Sports in Hell (14 page)

Questions poured forth:

1. Was it two guys sitting at a card table in the middle of a boxing ring playing chess? And maybe one of them goes, “Check.” And the other guy looks at the board, scratches his chin, and then just cold-cocks the guy with a roundhouse right, sending him backwards—bishops and queens and mouthpiece flying—and adding, “You sure?”

2. Could a guy cheat in chess boxing?

Cornerman:
Ref, check his glove! Check his glove! There's a rook in there!

3. Why combine chess and boxing? Can you think of two things that have less in common? Hey, I know! Let's combine scuba and baking? Bowling and colonoscopies?

4. Has a fan of one
ever
attended a match of the other? Although, it's true, the two do have one thing in common: Participants in both disciplines rarely have sex before a match. Of course, chess players don't have it after, either.

5. Did they do the chess and the boxing at the same time?

Breathless announcer:
Frazier's trying to get to his knight, but Foreman keeps slamming him with the jab!

6. Could the ref step in and call it if it's getting out of hand?

Ref:
That's it! Fight's over! He just tried to move his knight diagonally! We're finished here!

7. Was it live people—dressed as chess pieces—being moved around by two players standing in giant towers, with control of the square in question being decided by one piece boxing holy hell out of the other?

    The truth, though, was nearly as dumb. Chess boxing involves two combatants alternating six rounds of chess (four minutes) and five of boxing (three) until one of them is either checkmated on the board or knocked out in the ring, or time runs out on the chess clock. In that case, whoever is ahead on the cards of the judges is the winner.

Does that make any sense?

The sport was never meant to be a sport in the first place. It was a piece of performance art by a Dutchman named Iepe Rubingh. He called himself “Iepe the Joker” and his opponent was a friend,
“Luis the Lawyer.” Sitting in a fully lit, roped boxing ring, they proceeded to actually box, then play chess, over and over, much to the mouth-agape bewilderment of the art gallery audience. It was Iepe's statement about pigeonholing. It was so stupidly compelling—like
Celebrity Apprentice
—t
hat they did it again two months later in Amsterdam. In that bout, Iepe was behind in the chess going into the last round of boxing and just decided to start throwing a slew of punches. He connected enough to make Luis the Lawyer loopy, so much so that when they got back to the board, Luis couldn't make sense of the pieces nor where they should go. Iepe won, declaring himself the world middleweight chess boxing champ, possibly because there
was
no world middleweight chess boxing champ.

Next thing you knew, sane people were under the mistaken belief that this was actually a sport—similar to NASCAR. Iepe began promoting the idea all over Europe and Asia, and suddenly, there was a whole mess of kings in the boxing world not named Don. Actually, Don King could clean up with this. Consider: Both former world boxing champion Lennox Lewis and current champion Vitali Klitschko both play chess, and play it very well. Can't you see the posters?

Anyway, I set out to meet a real, live chess boxer and see a real, live chess boxing match. And that meant Europe or nothing. America wasn't ready. There was one small club in Los Angeles trying to start up but getting nowhere. We decided the best of the European chess boxing seemed to be in London, where a former Channel 1 BBC reporter named Tim Woolgar was attempting to promote—and win—the UK's first sanctioned chess boxing match.

So I boarded a plane for England, hoping more than usual that the plane wouldn't crash, if only for the ignominy of it.

There are things you figure you'll never see in your life as a sportswriter and one of them is a regulation-size boxing ring next to four waterproof chess boards, full of pieces, with fighters alternating rapidly between knocking each other's blocks in and knocking each other's queens off. But this is what I came upon at the Islington Boxing Club in north London, top floor, far corner. There were no chairs. Three men were on one side and three on the other, each sweating like B.B. King onto the boards, trying to clear their eyes so they could make their moves and punch their speed chess clocks. Each player had twelve total minutes of time to make his moves in the allotted six rounds of chess. If the player ran out of time, he lost the match. Suddenly, a buzzer would ring and they'd all put back on the one glove they'd taken off, and climb into the ring and start punching each other.

