Sports in Hell

by Rick Reilly

  Making the team is just about the proudest she’s ever been in her life, she said.

  “Good,” I said. “Now you’ve had your moment, go do something else.”

  Very few of them had any team football experience. We once had a female nanny who played starting quarterback for her eight-man high school team. It made for awkward neighborhood conversations.

  Neighbor lady: Where’s your dad?

  My son: In the back, throwing passes at the nanny.

  How many thousands of girls out there would love to play football but are told not to? Melissa is stocky, smart, and has a signal bark that sounds just like John Elway, yet her mother wouldn’t let her go out for any kind of youth football. “She said the boys were too big.” Just the opposite for Lela. She knew she’d be too good. “All my brothers were the stars of their high school teams. I didn’t want to take that from them.”

  One linebacker, Tarrah Phillpot, got into it as a way of getting closer to her dad, which was odd, since he’d been dead for sixteen years. He was Ed Phillpot, the fine linebacker for the New England Patriots in the ’70s who died of cancer when she was sixteen. “By the time I was born, he was done playing,” says Tarrah, who sells Dodges during the day. “I kind of lost touch with him. This kind of keeps me close with him. I get to live now by the principles he taught me. Like, ‘There’s always somebody badder than you, so you have to give it your all.’”

  Tarrah, a three-car-pileup sort of blonde, may also be the only former stripper in professional football. She was part of one “shoe show” or another for five years, from San Diego to Miami.

  Any similarities between football and stripping?

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “The same locker room bullshit goes on in both. A lot of giving each other shit. And a lot of drama. Like when the other girls hate a stripper because she’s taking all the tips. So they throw fruit punch on her best costumes.”

  Fruit punch?

  “Yeah, fruit punch stains and ruins all your clothes.”

  I guessed that the big difference between stripping and football is that in stripping, when you pull groins, you generally make more money.

  One woman joined the team to prove a point, that she could do it on one leg better than a lot of women on two. Born without the lower part of her left leg, right tackle Lindsay Hood came to the tryout and impressed the coaches but worried the ever-fretting owner, Ann. She remembers it like this:

  Ann: I notice that you’re limping …Is that a problem?

  Lindsay: No, I have a prosthesis. Is that a problem?

  Ann: No, no!

  Lindsay: Look, if my leg falls off during a game, I have an extra one in the car and I’ll leave it unlocked so you can go get it.

  Again, stuff you just don’t hear in the NFL.

  Having tried to run through them, tackle them, and escape them for two days, they really are pretty good, two legs or one. I guarantee, if you happened to be driving by the naval base one day and saw this team scrimmaging you’d go, Hey, high school football! “My favorite thing,” says Dez, “is to pop in a DVD of us playing—not say anything to anybody about who it is—and then see guys’ reactions when we take off our helmets and all that hair falls out. They’re shocked!”

  The biggest difference I noticed between men and women’s pro football is that women just laugh a lot more playing it. They’re not quite as afraid of the coaches, not all gung-ho about everything. They chat and gossip when it’s not their turn to run a play. None of them are trying to get to the NFL. They’re not even trying to get to the CFL. They’re just playing for the pure fun of it because they love the game and somebody finally gave them a chance to knock boobs, as they say.

  The biggest similarity? They both hate having their real weights printed in the program. Guys lie heavy, women lie light. “One time, I put down ‘210 pounds,’” Lela admitted. “Everybody giggled. They’re like, ‘OK, Little Miss 210.’ Because they all know I’m at least 280. My friend said, ‘Why don’t you just list 280?’ And I said, ‘’Cause there’s cute guys who read the roster!’”

  Halfway through that first practice, I asked Monty if she thought I’d be good enough to play for them, if I were indeed a woman.

  “Are you kidding?” said Lela, who hadn’t been asked in the first place. “You looked just like a girl at first. I’ve been laughing at you all night. I’m like, this dude has no ass!”

  “Seriously!” added Monty. “Your ass is all bony.”

  I’ll take that as a no.

