Chessboxing? Try GymnasticsSkeetShooting!

Brain and brawn meet in the ring
MIKE ARGENTO

News has arrived from Germany, via the Los Angeles Times, about an exciting new sport poised to break through and become the next big sports spectacle to invade America, replacing, of course, speculation about what exactly the deal is with Terrell Owens.

It is tailor-made for television, the greatest thing in broadcast sports since roller derby, professional wrestling and hockey and even more perplexing than that sport where contestants shoot rifles and cross-country ski.

It's called chessboxing.

And it is exactly what it sounds like.

Here's how it works: The contestants, combatants, boxers, chess geeks with anger-management issues, whatever you want to call them, start out playing chess for four minutes. Chess is always first, the sport's inventor, a guy nicknamed The Joker, told the Times, because if someone were to be knocked out in the first round, "there is no chess." And you can't have no chess because then it would just be plain old boxing.

After the chess round, the contestants don boxing gloves and whale away at each other for two minutes. Then, they play chess for four more minutes, and so on and so forth. A match lasts 11 rounds - chess for six and boxing for five - and if the chess game is unresolved and the boxing scorecards are tied at the end, the player with the black pieces wins.

That doesn't sound fair. Maybe they could settle ties with a game of ArmWrestlingBlackJack.

The story described a match in which a chessboxer named Amok was knocked out in the seventh round when his opponent - described as looking "dominating, like an upright piano in a tiny room" - moved his knight to H-4.

Checkmate. Knockout. I'm not sure what they call it.

I'm sure the instant replays were riveting.

Anyway, The Joker told the Times, "Chess and boxing are very different worlds. Chessboxers move around in both."

Alternating bashing the brains out of their opponents with their fists and their rooks, I suppose.

This is a great idea, combining two sports to come up with a whole new one. Here are some suggestions for future sports, once ESPN256 goes on the air sometime during the next millennium:

· HockeyYahtzee - The players skate around and whack each other on the heads with sticks. Then, they play Yahtzee and whack each other on the heads with sticks. Then, they just stand around and whack each other on the heads with sticks. The team with the most broken sticks wins. In case of a tie, the game is settled when a player gets Yahtzee and is dragged to the ice and pummeled mercilessly.

· MarathonCompetitiveEating - Competitors start out running a marathon, and at the 5-mile mark, they stop to eat as many hot dogs as they can in five minutes. Then, they run another five miles and stop to eat as much pepperoni pizza as they can in five minutes. Then, after another 5 miles, they eat blueberry pies. The race ends when the last contestant explodes.

· FencingPoker - Mixes high-stakes Texas Hold 'Em with fencing. Gives new meaning to the phrase, "All in." And it's fun until someone loses an eye. It could lead to special celebrity FencingPoker shows where we'd be treated to Tony Danza being sliced up by the guy who played Newman on "Seinfeld" while holding a pair of jacks.

· 100-MeterDarts - Run a sprint while throwing darts. See above.

· DeerHuntingSwimming - The bugs still have to be worked out on this one. I'm not sure whether deer can swim.

· PoolLiteraryCriticism - Players discuss post-modernist themes present in the works of Swift, Faulkner and Clancy and develop a semiotic theory that encompasses the works of the authors. Then, they whack each other with their sticks after accusations of cheating surface.

· MonopolyNASCAR - For some reason, the guy who gets the little car wins every time.

· GymnasticsSkeetShooting - I'm not sure how this would work, but you would watch it just in case it would involve that Bela Karolyi guy getting shot. Same with FigureSkatingRifleRange, except substitute that annoying TV announcer who goes all crazy when someone does a triple salchow, whatever that is.

· BeerPong - The game consists of Ping-Pong with cups of beer on the table ... wait a minute, they play this in every frat house in America already.

· ScrabbleFootball - Inspired by Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, who once said of former Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, "He couldn't spell 'cat" if you spotted him the 'c' and the 'a'." In this version of football, the game ends when Terrell Owens grabs the board and goes home because the team won't give him more money.

And then, he boxes some guy who looks like a piano.

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.