Q: What wears one glove, chases queens, and isn't Michael Jackson?

A: A chess boxer
.

Alternate answer: Woolgar, a square-jawed babyface with bangs and rectangular glasses. In the ring, his feet were anvils, but his punches jackhammers. Which was funny, because when he talked about his style, he saw himself as a kind of British Muhammad Ali. “I like to dance, stay out of reach, and hammer with the jab, like Ali,” he said.

And I think I look a lot like Brad Pitt.

As a youth, he was decent—his record was 1–1. “But my second fight, my opponent was really starting to get annoyed with all my dancing Ali stuff. He got really mean. I knew I had to do something different pretty soon or I was dead. So I threw a straight right. I didn't feel it even hit. It was that good. The guy went straight down.”

At nineteen, his trainer said he either had to turn pro or quit. So he quit and went to college. “Too bad, though,” he rued. “I have a
very strong jaw. I used to ride my bike to school and had no basket for my satchel, so I'd carry it in my mouth. I can take quite a punch because of that, you see.”

Of course, it's hard to tell if he's lying. He promotes himself as thirty-five in chess boxing when he's actually forty-five. The bastard—he actually looks thirty.

Woolgar first heard about chess boxing while trying to be charming with a delectable woman at a party. He was mentioning to her that he loved chess and would she fancy a match sometime? “Oh?” she said. “You should try chess boxing. My boyfriend loves it!” And before he could tuck his ego between his legs and escape, the boyfriend was there going, “Oh, yeah, chess without boxing is crap!” Next thing you know, Woolgar was at a match in Berlin and hooked.

“I just found it to be pure excitement,” he recalls. “Thrilling, really. Could the one chap who was the better boxer finish off the chap who was a better chess player before they had to go back to the board? I loved it!”

After the fight, he asked the promoter if he could join a club in the UK.

“There is no club in the UK,” the German said.

“Bollocks,” Tim lamented.

“So why not set one up?”

Soon he was quitting his BBC job to chase the kind of dream that when you tell people about it, they spit out their Guinness. Why quit a good job for something so patently ridiculous? Because he loves it. He loves it because, he says, the two disciplines are so much like each other. In both sports, fatigue can lead to dumb moves and a loss. Each uses combos. Both involve setting up traps for each other in hopes the opponent doesn't notice. Jab, jab, then the right. Jab, jab, then the right. Jab, jab, fake the right, left cross.

Except chess is far more brutal than boxing, Woolgar says. “Boxing is the sport of gentlemen. In chess, there's no quarter asked nor given. We have a champion, Frank Stolz. He lost his
crown to a nineteen-year-old when he blundered his queen. I know Frank would've rather been knocked out cold than do what he did, to lose his queen. It was humiliating for him.”

Chess genius Bobby Fischer used to find great pleasure in “the moment when I break a man's ego.” It's a truism: Men prefer their nose broken to their pride.

Exhibit A: In Greensburg, PA, recently, two men were playing chess when a Mr. Zachary Lucov became so humiliated at his blunder that he announced he was going to kill himself. He grabbed a .40-caliber Glock and pointed it at his head to prove it. The other participant, a Mr. Dennis Kleyn, leaped to stop him. They struggled. The gun went off and a bullet went through Kleyn's arm, came out the other side, and nearly killed Lucov's nine-month-old son, who was playing on the kitchen floor. Why the baby was playing on the kitchen floor at just before midnight is unknown. In fact, the whole story is sketchier than TMZ. As Lucov was leaving court a few days later, he was asked by reporters if he tried to kill himself. “I don't recall wanting to,” he said with aplomb.

Seems like that's something you might remember.

The best boxer of the six I was watching was a kid named Sascha (the Flascha) Wandkowsky, an unemployed German student who rides his bike to the gym every day, practices his chess and his English, and scares the bejeebers out of anybody who has to face him in the ring. In his last bout, he disfigured a British guy. “He concede,” Sascha says in his spotty English. “He had a little broken bone in his face, I think. Just leettle. But he was bleeding all over the board, so he stop the fight.”

