the gloved wrist itself (handcuffs are too small to go over the gloves); these can be fastened by a spec really tightly, apparently securing the gloves efficiently, though it's actually much easier than you'd think to slip the hands through (the bunched leather inside the cuffs provides the neccesary slack).

One of the reasons I like the old-style lace up ones is that they require a second person to tie them onto the hands, and indeed to remove them afterwards; the whole point is to prevent the gloves from coming loose during a fight. I'm experimenting with a few different ways of tying them to whatever advantage, but will point out that even if the gloves are tied on securely it's possible to maneouver a shim through the split in the lether between the lacing (the gloves themselves provide an audaciously misdirective place to store the shim, as you're getting people to think of them as an obstacle rather than something you might be using to your advantage).

Another nice thing is that boxing gloves hold a pretty similar shape whether your hands are inside or not, so by covering the cuffs with a sheet you can leave the business end of the gloves in full view whilst slipping out and doing the dirty work unseen; if you train to keep your forearms at the corect angle going into the sheet (a supple wrist comes in handy at this point) you can hint that your hands are still in the gloves (and therefore in view) and give a subtle illusion of doing nothing at all, at least until the sheet is removed to reveal the gloved hands free of the cuffs.

Of course, you could wimp out and just do the whole thing with gaffed cuffs or a siberian chain, but that's not nearly as much fun.

Those are my initial thoughts anyway.

You don't cover them with a sheet. Use a towel, and maintain the theme, eh? Or the other boxer's shorts. Boxers, yeah. One glove through each leg hole. Have your lacer hold the top shut.

But this is a beautiful idea!