  The more I played with them, the more I was starting to believe them. We’d been scrimmaging—offense vs. defense—for over thirty minutes and I didn’t have a single catch. My hammy was hurting and my chest was still in the state of Oklahoma, and my back was getting tight. The practice was about to end. I was desperate. And that’s when I had an idea. An awful idea. The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea. I realized that the tiny, lovable cornerback Priscilla had probably not played much backyard football. Me, I’d played it my whole youth, teen years, college life, and every Easter, July Fourth, Thanksgiving, and, if possible, Christmas in the Cheating Is the Whole Point Reilly Backyard Football Classics. I asked for a time-out and huddled with my O.

  “I gotta have one catch,” I said to Coach Ring. “Can I call a play?”

  He let me.

  I came out of the huddle hangdog, looking like I’d been shot down, and ran to a lone wideout position on the left. I took a big sigh at the line and put my hands on my hips like I was going to pout the rest of the practice. But at the snap, I suddenly took off on a very quick two-yard buttonhook. It surprised my tormentor to see such a thing, but not much. Melissa looked at me, cocked back her arm, and brought it forward, just as Priscilla timed her step to intercept it and take it for a touchdown.

  Only Melissa didn’t let go. It was a fake. On her arm pump, I spun clockwise, being careful to hook our little Miss Priscilla with my right arm, tossing her forward—à la Michael Jordan on Utah’s Bryon Russell to win the 1998 NBA Finals. No flag.

  Don’t cry, Young Priscilla. Your mascara will run.

  I went long. When the little medical assistant realized she’d been bamboozled, her pulse must’ve stopped. Doctor, Code Red! I was five yards past her before she could even turn around. I might as well have been at an anthrax cupcake sale, I was so alone. Melissa tossed up a beautiful little spinning egg that nestled happily in my greedy hands a half second before the dreaded Deuce could race over to help. I high-stepped my way into the end zone—in the manner of a marching band major—leapt high and flushed it backwards over my head.

  I really shouldn’t have done that.

  When I landed, something in my back began screaming, “You cretin!” TLC called a chiropractor that night and told him it was an emergency. He said he’d see us in the morning. Only Macallan whisky got me to sleep. Turns out I’d thrown my pelvis out. He reset it (first-ever expense report item: Pelvis, misplaced, $65), and said I was not to run, jump, or run pump-fake-hook-and-go’s for three days.

  Man, was it worth it.

  I got razzed more than somewhat for not being able to practice the second day. I took all the meetings and hung out in the huddles, but I didn’t suit up.

  “Figures,” Lela said when I told her I’d jarred loose my pelvis. “No ass.”

  But Monty admitted that I had a place of honor in Scorpion history. “You’re the only Stunt Monkey who’s stayed the whole practice.”

  And, thanks in large part to the example I set as a blocking sled and a cheat, the Scorpions had their greatest season ever. They won their final seven games, made the play-offs, finally knocked out hated, despised Dallas (spit!), and then gave the Houston Energy watt-for, 14–7, to win the whole WPFL enchilada. Quiche. Whatever.

  Dez rushed for over 1,300 yards—including 172 in the title game—and was named the league MVP, for which she got a trophy of a guy. “Guess they don’t make a lot of trophies with ponytails coming out the back,” she observed. Melissa
Gallegos—by far the shortest passer in the league—became the first QB in league history to throw for over 1,000 yards (1,520). And the whole team made it places no women football player had ever been: the sports section of the San Diego Tribune and the ten o’clock sportscasts. They each got a ring and Tovar got an unheard-of $500 bonus.

  And then the league folded.

  There was talk of till-dipping and misappropriation and lawsuits, but none of bringing it back. The Scorpions are now and forever the defending champions of a dead league.

  “We’re all going through bad withdrawals,” says Dez. “Four or five of us went up and worked out for [the] Orange County [Breakers, a team in another league], but we just couldn’t do it. It was just so—mediocre.”

  So Dez went back to normal life. She got a boyfriend and got a promotion, all the way up to crematorium manager. Still, she now has a moment that precious few men ever know: She is a world champion. And that can make a girl feel very alive indeed.

