“Erst denken, dann schlagen” (Think first, then pummel).

I don’t know about you, but having repeatedly had the experience of hearing about some new and fabulous cultural phenomenon and wondering, “Why didn’t I think of that first?” I am glad to report that finally I have discovered a plausible reason for my slackness in this department. In the case of what Nerve.com recently dubbed “the world’s best sport ever,” there is in fact a perfectly good explanation of why mere mortals like you and I fail to conceive such sublimity. For not one, but *two* half-insane European artistes are behind the beauty that is . . . chessboxing. Eleven round alternating bouts of “blitz” chess (4 minutes) and boxing (2 minutes): what could be simpler or more satisfying? One European championship (Amsterdam, 2003) and one World Championship (Berlin, 2005) have already taken place; in fact consider yourself on notice: the search is on for prospective competitors, particularly female ones. If I didn’t suck so bad at chess, I’d be all over this.

The wondrous idea of combining chess and boxing was first brought into the world in Yugoslavian born artist and filmmaker Enki Bilal’s Nikopol trilogy,a series of comic books depicting a futuristic Paris–circa 2023–in which fascist dictators, aliens, and Egyptian gods (of course!) run amok.


Initially featured in the trilogy’s final installment, Froid-Équateur (1992), this inspired conceptual joke was transformed into actual sport in 2003 by an even crazier dude, the Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh; he and a friend came up with the idea of actually staging a match over a few drinks. Fittingly, that first exhibition match of chess boxing was held in an art gallery, and Rubingh himself won the inaugural World Championship match.


Rubingh, who has declared that “developing the chessboxing world is an art project,” is probably best known for his “Joker” performances, in which he deliberately blocked off with tape major downtown intersections in Berlin (1999) and Tokyo (2000). (For the latter he spent 12 days in a Japanese detention center and was fined 50,000 yen; the performance planned for October 2001 in New York did not go off, for obvious reasons). He evinces a touching, if insane, commitment to his latest creation, not only serving as the prime mover and master spokesperson of this new sport, but also as current president of the World Chess Boxing Organization. “It will never be a mass sport, with as much active sportsmen as say, soccer. I think that the quantity of chessboxers will never be extremely high. You can compare it with the biathlon.” Ah, biathlon: now there’s a model for emulation.