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Ray Tang / Rex/REX USA
Round 6: The shorter fighter backs his 6-foot-2-inch opponent into the corner and pummels him with right and left hooks straight into the rib cage. The beanpole boxer has his hands up around his head, protecting the most vital body part used in this sport: the brain. He was afraid this would happen. His opponent has a mean left hook, and as he had said before the fight, because of his height, when he protects his head, the rest of his body is left open, lit white by the spotlight overhead.
In front of a crowd of 720 baying fans at The Scala nightclub in central London (which as you read this,
hosts the U.K. Twerking Championships), Matt Read has already shaken off a big left jab two rounds ago that rocked him back and involuntarily forced his hands up to his temples in an attempt to turn his spinning mind back on an even keel. And now the blows are raining down on his pale rib cage and his kidneys, and large red welts are visible from the VIP bar on the third-floor balcony above the ring. Someone in the crowd shouts, "It's not worth it!"
One punch does it, and Read goes down. The referee counts, and Read looks up at him, half-dazed, but imploring him that he's OK. He is, and comes back fighting, realizing that if he doesn't go on the offensive he could be knocked on his ass again. The end of the round comes with a Klaxon and a roar from the crowd, and both men retreat to their corners, where their seconds towel them down, feed them water, and bait them with tactical advice and shouts of encouragement.
The referee beckons them back into the middle of the ring and, breathing heavily, sweat dripping off their bodies, they take their seats. Read moves his pawn a step forward, matched by his opponent, and shortly there's a flurry of piece exchanges that leaves both men severely diminished and exhausted.
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Ornella Orlandini / LUZphoto / REDUX
Chessboxing is exactly what it sounds like: chess but with boxing. Two fighters — usually men, though
women have done it — step into a ring with all the pomp and circumstance of the most self-assured professional fighter. The bell rings, they sit down in the center of the ring, and play
four minutes of speed chess against the clock. The competitors wear bulky headphones to drown out the sound of the crowd, whose members watch the in-ring action unfold on giant screens above. Once the four minutes are up, the fighters retreat to their corners while the ring crew scurries around, setting the board out of harm's way. Gloves are donned, and boxing, which lasts three minutes per round, begins. This repeats for 11 rounds, or until one fighter passes out, runs out of total chess-playing time (12 minutes), or is checkmated.
Many people may know about chessboxing via the Wu-Tang Clan, whose "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'" was inspired by a 1979 kung fu film, Mystery of Chessboxing, also known as Ninja Checkmate, that RZA and GZA watched as teenagers on Saturday morning UHF TV broadcasts. (The movie's villain is called the Ghost Faced Killer, which also made an impression.) Though both of these cultural reference points can claim a role in the genesis of chessboxing, it's more as a ur-meme, inventing the name and implanting the general concept that mixing chess and boxing would be cool in people's minds, rather than any of the particulars. The sport's actual origins are arguably stranger.
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French comic book artist Enki Bilal attends France's first official chessboxing match on February 1, 2013.
FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP / Getty Images
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Humanoids Publishing
In 2003, a Dutch performance artist in his late twenties named Iepe Rubingh took the idea for chessboxing from a sci-fi graphic novel called
Froid Équateur ("Cold Equator"), written in 1992 by a Franco-Yugoslav artist named Enki Bilal. In it, millionaire fighter John-Elvis Johnelvisson slugs away with the enigmatic Loopkin. Bilal's
vision of chessboxing is dark, dystopian; by the end of the bout, both men are battered and beaten, their eyes white pinpricks underneath heavy, bloody brows.
"I remember there was this sketch," Rubingh explains, calling from a Berlin park in midsummer. "The people fight, then play a grandmaster game of chess. And I just... It clicked." Rubingh and a Dutch lawyer called Jean-Louis Fainstra had been going to boxing training together, and were eager to have their first bout against each other. "I said to him that if we're going to fight, we're going to do a chessboxing fight," Rubingh says. Fainstra was dumbfounded by the suggestion, but went along with it. Rubingh gained funding from Dutch arts organizations to put on the show.
The club that agreed to host the bout — Paradiso, on de Weteringschans — was once a church that became a squat for hippies in the late 1960s. In the absence of the creepy environs of the graphic novel, Paradiso, with its barrel roof, overhanging balconies, and large stained glass windows, was the next best venue, in Rubingh's opinion. The practicalities also changed slightly from its graphic novel origins: The bout time was shortened, and rules were written up in concert with the Dutch chess and boxing associations.
"We had Dutch TV there, German TV, Japanese, French TV," Rubingh recalls. "We had an official press conference. And we were saying, 'OK, people really want to see this.'"