  7

  Chess Boxing

  There is a sport—chess boxing—that sounded just so deliciously dumb I almost didn’t want to know what it really was. I just liked saying it, “Chess boxing.”

  Questions poured forth:

  1. Was it two guys sitting at a card table in the middle of a boxing ring playing chess? And maybe one of them goes, “Check.” And the other guy looks at the board, scratches his chin, and then just cold-cocks the guy with a roundhouse right, sending him backwards—bishops and queens and mouthpiece flying—and adding, “You sure?”

  2. Could a guy cheat in chess boxing?

  Cornerman: Ref, check his glove! Check his glove! There’s a rook in there!

  3. Why combine chess and boxing? Can you think of two things that have less in common? Hey, I know! Let’s combine scuba and baking? Bowling and colonoscopies?

  4. Has a fan of one ever attended a match of the other? Although, it’s true, the two do have one thing in common: Participants in both disciplines rarely have sex before a match. Of course, chess players don’t have it after, either.

  5. Did they do the chess and the boxing at the same time?

  Breathless announcer: Frazier’s trying to get to his knight, but Foreman keeps slamming him with the jab!

  6. Could the ref step in and call it if it’s getting out of hand?

  Ref: That’s it! Fight’s over! He just tried to move his knight diagonally! We’re finished here!

  7. Was it live people—dressed as chess pieces—being moved around by two players standing in giant towers, with control of the square in question being decided by one piece boxing holy hell out of the other?

  The truth, though, was nearly as dumb. Chess boxing involves two combatants alternating six rounds of chess (four minutes) and five of boxing (three) until one of them is either checkmated on the board or knocked out in the ring, or time runs out on the chess clock. In that case, whoever is ahead on the cards of the judges is the winner.

  Does that make any sense?

  The sport was never meant to be a sport in the first place. It was a piece of performance art by a Dutchman named Iepe Rubingh. He called himself “Iepe the Joker” and his opponent was a friend, “Luis the Lawyer.” Sitting in a fully lit, roped boxing ring, they proceeded to actually box, then play chess, over and over, much to the mouth-agape bewilderment of the art gallery audience. It was Iepe’s statement about pigeonholing. It was so stupidly compelling—like Celebrity Apprentice—that they did it again two months later in Amsterdam. In that bout, Iepe was behind in the chess going into the last round of boxing and just decided to start throwing a slew of punches. He connected enough to make Luis the Lawyer loopy, so much so that when they got back to the board, Luis couldn’t make sense of the pieces nor where they should go. Iepe won, declaring himself the world middleweight chess boxing champ, possibly because there was no world middleweight chess boxing champ.

  Next thing you knew, sane people were under the mistaken belief that this was actually a sport—similar to NASCAR. Iepe began promoting the idea all over Europe and Asia, and suddenly, there was a whole mess of kings in the boxing world not named Don. Actually, Don King could clean up with this. Consider: Both former world boxing champion Lennox Lewis and current champion Vitali Klitschko both play chess, and play it very well. Can’t you see the posters?

  BLOOD ON THE BOARD!

  Or … BLACK, WHITE, AND RED ALL OVER!

  Or … “CUT ME, MICK. MY QUEEN’S TRAPPED!”

  Anyway, I set out to meet a real, live chess boxer and see a real, live chess boxing match. And that meant Europe or nothing. America wasn’t ready. There was one small club in Los Angeles trying to start up but getting nowhere. We decided the best of the European chess boxing seemed to be in London, where a former Channel 1 BBC reporter named Tim Woolgar was attempting to promote—and win—the UK’s first sanctioned chess boxing match.

  So I boarded a plane for England, hoping more than usual that the plane wouldn’t crash, if only for the ignominy of it.

  Mourners at funeral: Why was he going to London again?

  My kids: Uh, well … chess boxing.

