With the exception of seeing an occasional brawl, I haven’t really been much of a sports fan lately. All the rule changes have taken the fun out of watching. Penalty flags everywhere if a player gets aggressively exhaled on. No more of those good, hard slides to break up a play type stuff. Throwing elbows to clear out the paint? Illegal.
With gambling now allowed, who the hell knows if what we’re watching is legit? For all we know it’s a fraud. The lie that we tell ourselves to justify sitting down on the couch for three hours while yelling at disloyal millionaires that laugh and pat each other on the ass like they were bunkmates in the Navy. We root for laundry.
Not to mention the countless commercials and opportunistic product placement. A guy makes a great play, and the graphics show up to pitch you unhealthy crap that normally wouldn’t cross your mind. Real subtle stuff.
That all changed on Saturday afternoon when I took a walk downtown.
It’s a good time to snoop around. It helps you avoid eye contact with people who still have dental insurance while looking for a side hustle to enhance your income after age 60. Casually strolling past a construction site, I scoped for scrap building materials or, as the local PD calls it, “loitering with intent to gain.”
As I looked around to see if the coast was clear, I started hearing all kinds of hooting and hollering coming from a building down the street, so I wandered over to investigate.
For a second, I hoped it was going to be a piñata festival. I’ve had dreams about being in the middle of a piñata festival. I’ve been waiting for it to come true. Lord knows I love some Jolly Ranchers and Bubble Yum.
Sadly, it wasn’t a piñata festival. Can’t say I was surprised though. Been hoping for it for so long that I don’t even get disappointed anymore. I’ll just keep dreaming that one day, when I least expect it, I’m going to walk into a giant auditorium and people are going to be whacking colorful papier mâché burros and swimming in delicious candy.
Instead, I found two guys in a dusty boxing gym. Boxing’s good for a few minutes, but if the boxers aren’t beating the s**t out of each other, it can get tedious.
There were a few spectators, and the place was as humid as the inside of one of those sidewalk dirty water hotdog stands. I almost walked right out, but the bell sounded and the two guys climbed out of the ring, took off their gloves and sat down at a table with a chessboard on top. Drew me in like a tractor beam. I was hooked right away.
Those two thugs blew the stereotypes right out of the water. They started playing chess at lightning speed. Ten seconds to make a move. Three-minute rounds like boxing. Took me back to sports fundamentals without the loud music or razzle-dazzle that plays these days.
It was a thing of beauty.
Every quick move had me transfixed. I never gave a f**k about chess before, but these dudes were making me try to figure out what they were doing.
Once the chess round was up, they laced up the gloves and got back into the ring and resumed knocking the hell out of each other. I felt like I was watching a symphony of brain rattling brutality and making the most of using the brains they had left. Quite the juxtapositional spectacle, if you ask me.
I stayed for the entire time. When it was all over, I was so fired up that I jumped in the ring to high-five everyone involved. Some spectators must’ve thought it was strange, but I’d guess they thought I was somebody’s senile grandfather so they just smiled and laughed. You’d be amazed at the things I can do because people assume I’m senile, but the joke’s on them because I’m nowhere close to senile yet.
That one half-hour showed me that brains and brawn and raw emotion have not disappeared from the sporting world. If you ask me, chess boxing is where it’s at.
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The Lying Spiral by Craig Tyson Adams
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