Demanding a combination of brains and brawn, this new sport has competitors floating like butterflies and stinging like kings
By Linda Rodriguez McRobbie for Smithsonian Magazine
There’s a boxing ring planted in the middle of a London nightclub.
So far, nothing too out of the ordinary. But there’s also a folding table in the center of the ring, and on it, a chessboard. And rather than gloving up to start sparring, the two boxers, hands wrapped, sit down to square off over the board. Because this isn’t regular boxing—it’s chessboxing.
Chessboxing is a hybrid sport that is exactly what it sounds like: Chess plus boxing, or, more specifically, a round of chess followed by a round of boxing, repeated until someone comes out the victor. As Tim Woolgar, founder of London Chessboxing, says, “If you know how to play chess and you know how to box, you know how to chessbox.”
Easy enough. But why? “They’re two sports where you have a duel and all you’ve got to help you is what you’ve brought to the table at that time. It’s your talent, your preparation,” explains Woolgar. “And what it comes down to, in the end, is a battle of wills.” A battle of wills, he says, both intellectual and physical.
Chess is a game with a long and hallowed history, and in the roughly 1,500 years since it first popped up in northwest India and Central Asia, it has earned a reputation as the most intellectual of pursuits. Boxing has been around for longer—pitting two men against one another in a contest of physical combat has been Saturday night entertainment since time immemorial.
But combining chess and boxing didn’t occur until 1992, and even then, it was only in the art of a Bosnian-born French filmmaker and comic book artist named Enki Bilal, whose science fiction graphic novel Froid Équateur featured a dystopia where a former soldier becomes a chessboxer. (Bilal may have – may have – been inspired by the 1979 kung fu film, Mystery of Chessboxing, also released as Ninja Checkmate,in which a young boy wants to avenge his father’s death by learning kung fu and takes lessons from a master of xiangqi, or Chinese chess.) Read more from Smithsonian Magazine.
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