  There are things you figure you’ll never see in your life as a sportswriter and one of them is a regulation-size boxing ring next to four waterproof chess boards, full of pieces, with fighters alternating rapidly between knocking each other’s blocks in and knocking each other’s queens off. But this is what I came upon at the Islington Boxing Club in north London, top floor, far corner. There were no chairs. Three men were on one side and three on the other, each sweating like B.B. King onto the boards, trying to clear their eyes so they could make their moves and punch their speed chess clocks. Each player had twelve total minutes of time to make his moves in the allotted six rounds of chess. If the player ran out of time, he lost the match. Suddenly, a buzzer would ring and they’d all put back on the one glove they’d taken off, and climb into the ring and start punching each other.

  Q: What wears one glove, chases queens, and isn’t Michael Jackson?

  A: A chess boxer.

  Alternate answer: Woolgar, a square-jawed babyface with bangs and rectangular glasses. In the ring, his feet were anvils, but his punches jackhammers. Which was funny, because when he talked about his style, he saw himself as a kind of British Muhammad Ali. “I like to dance, stay out of reach, and hammer with the jab, like Ali,” he said.

  And I think I look a lot like Brad Pitt.

  As a youth, he was decent—his record was 1–1. “But my second fight, my opponent was really starting to get annoyed with all my dancing Ali stuff. He got really mean. I knew I had to do something different pretty soon or I was dead. So I threw a straight right. I didn’t feel it even hit. It was that good. The guy went straight down.”

  At nineteen, his trainer said he either had to turn pro or quit. So he quit and went to college. “Too bad, though,” he rued. “I have a very strong jaw. I used to ride my bike to school and had no basket for my satchel, so I’d carry it in my mouth. I can take quite a punch because of that, you see.”

  Of course, it’s hard to tell if he’s lying. He promotes himself as thirty-five in chess boxing when he’s actually forty-five. The bastard—he actually looks thirty.

  Woolgar first heard about chess boxing while trying to be charming with a delectable woman at a party. He was mentioning to her that he loved chess and would she fancy a match sometime? “Oh?” she said. “You should try chess boxing. My boyfriend loves it!” And before he could tuck his ego between his legs and escape, the boyfriend was there going, “Oh, yeah, chess without boxing is crap!” Next thing you know, Woolgar was at a match in Berlin and hooked.

  “I just found it to be pure excitement,” he recalls. “Thrilling, really. Could the one chap who was the better boxer finish off the chap who was a better chess player before they had to go back to the board? I loved it!”

  After the fight, he asked the promoter if he could join a club in the UK.

  “There is no club in the UK,
” the German said.

  “Bollocks,” Tim lamented.

  “So why not set one up?”

  Soon he was quitting his BBC job to chase the kind of dream that when you tell people about it, they spit out their Guinness. Why quit a good job for something so patently ridiculous? Because he loves it. He loves it because, he says, the two disciplines are so much like each other. In both sports, fatigue can lead to dumb moves and a loss. Each uses combos. Both involve setting up traps for each other in hopes the opponent doesn’t notice. Jab, jab, then the right. Jab, jab, then the right. Jab, jab, fake the right, left cross.

  Except chess is far more brutal than boxing, Woolgar says. “Boxing is the sport of gentlemen. In chess, there’s no quarter asked nor given. We have a champion, Frank Stolz. He lost his crown to a nineteen-year-old when he blundered his queen. I know Frank would’ve rather been knocked out cold than do what he did, to lose his queen. It was humiliating for him.”

  Chess genius Bobby Fischer used to find great pleasure in “the moment when I break a man’s ego.” It’s a truism: Men prefer their nose broken to their pride.

  Exhibit A: In Greensburg, PA, recently, two men were playing chess when a Mr. Zachary Lucov became so humiliated at his blunder that he announced he was going to kill himself. He grabbed a .40-caliber Glock and pointed it at his head to prove it. The other participant, a Mr. Dennis Kleyn, leaped to stop him. They struggled. The gun went off and a bullet went through Kleyn’s arm, came out the other side, and nearly killed Lucov’s nine-month-old son, who was playing on the kitchen floor. Why the baby was playing on the kitchen floor at just before midnight is unknown. In fact, the whole story is sketchier than TMZ. As Lucov was leaving court a few days later, he was asked by reporters if he tried to kill himself. “I don’t recall wanting to,” he said with aplomb.