Wide World of Sports
Saturday, July 12th, 2008One of the many advantages to international travel is the exposure to all kinds of news and sports that we just don’t see covered on TV here in the U.S. of A.
I just got back from almost a week in Poland, and the only English-language channel on my TV was CNN. Over the course of several days I got to see (over and over) a report of a sport just coming into its own in Germany: chess boxing. Two guys who can be best described as nerdy but muscular compete in alternate rounds of, you guessed it, chess and boxing.
The championship match I saw was pretty short. A thousand fans watched a match in Berlin on July 5 for the light-heavyweight championship. After trading some good punches in the second and fourth rounds, the previous titleholder was “knocked out” in the fifth round by a 19-year-old Russian math student who took his queen for checkmate, thus ending the match.
The match hit the European news right after it happened. In all fairness, I can’t swear that it wasn’t also shown on CNN here–I wasn’t here, after all–but it didn’t make it into the major print media here until July 10, when Time magazine gave it a few paragraphs.
ESPN sports center also ran a story that’s a more general introduction to the sport. It described the sport as being “not actually the best of both worlds - or even the best of either.” It wasn’t posted on YouTube til July 13.
So for a few days, at least, those of us who were traveling in Europe knew something the rest of America didn’t know: all about chess boxing. Not quite an Olympic sport yet; and maybe really not all that much worth knowing. But definitely something for when you run out of cocktail party chat.
- Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer
