Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (19 page)

E
ven a punch-drunk fighter can figure out that his work space is a square. Where did “ring” come from?

The answer is that “ring” was first applied not to the boxing area, but to the spectators who formed a
ring
around the combatants, according to
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
Although hand-to-hand combat was probably invented by the first two-year-old boy to discover he had a younger sibling, the first public boxing matches took place in early eighteenth-century England. These were bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred affairs with no time limits, no ropes, and no referees. The winner was the last man standing. The ring of bloodthirsty fans formed a permeable enclosure for the pugilists.

Eventually, as boxers started to make more money for their efforts, small arenas were built that featured rings demarcated by wooden barriers or heavy ropes. The current ring, with four (or occasionally three) ropes tied to turnbuckles on corner posts, is the descendant.

Although sanctioning bodies mandate the size of boxing rings, professional wrestling has no such requirement. In many venues, the same rings are used for boxing and wrestling. Amateur wrestling is done on mats laid across a floor. Ironically, the action in amateur wrestling is demarcated by a circle, yet it isn’t called a ring.

None of this makes much sense without the historical perspective. That’s probably why the most common slang term for the ring in professional wrestling is: “The squared circle.”

Submitted by Virginia Graeber of Giants Pass, Oregon. Thanks also to Adam Rawls of Tyler, Texas; and R.J. Mamula of Hammond, Indiana.

Y
ou don’t have to read tea leaves to get an answer to this Imponderable. According to the Tea Association of the USA, when tea is brewed with boiling water, tannins are leached out of the leaves and are released into the water. If the water is hot enough, most of the tannins, including theaflavin, the antioxidant that many believe helps lower LDL cholesterol, is dissolved. But when ice is added to the brewed tea, the caffeine and theaflavin form tiny particles that are harmless but unsightly.

Even if the murk doesn’t affect the taste or healthfulness of the tea, many experts are armed with solutions to bring your tea back to clarity. In
On Food and Cooking,
food chemist Harold McGee recommends

If you don’t have the time to cold-brew, just leaving the hot tea out in room temperature before refrigerating will keep the particles from forming. And if you live in an area with hard water, try using filtered water instead—solids dissolve more easily in it.

If guests are coming and you open the refrigerator, only to find the dreaded cloudy iced tea, there’s an instant fix—add a little boiling water. Of course, if you do that, then the tea warms a bit. But if you throw some ice in, it might get murky again.

On second thought, maybe it’s best to serve Snapple.

Submitted by Susan Thomas of New York, New York.

U
ntil recently, medicine balls had a hopelessly old-school image. They were associated with punch-drunk boxers and obsolete physical therapy. Now they are trendy again among physical trainers. Instead of the old brown leather medicine balls, equipment makers are promoting balls in psychedelic colors that Jimi Hendrix would approve.

Trainers are hailing medicine balls as just the medicine for improving strength, flexibility, and reflex time in their athletes. Unlike most weight training apparatus, medicine balls encourage a full range of motion. While bodybuilders are often concerned with maximizing the size of muscles, trainers use medicine balls to promote functional training, resulting not only in better performance in sports, but in superior health, as multiple muscle groups are engaged with every use of the medicine ball. Every time you lift, throw, or catch a medicine ball, you have to stabilize the torso. Strengthening the core of back, abdomen, and hips seems to be the Holy Grail of fitness trainers these days, not only to promote strength, but to prevent back injuries that eventually plague most people as they age.

We corresponded with Cheryl L. Hyde, president and CEO of White Dolphin, Inc. and Academy Fitness, who loves not only the benefits of medicine balls, but their convenience and flexibility:

We’re not sure “cool” is the word we would have used, but we get the point. Hyde adds that unlike free weights and machines, medicine balls allow realistic motions and unrestricted movement. Trainees, for example, can attempt explosive and ballistic movements with the medicine ball.

