Testing your mind and body via chessboxing
You think you’ve seen it all… and then there’s chessboxing.
“You play chess and then you try to kill each other and then you go play chess again,” said Andrew McGregor, founder of the Los Angeles Chessboxing Club.
Chessboxing is a new sport that’s just as strange as it sounds. A match is made up of 11 alternating rounds, starting and ending with chess. A round of chess lasts four minutes; a bout of boxing lasts three minutes. Fighters have just one minute between rounds to switch gears.
A checkmate or a knockout wins the game, so it’s crucial that fighters are skilled both in the ring and on the board.
“Boxing, you need great instincts. Chess, you need wisdom,” said McGregor.
Transitioning quickly between those polar states of mind is what makes chessboxing such a challenge. It’s also what drew McGregor, a former USC grad student and photojournalist by trade, to the sport when he stumbled across a flier for a match in Budapest.
“It kind of just was calling to me as this thing that I had to do,” he said.
A peculiar new hobby was just what McGregor needed after a grueling stint shooting war photography in Africa. But back in the U.S., chessboxing was a foreign concept.
McGregor decided to found the first and only club in all of North America right here in L.A. He grew up playing chess but had little experience with boxing. Not knowing where to begin, he e-mailed his boxing hero, former two-time heavyweight champion George Foreman, for advice.
“He actually responded with a very awesome description of how you become a heavyweight champion,” said McGregor. “And I just did what George told me, because it was like, ‘St. George has consecrated this chessboxing thing.’ It had to be done.”
In 2009, McGregor fought the first official North American match sanctioned by the World Chess Boxing Organization. Against all odds, the rookie won by checkmate in the fifth round.
“There’s this kind of terrifying German man who’s come to split your head open and then play chess with you,” he said. “It was a new emotion!”
Chessboxing was inspired by a hybrid sport envisioned by French cartoonist Enki Bilal in his 1992 graphic novel “Froid Équateur.” What started out as a figment of one author’s imagination is now an international sport with a governing body and Olympic aspirations.
But what does boxing have anything to do with chess?
“It’s very strategic, which is why it relates to chess very well,” said Vince Camacho, McGregor’s boxing coach and owner of Ten Nine Fitness. “You’re using moves to set up other moves.
Chessboxing is popular in Europe, where Amsterdam hosted the first world championship in 2003. Fighters live by the WCBO’s motto: “Fighting is done in the ring and wars are waged on the board.”
“The synthesis of those two things is an entirely new experience,” said McGregor. “And it makes the worlds of boxing and chess accessible to a lot of people who never would have come to those activities before.”
“People that are more intellectual and maybe not as physical can come try out something physical and realize that they do have the ability to do it,” said Camacho.
There’s something in the game for everyone, including photojournalists.
“It kind of reminded me of war photography because you have this horribly stressful thing and you have to compose a beautiful picture,” said McGregor.
The LA Chessboxing Club is made up of about 10 fighters on and off. Occasionally, fighters practice at Santa Monica’s International Chess Park and duke it out in unofficial themed matches, such as Republicans versus Democrats or artists versus scientists. The club is still looking for sponsors to help send American fighters to sanctioned matches in Europe.
Chessboxing in the U.S. is only a year and a half old, but McGregor is confident it will evolve into a popular pastime.
“I think it’s going to be like a snowboarding thing 10 years from now,” he said. “I truly love the sport for what it is.”
For fighters, it’s the combination of brain and brawn that makes this sport such a knockout.
