A Fight With No Modern Round Limit
Andy Bowen and Jack Burke kept returning to the contest because, in their era, a championship fight was not necessarily scheduled to end after a set number of rounds. A bout could continue until one boxer won or could no longer go on. That made endurance part of the contest in a way that is difficult to imagine from today’s shorter, capped championship fights.
The number of rounds alone does not mean the men boxed continuously for seven hours. A round is one segment of a bout, with pauses between segments; the full elapsed time included those breaks. But the repeated cycle of fighting, resting briefly, and starting again could still stretch a match far beyond the limits familiar to modern audiences.
When Neither Boxer Could Continue
After 110 rounds, the decisive event was not a knockout or a clear victory. Both men were too exhausted to stand, so the referee called the bout a no contest—an outcome that recorded no winner. The ending exposed the danger of a format built around continuing until a fighter prevailed: if neither boxer could finish the other, the contest could run on until both were spent.
That is what makes the bout more than an extraordinary round count. Its final result was a measure of exhaustion, not triumph: two fighters had lasted for hours, yet neither was able to claim the fight.
