ESPN On Chess Boxing

Brett Forrest wrote the article on Chess Boxing and witnessed the fight night in Cologne, it is written in a very exciting kind of taste and yet is imformative at the same time, along with the article comes several pictures and a highly intresting video clip of the first Chess Boxing Championship in Cologne. Here is part of the article.

By Brett Forrest, Special to ESPN.com
Photos and Video Production by Nik Kleinberg


COLOGNE, Germany — How weird is too weird? How freaky too freaky? At what point does charm call out for ridicule? These are the questions that arise when considering the new "sport" of chessboxing.

It is Friday night, and doubtless there are better things to do than to pack into a refurbished theater of blue movies and focus the eyes on a couple of anonymous Europeans crouching over a chessboard. They marshal tiny pieces against one another in a battle of quiet strategy. Sound and movement are of the faintest quality. It is as though you have barged into a stranger's parlor. There may yet be time to sneak away.

But then a bell rings and the hall fills with loud music. There are hoots and yells from the darkened sections of seats, along with other signals of unshackled enthusiasm. When the bell rings once more and the eyes refocus, you notice the chess players have begun to punch each other in the nose and in the ribs. There is blood. This is a fight, and it's not bad at that, the theater having transformed into an arena of genuine athletic pursuit. This is no parlor game after all. It is chess and it is boxing, and doubt has begun to fade into curiosity. This may be strange, but it is strangely worth a look.

Iepe Rubingh is the creator of Chess Boxing, he devolped his ideas from a comic story he once read. This version of chessboxing conforms, more or less, to the comic book representation. There is no blinding of participants, but there is a fin de siecle feel to the whole affair, with Rubingh talking an awful lot about how the sport combines elements of the complete man, one who is prepared for any eventuality, not a pure brute, not a hopeless nerd. Rubingh foresees a day when his sport will gain Olympic status and even go on to resolve implacable global conflicts. "The future chessboxer will be a grandmaster and a professional boxer," Rubingh says. "Chessboxing could even solve the problem in the Middle East. I want to hold a chessboxing match between an Israeli and a Palestinian, and the winner will get to decide what happens to Israel."

Iepe Rubingh is not crazy; he just sounds like it. He's as crazy as one need be to pull off something like this, prevailing upon people to take chessboxing seriously.

Rubingh is as much showman and promoter as he is anything else. Testament to this is the fact that he was able to attract 800 people to the first World Championship of Chessboxing in November 2003 in Amsterdam. Rubingh himself fought in that match — after nine months of training, transforming the Joker into a chessboxer — against a boxer called Luis the Lawyer. Rubingh won the title, and then took his show on the road a year later, with a showcase in Tokyo, where he fought against a guy called Yoichiro the Wicked. Last September, Rubingh held the first European chessboxing championship, between a German and a Bulgarian, in Berlin. This match served to promote the opening, also in Berlin, of the first all-chessboxing gym, which now has 40 or so members, all of them sliding off the gloves at the end of each sparring round to wrap delicate fingers around tiny chess pieces.

Thats all of the article I want to insert but you can read the original article and watch the video clip on ESPN.com. Oh and about that part where Iepe Rubingh wants to solve the Israel\Palistine wars with Chess Boxing... I think he must be just a little crazy!