Those annoying leettle broken face bones.

“My chess is good, but I always make mistakes,” says Sascha, who is just a beginner in chess.

So his strategy is to stall on the board and attack on the canvas. He will take as long as he can over each chess move, figuring he will rearrange your cerebellum quite quickly in the ring. Generally, the ref will nudge you if you haven't moved in twenty seconds, DQ you in thirty or forty. If Sascha the Flascha can get a guy in the ring for at least two rounds without doing something really stupid to lose the chess first, he usually wins. “In my second bout, I am almost out of time. I am at 11:50 and he had only use only fifty seconds. I managed to have only ten seconds left when the four-minute bell go off. This poor guy he must put on his glove and come back to ring. And then I knock him out, I really knock him out.”

Which brings up a hole in the entire sport to my mind.

Why couldn't a person who never plays chess—like Mike Tyson—simply stall for the first round of the chess and then knock his opponent out colder than a flounder in the first ring minute? I put this to the club's best chess player, a five-six brainiac named RajKO (get it?) Vujatovic, one of 200 actual chess masters in all of London.

“Well, he could,” RajKO declared. “He would just have to get through the first four minutes of chess without doing something so completely stupid that I was able to mate him before we got into the ring. And that'd be very, very stupid. I think I'd need at least into the third round of chess to defeat a simple beginner, unless he just had no idea how to stall.”

And in the ring?

“I'd just have to run,” RajKO said.

I wanted to test this theory, but Woolgar's insurance wouldn't allow me to box. So I played RajKO in chess just to see how long I could last. I know as much chess as I do Swahili, which is to say almost nothing. I only know how the pieces move. He beat me in about six minutes—thirty-one moves—thus proving himself wrong. He could've defeated me in only two chess rounds and he'd need only to survive one round in the ring with me. Although I was an idiot about it. I was taking five seconds between moves, not
thirty, so it all went much too quick. But considering that in his sparring sessions, he sometimes threw both fists at once, I think that's all I would've needed.

I asked RajKO what the other chess masters think of him chess boxing. “They think it's bonkers. Bizarre. Chess players are not supposed to be punched in the head.” Actually, it might make an interesting pay-per-view telecast.

Fischer has now absorbed twenty-two straight punches in the head and yet he still has Joe Frazier in check!

After the boxing, the six combatants went back to the board and proceeded to sweat all over it. The pawns were nearly drowning. It was a rubber board, but still. I asked Woolgar how often he cleans the boards, which looked like something that should be sent immediately to the Centers for Disease Control. His answer? “Uh, never.”

A lot more matches end by rook than hook, and there's a reason for it. It's much easier to topple a king onto the board than a man onto the canvas. It takes some real skill and strength. These guys don't have it. It's mostly a lot of, “Ow! That hurt!” and keeping the distance of a Cessna between each other.

It's hard to explain how awful most chess players box, but this may give you an idea:

The two best chess players—RajKO and a very skinny Chinese guy named Doug—began sparring. They both employed the seldom-seen double-punch strategy. RajKO was closing his eyes when Doug threw a punch, which never got past RajKO's gloves. He had them both in front of his face and yet Doug wouldn't go for the body. Nor would he extend his arm fully when punching, nor turn his fist into the punch. His salvos had all the power of a man on his deathbed reaching out for one last brownie.

Hanging over the ropes, trying to give them pointers, was the London senior lightweight boxing champ. He'd come up from below just to help out a little. He hollered at RajKO, “Try the jab!” And—get this—they both
stopped
and looked at him. Just stopped
boxing, turned to the guy, and said, “What?” It's the equivalent of a coach yelling at his running back to “Hit the hole!” and the running back suddenly stopping—ball in hand—running over to the sideline, and saying, “Say again?”