Sports in Hell (15 page)

The real boxer just buried his head in his hands.

At one point, Doug got a punch through RajKO's double-fisted closed-eyes wall and bopped him on the nose. The receiver looked surprised and his eyes watered a little. He dropped his hands and rubbed his nose. Doug looked like he'd just shot a bunny. He apologized and then actually reached out and rubbed Raj's nose, too. I thought the boxer from London was going to cry.

Afterward, there was this exchange:

Oy. I could see Kasparov dead, showing up at St. Peter's gate, and St. Peter going, “Were you trying to kill yourself?” And Kasparov going, “I don't recall wanting to.”

Against this backdrop, Woolgar stood out like Halle Berry at a fat farm. He was devoting his life to this. He was running five miles every day, followed by two hours in the gym and an hour of chess. He was pretty good at both. He'd better be. Two years of work were coming to a head very soon in one scary night.

Quiz:

Which strategies are boxing and which are chess?

The LaBlanche Swing

The Frisco Crouch

The Texas Tommy

The Philadelphia Shell

The Spanish Exchange

The Pin and the Fork

The Indian

The Turk

A: The first four are all boxing, the last four all chess.

    Also: Somebody needs to make a chess boxing movie in which the bent-nose mafia mook comes into the pre-fight locker room and says to the fighter: “Listen up. Da boss wants you to go down in the fifth.”

The terrified chess boxer argues, “No! I can't!”

“Yeah, you can,” warns the mook. “Let him take yer queen. And no funny bizness, or you'll be movin' pawns witch yer elbows the rest of yer life!”

At last, the big night arrived—August 15, 2008—the first chess boxing card in British history. More than 150 people crowded into a place called the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club in East London, which isn't a strip joint but a kind of blue-collar nightclub. Inside was the largest paying audience for a chess match in the UK since Kramnik vs. Kasparov in London in 2000, even outselling—yes—the club's recent Mexican wrestling event.

You can see why. Ask your buddy if he wants to go to a chess match with you, he'll suddenly come down with mono or rickets or both. But if you mention that between the rapid-fire rounds of chess, there will also be people punching the mucus out of
each other, plus a bar, followed by an after party, how's Mexican wrestling going to compete with that?

By dinnertime, Woolgar was as nervous as a quart of coffee. He was not only the promoter, manager, ticket agent, media director, and technical advisor, he was also half the main event in the heavyweight division. He'd sunk a silo of his own money into this. Worse, he was up against a brute with a broad back and long arms named Stewart Telford, who once owned a 5–5 record in amateur heavyweight bouts. Telford worked with juvenile offenders, so you got the feeling he'd be able to hold his own against a very polite, false-aged ex–BBC producer.

It was only a two-fight card. Sascha the Flascha opened against a fireplug Dutchman and didn't disappoint. Sascha took him out in the seventh round—on the chess board, no less—although it took the in-house bonehead commentator thirty seconds to realize Sascha had checkmated him. OK, so it's a new sport. We're still trying to iron the wrinkles out.

Eventually, it was time for the main event. Telford came out first in a Tyson-like black cape with two guys in white vests escorting him. He seemed to have hit a few too many donut shops on the way to work over the years, and immediately you could tell that Woolgar, who came out by himself to Guns N' Roses, was more fit.

First round is always chess, so the two gladiators went through the traditional donning of the … headphones? Yes, huge headphones to help them concentrate and avoid hearing advice yelled from the crowd. What was playing in the headphones? “Choral music, with sounds of the ocean,” Woolgar said. Funny, I just can't see Mike Tyson listening to ocean sounds minutes before he fights, can you?
More theagullth, dammit!

The two felt each other out on the chessboard for the first four minutes—each safely castling their kings away—with nothing much coming of it, and soon the bell rang and they removed the board, table, and two chairs from the ring in order to let the punching begin. The inebriated crowd was much louder than anybody would've thought. And perhaps spurred on by it, the two
started brawling. All the caution and tiny steps on the chessboard were gone now, replaced by two palookas whaling at each other like Dublin bar patrons. Telford greeted Woolgar's face with a hook very early on, leaving him with a nice mouse above the eye. “He kept lining me up where the spotlights were blinding, then coming in with lightning-fast hooks to the temple,” Woolgar recalled. “He caught me a couple of times and rocked me, but I managed to respond with a perfect right uppercut which landed on his jaw and made him think.”

In Round Three, the best thinking on the chess side was done by Woolgar, who took charge of the middle and even captured a piece. It's a very odd thing to hear a lot of lusty Brits roar for a captured pawn.

When the two went back to the ring for Round Four, one could hear Woolgar's corner telling him to “Make him miss! Make him miss!” Woolgar heard and obeyed. “I just stayed slightly out of reach and watched various fists whizzing past my jaw but not connecting,” Woolgar remembered. Maybe it was fear, but his leaden feet seemed to be lighter and he was no longer absorbing leather facials. By Round Five (chess), it was clear Woolgar was the Doberman and Telford the pork chop. He was starting to dominate the sixty-four squares. He looked in command of the whole night. Prepare the crown. But then, in Round Six, a very odd thing happened. Woolgar started listening to the suddenly bloodthirsty crowd.

“Fuck him up, Timmy!” somebody hollered.

“Knock his fucking head off!” another screamed.

You know how rowdy chess boxing crowds can get.

