Board in the ring? It's chessboxing.

World championship is in Berlin this weekend. Six rounds of speed chess, five rounds in the ring.

from the November 2, 2007 edition

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"If you are weak at chess, you will get checkmated quickly and if you are weak at boxing, you will get knocked out quickly," he says on the eve of his title fight.

The concept was the brainchild of Iepe Rubingh, a Dutch artist who took the idea from a comic, Froid Equateur. The first bouts, staged five years ago, were more performance art than sport, but the oxymoronic nature of the contest has caught on.

Stephen Moss, a British journalist and chess enthusiast who endured one chessboxing bout – and is unlikely to repeat the experience – says the combination of sports is not so incongruous.

"I don't know if it will catch on, but it's not as ridiculous a combination as you might think," he says. "There is a machoness about chess that people don't realize. The same sorts of emotions are driving those who do both. Both are battles to the death, kill or be killed, and it could all change in the space of two or three moves."

Move over, ultimate Frisbee

Chessboxing is not the only example of old disciplines being meshed and combined into new concepts.

Ultimate Frisbee and roller hockey have long since penetrated the mainstream. But out at the margins, other alternative sports are cropping up all the time, and it's remarkable how many people play them.

A quick trawl for examples produced blokarting (yachting on land), blackminton (badminton at night with flourescent body paint), tchoukball (a version of handball), urban golf, and street luge (self-explanatory and ill-advised).

Octopush is underwater hockey, a seemingly silly notion until you realize that as many as 2,000 people play regularly in Britain alone.

"It's a very fast-moving game," says Phil Lawrence, an octopush devotee. "We ran a few after-school sessions with kids. Within two months, we had 30 regulars."

He says the game is even bigger in Australia and New Zealand.

But why do sports morph and change and reinvent themselves like this?

Mr. Moss argues that every sport is in a kind of Darwinian struggle with other sports for survival. "When one sport gets boring they have to change the rules."

For Depto, it's simpler than that. "It's human nature," he observes, "to want to come up with something new."

OK then, iceketball anyone?

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