By: Nathaniel Charendoff, Section Editor

Newark Academy Athletics offers a wide variety of sports options throughout each semester. You can find yourself smacking forehands down the baseline on the tennis courts, running up and down the gorgeous soccer fields, or even fiercely grappling on the wrestling mats behind a raucous crowd.

But, there are indeed sports it does not offer.

Today I will tell you about another sport. A sport that has never found a rightful place in NA’s athletic curriculum. A sport unbeknownst to a great majority of NA attendees. A sport that truly combines brawn and brain to the fullest capacity.
This sport is called chessboxing.

Here’s how it works. A chessboxing match alternates between 11 total rounds of chess and boxing, as its name suggests. It begins with the first round of a chess match, inside the ring, which lasts three minutes, then after a short interval, switches to three minutes of boxing. Competitors can win through knockout or checkmate, and of course if the opposition player runs out of time designated to the chess match. If a draw occurs in the chess match and no knockout occurs, then the match is decided by boxing points accumulated during the rounds of the fight. There are weight classes just as in traditional boxing.

The first official chessboxing competition occurred in 2003, and the sport has only grown in the years following, especially in Russia, India, Germany, and Great Britain. It was created by Dutchman Iepe Rubingh based on work done by cartoonist Enki Bilal, and has evolved into a now professional sport. In the October of 2005 in Berlin, Tihomir Atanassov Dovramadjiev won the first ever European Chess Boxing Championship. A year later, the world championship qualification matchup between Zoran Mijatovic and Frank Stoldt in Germany saw a crowd of more than 800 people. The German Frank Stoldt eventually won the first world championship title in the light heavyweight division over American David Depto in 2007.

But chessboxing didn’t stop at an 800 person crowd. In the April of 2008, the sport was given credit from FIDE, the World Chess Federation. That same year, chessboxing clubs popped up in London in

and Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and the year later,  in Los Angeles. New York Chessboxing Club opened its doors in 2010, giving the United States Chessboxing Clubs on both the west and east coasts. The recent establishments of USA Chessboxing, Chessboxing China, the Chessboxing Organization of Iran, as well as the Italian Chessboxing Federation shows us just how much chessboxing has started to turn into a world phenomenon. If you really want to see it in action, mark down Saturday, October 14, 2017 on your calendars and schedule a flight to Berlin, Germany— that’s when and where the 2017 World Championships are taking place.

Not all reception to the new sport has been 100% positive. When asked about chessboxing in general, sport enthusiast Anthony Giachin ‘17 found it hard to believe that the sport would last all that long. “Chessboxing combines the civil world with barbarian action. It’s ironic that they challenge each other in a battle of intelligence then proceed to go after each other like mad-men. It just seems like too crazy an idea for a sport for it to really survive.”

Avid sports aficionado Kiran Damodaran 17’ also had similar feelings towards chessboxing. He remarked, “I think the concept is really cool and innovative in that these two ideas are often portrayed as opposites; however, I believe that while it may find some success as a niche sport, but  it will never gain the same prominence as independently standing events, like boxing itself, because chess boxing provides little to new content – rather, it is a combination. I’m just not sure there’s a large enough market for it to expand as a professional-type sport.”

Alright, so maybe we won’t see chessboxing at NA in the near future. But the creation of such a sport, one that combines two contrasting notions of intellectual and physical contest, is an incredible example of the endless boundaries of imagination and creativity in the world of sports.