All told, the November 2003 novelty match drew 1,200 spectators to Amsterdam to watch Rubingh and Fainstra chessbox for 11 rounds. Rubingh, fighting as the self-anointed "Joker," won and became the world chessboxing champion by default.
Though it retains that fantastical, somewhat absurd veneer, in the intervening decade, chessboxing has managed to evolve. Rubingh estimates there are maybe 500 people worldwide actively involved in competition under his umbrella organization, the World Chessboxing Organization (WCBO); 125 alone are members of the Berlin chessboxing club where he now trains. There's a club in China, in India, in Italy; South Africa, Australia, and Russia chessbox, as does Bulgaria. Absurdly, Iran (where pro boxing is banned) recently opened its own affiliate. The Los Angeles Chessboxing Club, which claims no official affiliation, held its first event in New York this summer at the famous Gleason's boxing gym, butting up against NYC ChessBoxing, a club set up in March.
Each regional or national organization comes together much in the same way: One dedicated guy sees or hears about the sport and gets the bug. (YouTube, and the ability to remotely watch chessboxing bouts from Croydon to Calcutta, Tehran to Tbilisi, has helped spread the sport.) The organization draws together a group of like-minded people, and begins small, with members training at local gyms. Eventually, they graduate to promoting their own shows. (India's chessboxing organization was founded by Montu Das, a former kickboxer. His second tournament held in July attracted 200 potential fighters.) Then a club applies for accreditation with the WCBO.
But Rubingh wants to raise barriers to entry, and generally to smarten up his sport. The performance artist has become a tycoon, promoting events and legitimizing chessboxing. The world championships will be held next week in Moscow under the banner of a new brand name, Chess Boxing Global (CBG). Rubingh's making the leap to turn his 10-year-old art project into a mainstream sport. He has secured investments from Enki Bilal, chessboxing's accidental progenitor, and Soundcloud founder Eric Wahlforss, to build the group internationally. The WCBO is offering €1,500 purses (a little over $2,000) for prizefights.
"We filter," Rubingh explains. To pass muster, fights must be organized with a degree of professionalism; the fighters themselves must meet certain standards in chess and have boxed for a year.
And with this attempt to become legit comes casualties. "We decided to cut loose the London Chessboxing Organization, because it couldn't live up to WCBO standards," he explains. "Don't get me wrong, I respect everybody that steps into the ring because I did it myself. But I think the quality of the sport and the image of the sport is also being damaged by such events, which are more of an entertainment. We have a lot of people training, but fighting — fighting seriously — there's only a very small, dedicated group."
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Islington Boxing Club, London
Ray Tang/REX USA
The Islington Amateur Boxing Club, a red tin hut on the fringes of a rabbit warren housing estate, is the part-time home of London Chessboxing, the now-unofficial U.K. outpost of the sport. No amount of PR work could portray the surroundings as anything but shabby, which may go some way to explaining why London was cut out by Rubingh.
"The sport tends to attract people who don't follow convention," says Read on the morning of his fight. The walls of the boxing club are lined with pictures of prizefighters, young and old, looking battered, at times bloody, but always resplendent in victory. They hold the typical fighters' posture: hands up near the face in a boxing pose, looking tough for the camera.
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Ray Tang/REX USA
Read doesn't look like any of the people in the pictures. He doesn't look like your typical boxer — because he isn't. (He was given his ring name, "Crazy Arms," because, as he says, "My left arm and my right arm don't seem to have any communication: One turns in a slightly larger arc than the other, and at different speeds.")
Read runs a chess shop on the classy Baker Street in London, and works for CHESS Magazine. He handles the chess side of the training, leaving the boxing tuition to 41-year-old Anthony Wright, a gap-toothed, squat bull of a man who looks like he could break you in an instant but chooses not to. Both men learn from each other, and are typical of the roster of world chessboxers: You're either a boxer who's picked up chess, or a chess player who has come to boxing. (Certainly, they're not in it for the money: Purses for a world title fight in London don't go beyond about $540, or approximately €400; first-timers get less than $100, or about €70, for their efforts, roughly double the cost of a standard standing ticket to see the fight, and a fraction of WCBO payouts.)
One day Wright saw two men training at the Islington Boxing Club, flailing their arms around in a weak imitation of punches. A superior boxer, Wright walked up to them and started giving them advice for their sparring sessions. One of them was Tim Woolgar, a former television executive who had seen a chessboxing event in continental Europe and was just mad enough to decide he'd bring the sport to the U.K. And since that day, a magnetic yellow-and-black demonstration chessboard has hung on the wall, next to one of the 13 punching bags that line the perimeter of the Islington Boxing Club.