Somehow, Woolgar was flummoxed by it. He remembers thinking, “That's not the sort of thing I want to hear at my fight!” Although exactly what he was expecting them to yell, he had no idea. “Some sort of sporting soundtrack from an old Basil Rathbone movie perhaps,” he says. “You know: ‘Jolly good show! Oh I say, what a corker!'” And while he was wondering how his chess boxing event had turned into an NHL game, Telford planted a
straight right-hand flush in his kisser. While Woolgar's head was snapping back, Telford added a fierce left hook on his temple for good measure. Woolgar started hugging Telford then like he was Bela Karolyi, hanging on for dear life. Soon as the ref separated them, another right hook came, which Woolgar ducked and followed with a combination to Telford's ribs. The bell rang. It was a great round and nobody could remember anything like it in Fischer vs. Spassky.

The doctor and the ref examined the swelling under Woolgar's eye, but let the bout continue. Which meant he had to go play chess with one eye, one glove, and a spinning brain. Luckily, Telford's mind was also moving at the speed of cold honey tipped over. The two of them made only three moves in four minutes. It was the Stupor Bowl. Perhaps even the ref was woozy, because he did nothing to speed them up. Suddenly, they were back in the ring, and this time Woolgar was on the counselor like freckles on Opie. He pummeled him in the corner, against the ropes, with his back to the lights, everything. The crowd was beside itself as the bell rang.

As they sat down for chess and Round Nine, Telford's brain must've been on sleep mode, because, by expert accounts, he played chess like a poodle on Xanax. “Twice in five moves he was oblivious to the long-range diagonal threat of the Black queen,” RajKO wrote breathlessly of the match later. The second time, 2:23 into the round, Woolgar delivered checkmate.

All of which led to a deliriously happy chess boxer named Tim Woolgar accepting his honor as the Great Britain Chess Boxing Organization Heavyweight Champion of the World from Great Britain Chess Boxing Organization director Tim Woolgar. It was a very easy picture to take. One guy. Plus, nobody thought to make up a belt.

Telford admitted later that his strategy was to play chess slow and box fast. “He took some pretty clean, hard shots,” Telford admitted. “He wobbled a few times, but didn't give up.”

Satchel in the teeth, my friend. Satchel in the teeth.

•   •   •

Overall, I believe chess boxing has a bright future, provided it adopts immediately and forthwith my list of improvements, which will take it to the upper stratospheres, or at least ESPN6:

• Make the chess harder by insisting the combatants play it with
  both
  gloves on.
  

• Between rounds, sexy librarian ring card girls should sashay around with their hair up, lensless glasses on, holding copies of Dostoyevsky over their heads, wearing cleavage-laden Swarthmore tops and short shorts with some kind of cheesy ad on the butt, such as, “You won't get rooked at Sam's!”
  

• The chessboards themselves should have little tiny boxing ropes around it. And be cleaned at least once a decade, for sure.
  

(
Note to the reader: As we researched this, we collected what we believe is a Guinness world record for euphemisms for “to regurgitate” or “regurgitation.” Feel free to count along!
)

This is about games in which people purposely drink vats of alcohol that would float the Queen Mary, often for the sole purpose of throwing up (1) in as multicolored a manner as possible. These are called drinking games. Believe me: Most of your tuition money goes to them.

This all started at a Fourth of July event near our home in Hermosa Beach, CA, called the 34th Annual Iron Man, which we
naively thought might actually center on running and swimming and stopwatches. We were very mistaken.

At first, it
looked
like an actual athletic event. About 500 young men were there with their surfboards. But we also noticed they were all carrying six-packs, twelve-packs, even cases of beer. Seemed odd. We noticed those same guys burying their six-packs in the sand, or under their discarded shirts. Paranoid bunch, we thought.

We soon found out that the rules for this Iron Man were much different. The combatants had to paddle their boards a mile, yes, then ditch the boards on the beach and run a mile, yes, but the third leg required them to chug their warm six-packs of beer in twenty minutes or less without spewing (2) in order to post a time.

Of course, these are American young men, so 95 percent of them were in it purely for the yak-fest (3). In fact, many of them were ingesting colored Jell-O, half bottles of mustard, and food coloring, to give their hurl (4) a colorful aspect, like a colored mouth fountain (5). Some guys even ate sprinkles. Festive! We saw one man in a Speedo eating giant spoonfuls of peanut butter and honey just before the race was about to begin. Why? “Sticks on people better,” he explained.

You tell me. How can this
not
be in the next Summer Games? Or at least the Blowlympics (6)?

Soon they were off, and I can honestly say I have not seen a bigger bunch of cheaters since the U.S. House of Representatives annual golf outing. Almost none of them paddled to the half-mile mark before turning around. Some of them barely went 300 yards. The running was even worse. A lot of those guys didn't even get 100 yards. One of the first guys in was a firefighter named Mike McIndoe.

“How'd you get done so fast?” I asked. “You've been training?”

“No, I didn't come close to running the mile,” he said as he started to rip open his first beer, “and I cheated even worse on the paddle.”

Yet the beer drinking is conducted under the strictest guidelines. There is a judge for every six iron men, weighing the cans when they're done to be sure they're empty, and using stopwatches to mark to the second when the sixth and final beer is drained. Mike was one of the first to finish, but soon after great multitudes finished. And that's when the first great beach retch (7) happened.

It was a young, skinny Asian guy. The volume, the power, and the arc of his heave (8) were chilling to behold. It went at least ten feet and yet never got wider than eight inches around. It resembled a New York City fire hydrant let loose. If I'm lying, I'll let him entertain at my daughter's wedding. It was a bit like witnessing a space launch, or some kind of Hollywood special effect. There is no way a human could project the contents of his stomach (9) with such astonishing violence and yet—dare I say it?—beauty. Were we in Salem, Mass., in the 1600s, he'd have been burned as a witch.