HISTORY OF THE MEDICINE BALL

We weren’t able to pinpoint the exact date when the term “medicine ball” was coined. As far back as 1000
B.C.
, Persian wrestlers trained with animal bladders stuffed with sand (we kid you not—as we discussed in
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
, early footballs were made from inflated cow bladders). The father of medicine, the ancient Greek Hippocrates, stuffed animal skins with sand and promoted the benefits of throwing and catching the “ball” (some think the Hippocrates connection is how the word “medicine” became attached to the ball). Not too long after, the Romans played games with balls called
paganica,
which were oblong medicine balls stuffed with feathers.

The credit for the invention of the modern medicine ball is given to a colorful figure, William “Iron Duke” Muldoon, a New York City police officer who was such an accomplished wrestler that he quit the force in 1875 to become the first person ever to be a full-time professional wrestler. Muldoon not only traveled with carnivals, taking on all comers, but eventually participated in the first wrestler versus boxer contest, ending his match with the most famous boxer of his time, bare-knuckles champion John L. Sullivan, when Muldoon quickly body slammed the hapless Sullivan.

Among his many other activities, Muldoon eventually became a boxing trainer, and developed several apparatus that live on to this day—the heavy bag and the medicine ball, made of heavy leather and stuffed with sand. Cheryl Hyde would probably not approve of Muldoon’s techniques. He not only had boxers throw and catch the medicine ball, but Muldoon dropped it on the boxers’ abdomens, mimicking the explosive thrust of a punch.

Medicine balls soon caught on with a wider audience than boxers. YMCAs and schools prized the relative cheapness and portability of medicine balls. They were particularly popular on transatlantic ships during World War I, among both military and cruise ships. Perhaps nothing popularized them more than a presidential product placement. Shortly after his election, while aboard a ship returning from South America, president Herbert Hoover observed a game of “bull-in-the-ring,” in which one player in the middle of a circle of competitors attempted to intercept a pass of the medicine ball.

Inspired by the game he saw and, perhaps, by his burgeoning waistline, Hoover rustled up members of his cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and other high officials, and invented the game of “Hoover-ball” in 1928. Teams of two or four competed every morning but Sundays, starting at 7:00
A.M.
and stopping promptly at 7:30
A.M.
, regardless of the score. One player “served,” throwing the six-pound medicine ball over a net on a tennis-sized court. The receivers had to catch the ball on the fly and return it immediately. The first team to allow the ball to drop inside the court lost a point.

Hoover credited his daily game for keeping his weight, which had ballooned up to 210 pounds at the beginning of his term, to a trim 185 during his administration. Hoover-ball became popular among even hoi polloi in the United States, but Americans seemed to tire of the game as they did of the President, who was not reelected. Still, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association sponsors a Hoover-ball championship every year in West Branch, Iowa.

OLD STUFFING

The engineering problem with medicine balls has always been how to stuff them to provide minimum fuss and maximum weight. In the good old days of inflatable bladders, the “balls” were probably filled with whatever was handy, most likely dirt or sand. A manufacturer of medicine balls, Healthtrek, claims that Hippocrates filled his bladders with sand. Sand continued to be popular filler for medicine balls, from the days of William Muldoon to the present. Other popular fillers included rags and kapok, the soft and fluffy fiber from the kapok tree, which is still a popular fill for upholstered furniture.

NEW STUFFING

Medicine balls come in a bewildering array of choices. Cheryl Hyde says that she likes gel-filled balls made by Thera-Band: “They are small—the eight-pound ball fits in the palm of my hand, and I don’t have big hands.” Others are the size of basketballs. Some have handles, most do not. A few still sport a leather exterior, while others have inches of rubber on the outside, and are hard enough to break a jaw or a rib if dropped at an inopportune time (or place).

Sand (along with dry air) still survives as a fill for some medicine balls, particularly ones not designed to bounce, but the state of the art today seems to be gel. Once medicine balls became a commercial product, especially for the health and fitness markets, an image of proper hygiene was essential, and customers became pickier about the composition of the fill. MediBall claims to have been the first gel-filled medicine ball—their smallest ball, five inches in diameter, weighs two pounds, and their fifteen-pound ball is nine inches.

No one asked us, but: What do Pampers and MediBalls have in common? According to MediBall,

Hey! Leave the jokes to us.

Submitted by Taryn Losch of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Thanks also to Reena Mudhar of Germantown, Maryland.