Woolgar denies that there is bad blood following Rubingh's decision to cut London loose — but the split certainly wasn't amicable. According to him, to be part of the WCBO, you have to give up 75.1% of your business to the organizing body. Woolgar wasn't willing to.
"Clearly that wasn't acceptable," Woolgar says. "When they didn't have a chessboxing scene in Germany, we carried the flag for years" as the sport found its feet. "They didn't appreciate that. But it's just the way things go."
Woolgar continues: "[Rubingh's] vision is creating this superman of world sport," he explains. "It's very theoretical, very Germanic. It's not grounded in reality. I know what audiences like; for him, entertainment was never a factor."
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Photograph by James Bartosik
"It's two different shows," explains Nick Cornish over the sound of yapping bulldogs (he breeds them, and nearly didn't pick up the phone, thinking it was another person looking for a puppy) on a dark November night. Cornish is unique: He's one of the few people who has fought both for London chessboxing and one of Rubingh's WCBO-accredited events.
"The U.K. one is more cabaret style — more of a jovial, carnival atmosphere, and the interlude acts," he says. "You get an eclectic audience, not a boxing spit-and-sawdust audience — intellectuals, arty types. In Germany you see it's very serious, well-organized, everything's taken care of."
Cornish, who was introduced to the sport in his late thirties by Matt Read, was singled out by Rubingh as perhaps the only U.K.-based chessboxer he'd pick up for his WCBO events, and Cornish jumped at the chance. The hypercompetitive nature appealed to him, and four months before his bout, he began training in earnest.
"I literally trained every day with pros and amateur boxers," he says. He'd go for miles-long runs in the mornings and hit the gym at night. He'd fall asleep at work, shattered from the preparation. "Not everyone [in the U.K.] trains as hard as I do, and you can see that in the matches. Not everyone has the time or dedication to do that, combined with a job. I happen to be one of those guys who does."
Now, pushing 40, by his own admission, he worries that competing again for Rubingh's troupe is probably past him. "There was a time when I was desperate for that."
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Photograph by James Bartosik
Round 9: The chessboard is set up in the middle of the ring, and Read and his opponent, Chris Levy, sit down, sweat covering their bodies. Taped hands pick up pieces and move them in a flurry — both men have less than a minute left on the clocks that count down the time they're allotted to make their chess moves — as the crowd shouts encouragements.
Though Read's an experienced chess player, the lights, the environment, and the feeling of sound waves hitting the fine hairs on your skin, even if you can't hear the shouts themselves, get the better of him.
The in-ring temperature under the spotlights can reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit; heart rates can rise well beyond normal levels. Read has spent many of the prior rounds being knocked from pillar to post by Levy. By his own estimation, based on prior experience, for the first 30 seconds or so of each chess round, you're not fully focused; your mind is still adjusting from brutality to brainpower.
It makes the next move seem more reasonable. Read's left his queen open for the taking. In a second, it's gone, and the moves become more frenetic. Each man's move clock drops below 30 seconds, then 15, then the referee steps in.
Due to a technicality involving a piece position being repeated three times, the match is over. It's a draw. The crowd boos.
Both men explode. Competitive spirit and a desire to entertain commingle. Bravado takes over; Read stalks the ring, shouting, "I want another round." His opponent's just as insistent. After a brief discussion, the emcee comes over the microphone: Both men will fight one more round — of boxing — to decide a winner.
The chessboard's hurried away, gloves are fitted.
"Seconds out, round 10," comes the shout over the speakers.
Both rush out of their corners, swinging like men who know they haven't got much more to give.
Attending the fight is Ray Keene, Britain's first representative to achieve a grandmaster result, a title awarded to chess players of a particular proficiency, back in 1974. He holds an Order of the British Empire, awarded by the royal household for services to the country — in his case, chess. He covers chess for several national newspapers and has written more books on chess than years he's lived. And he attends chessboxing matches.
He's 65, and in the time it takes to drag his heavyset body up The Scala's seemingly endless flights of stairs toward the restroom, he's breathing heavily, barely audible above the muffled music of the fan dancer entertaining fans between fights. Her speciality is stubbing out cigars on her tongue. Keene boxed in his youth, he tells me, and obviously played chess. Would he have partaken in chessboxing when younger? Winded, he replies quietly, "Not the boxing bit, no."
But the old grandmaster is impressed: The chess is good — "it's club player standard," he points out — and it's "absolutely" a boon for chess in general. "It's what draws in younger players."
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Andrew McGregor of the Los Angeles Chessboxing Club
Monica Almeida/The New York Times/ REDUX
