If I asked you to guess what chessboxing is, what would you guess? That is exactly correct. Whatever it is that you are picturing in your head right now, you nailed it. Chessboxing is a sport in which two people sit down two play a friendly game of chess. Then the bell rings, they move the table, and beat the shit out of each other. The bell then rings again, the table comes back out, and they are back playing the ultimate strategist’s game. This goes on for 11 rounds, beginning and ending with the chess match.
“But wait.. How do you win a chessboxing match?” Take a wild guess genius. You win a match by either getting a knockout or a checkmate. If neither of those things happen, it goes to decision just like any other boxing match. Both of these activities have been around for so long and the combination of them is so perfect that it’s a wonder it took this long for someone to think of it. It is the ultimate, triumphant battle of brain and brawn alike. You better be good with both, or exceptional with just one. How did something like this come to be? Well grab a seat and a juice box children and let’s take a little ride down history avenue.
Boxing dates back. That’s it. That’s the sentence. The idea of combat sports is so fucking old man. I assume the first humans figured out how to sex, then immediately started beating the piss out of one another. There are hieroglyphics dating back to 4,000 BC that depict hand to hand combat. In the late (or I guess… early? I don’t know how to do this backwards) 7th Century BC boxing was officially made an olympic sport. Side note: isn’t it absolutely insane how old the Olympics are?
Modern boxing as we know it came along a little later. The boxing that we know of today started in London in the late 17th Century, but this still wasn’t very organized. This boxing was the wild west. These matches were fought bare-knuckled with no weight classes. Also, it was not against the rules to hit your opponent when he fell to the ground. Chaos. Then in 1743 this fella named Jack Brownton, nicknamed the Father of Modern Boxing, came along and organized it all. He created a bunch of rules and codes and it made it much less fun for everyone involved. But it needed to be done because at the time boxing was illegal in London due to the dangers of the sport. If more rules and codes were put in place, maybe it would seem a little less barbaric. This eventually led to the evolution of what we know as boxing today. Another side note: early boxers had some FIRE names. Here are a few examples: Jack Slack, John ‘Gentleman’ Jackson, James ‘Deaf’ Zamnet, and William ‘Bendingo’ Thompson.
Now let’s take a look at the other half of chessboxing.
Alright so chess has a long and complicated history that is honestly pretty boring. Also I don’t know how to play chess and a lot of the history is just various rule changes that mean nothing to me so let’s just sparknotes this shit. Most historians believe that modern chess derived from an Indian war game called chaturanga. Chaturanga was developed in the 6th Century AD and is a Sanskrit name for a battle formation mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata. This game was then spread through trading routes I.E. The Silk Road. Then every culture made their own tweaks and changes. The standardization of the rules of chess seemed to have started around the 15th Century in Europe, and then solidified around the Mid-19th Century. Fantastic, thrilling stuff. Alright now let’s get back to the violence.
The history of chessboxing has some very interesting connections. The term was first coined in the 1979 kung fu film Mystery of Chessboxing or Ninja Checkmate (way cooler name). Some of you who are well versed in hip-hop may know that there is a song by the Wu-Tang Clan called “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’” on 36 Chambers. Yes, they are obviously connected you dolt. Want another connection? The villain in this film is known as the Ghost Faced Killer. Yes, you guessed it, that is where Ghostface gets his stage name. This kung fu film was RZA’s all-time favorite movie until the release of Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang. And yep, you guessed it, that film is where the group gets their name and first album name from.
Alright I am getting off-track, my apologies. I just like those facts and really wanted to include them even if they are only tangentially related to the sport I am talking about. The actual sport that I am talking about was first organized by a Dutch performance artist named Iepe Rubingh. I am glad that I only have to type this gentleman’s name and not say it aloud. He developed the rules and alternating rounds for each activity. In 2003 he united the Dutch Boxing Association with the Dutch Chess Federation to create the first Chessboxing World Championship Fight. He fought in the match himself and beat his opponent in the chess portion to become the first ever world champion of chessboxing.
Eventually Rubingh and his British rival, Tim Woolgar, had become the sport’s two biggest stars. Rubingh’s events were about professionalism and had a serious, legitimate tone. Woolgar’s events were just a straight up party with loud crowds and lots of booze. The differing ideals between the two led to the creation of two different organizations, World Chessboxing Organization and the World Chessboxing Association and the. One wanted it to be a legitimate sport, the other saw it as the fun gimmick it is.
Eventually the sport spread into India and then into Eastern Asia. Today the sport is a worldwide phenomenon. The sports top presidents and executives are making serious pushes to try to get chessboxing into the Olympics as an official sport. If this sport makes it to the olympics, I will be setting my alarm clock everyday come 2024. I will leave you all with my top 5 “2 sports/games/activities that should be combined into 1” list:
5. Competitive eating and bungee jumping.
Watching Chestnut dive off a cliff after vacuuming 77 hotdogs down his gullet seems like a blast.
4. Horseback riding and basketball:
You must dribble or it’s a travel. Played on a freshly waxed court. Slipping and sliding of the horses will abound.
3. Windsurfing and kite flying:
Self explanatory. Just makes sense.
2. Olympic swimming and a cooking competition:
Oven and Stove on one side of the pool. Grill and fryers on the other side of the pool.
1. Beach volleyball and building a sand castle:
Each team plays a standard beach volleyball game while they take turns building a sand castle in the middle of the… field? Court? Playing Area? Let’s go with playing area. They have to play around the castle while trying not to step on it. When the game is over, a judge will reward both teams a certain number of points based on how great each teams’ castle is. If the losing team’s castle is great enough, it could give them enough points for victory.
