Put up your dukes . . . and your queen:

ONCE UPON a time a baron, name of Pierre de Coubertin, invented a five-event sporting contest that included pistol shooting, swimming, showjumping, cross-country running and moustache waxing (okay, I made the last bit up: the fifth is actually fencing using épées).

De Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, wanted to update the ancient Greek pentathlon of running, wrestling, long-jumping, javelin and discus, and he imagined the skill-set required by a 19th century cavalry officer stuck behind enemy lines: ride someone else's horse, use pistol and sword, swim and run. The baron's modern pentathlon has been an Olympic fixture since 1912, despite a lack of enthusiasm for it outside the eastern parts of Europe.

But now comes a hybrid that makes modern sense. It's called chess boxing. It's only six years old as a formally competitive sport, but its spread has been swift and there are around 150 professionals already competing for titles.

The rules are simple. Eleven rounds maximum, starting with four minutes of speed chess, using a 12-minute clock, then three minutes in the ring, and alternating thereafter with one-minute breaks between rounds. Victory is decided by knock-out, checkmate, judge's decision, boxing points scores or if either competitor runs out of chess time.

Its origins are splendidly odd. Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh is credited with its practical invention, but he in turn got the idea from Serbian cartoonist Enki Bilal, who used the chess-boxing concept as a plot device in his 1992 graphic novel Froid Équateur.

It's big in Germany, Bulgarians play and there's even a Siberian chapter.

In the Berlin tournament last July, 19-year-old local mathematician and light-heavyweight Nikolai Sazhin beat Frank Stoldt, a German anti-riot cop who had to resign in the fifth when he lost his queen.

Nor is it by any means only for the cauliflower-ears. To compete at the top, you'll need an ELO (chess) rating of at least 1,800. Sazhin's a 1,900 and the first Euro champion, Bulgaria's Tihomir Atanassov Dovramadjiev (2005), is a FIDE Master rated over 2,300.

Chess boxing is also popular in northwest London where tournaments are held in the Boston Dome in Tufnell Park, and where a tournament last week offered four fights, including the clash between Piotr 'Polish Pitbull' Pukos and Sascha 'Sensational' Wandkowsky. For your tenner in, you also got a DJ, interval entertainment and beer at £2.40 all night.

How will any sports aficionado, even those populating the IOC, resist?

Blogs cause a bit of friction

THE INTERNET’S malign shadow fell across the Hammersmith end of Craven Cottage last Sunday. It was a game that mattered equally to both clubs, although the 1-0 win did move Fulham up to eighth in the English Premiership, lurking on the shoulder of jittery Liverpool.

In the stands, Sunderland chairman Niall Quinn was reportedly stoic. Beside him, guest Martina Navratilova – a friend of the visiting club’s owner, Ellis Short – was politely baffled by Sunderland’s inability to simply put the ball in the net. The Guardian’s Dominic Fifield reported that manager Steve Bruce was “merely livid”.

The difference on the day came when a long and hopeful ball into the Sunderland goalmouth, which could and should have been cleared with expedition, fell instead to Fulham striker Bobby Zamora who managed to direct a decent header into the bottom corner.

Later, Zamora nodded against the bar, and he also created an insurance-goal opportunity. Good day, Bobby? Not one bit. The post-score behaviour of 28-year-old Zamora drew a froth of comment when he ran to Fulham’s own ’Ammersmiff fans, and shouted what even guesstimating television lip-readers could see was: “Shut your f****** mouths.”

Not once, but repeatedly, even brushing off the congratulatory efforts of team-mates to get a few more bellows in.

The powerfully built and shaven-headed East Ender, a well-paid professional regarded by Roy Hodgson as a skilful, adept and hard-working technician who fits well into the club’s meitheal gestalt, has been tormented by a handful of Fulham bloggers who have derided his poor scoring record.

“Maybe he reads too many of these blogs,” manager Hodgson said. “Our fans in the Hammersmith End actually constantly chant his name.”

Hodgson, mind you, may have been somewhat disingenuous there, given those fans penned and sang one chant last year that went (to the tune of That’s Amore): When the ball meet ’is ’ead/And ends up in Row Z/That’s Zamora!’

All rather benign, even affectionate, certainly not near the scale of the social problems revealed in this week’s Financial Times report that teenage addiction to the internet had led to the creation of remedial boot camps.

One 15-year-old was beaten to death in one such camp, and the government has had to ban electro-convulsive therapy as a treatment option.

Woods saga; the story that keeps on giving

I'M SURE most readers are up to their nostrils by now in Lion Cheetah Tiger headlines, and could be forgiven for wondering what else the hyenas of the media can chew off the carcass of the fallen big cat.

All right, enough Jungle Bookalready.

Everyone from the rent-a-quote PR "experts" to the website moralists, from psychoanalytical sciolists to pitch-and-putt dabblers, have had their 15 minutes of ephemeral exposure.

And still, it remains the story that keeps on giving, especially on the Why.

My own favourite hypothesis was iterated by Desmond " Manwatching" Morris, who last year was exercised greatly by the concept of Eldrick Tont Woods as a self-described Cablinasian: half Asian, quarter black and equal remaining parts white and (North American) Indian.

Morris was also taken by how this accidental racial amalgam had produced a "rather childlike" and beautiful smile.

In the Sunday Telegraph, Morris wrote that as humans evolved away from monkeys and apes, their mating behaviour and pair-bonding developed significantly.

Crudely summarised, that meant that although the male was increasingly encouraged to rear his own offspring within a loving family unit, the urge to pass on his genes through other females remained a primeval urge.

In the Sunday Times, that excellent columnist Rod Liddle had a simpler and even more plausible take. It reminded me strikingly of a Baggot Street publican who, when asked in the 1980s why the price of the pint had just gone up for the third time in six months, gave the most honest answer I'd ever heard from his ilk: "Because we can."

That's Liddle's thesis in a nutshell. These sporting alpha males "all succumb, or almost all", Liddle wrote: "Even the really, really boring ones" (even John Major, so cruelly satirised by Steve Bell who represented him as a pair of Y-fronts – almost certainly M&S ones).

Tina Brown's The Daily Beastwebsite made reference to a carousing caravanserai of groupies that accompanies the professional golf circuit in America.

Several experts on the shenanigans wrote that some golfers were more enthusiastic participants than others, and such men were often described as "hounds".

Which sat neatly with other references to professional sports circuses generally, in which casual-sex groupies are categorised as "road beef".

An aside to all of this is the issue of drugs and whether Tiger Woods – if, like so many US sportsmen, he's a martyr to pain – was hooked on the powerful Vicodin painkiller, whose side -effects can include liver damage.

Vicodin is a drug that's led to so many overdoses, the US FDA recommended it be taken off the market last summer.

And in the context of Woods's even surlier-than-usual public behaviour this year, it's interesting to note the highly addictive painkiller's withdrawal symptoms include depression, irritability and outbursts of atypical anger.

Finally . . . as someone said to me, perhaps wistfully, just yesterday:

"I hear Brian Cowen's resigned, he's going to emigrate and he's on his way to the airport right now. Trouble is, Tiger's driving."

FINAL STRAW

SO FAREWELLthen, MJ Kinane. The manner of your going was typical.

The fact of it was only made public when this paragon of Irish horse-riding perfection got home to his farm near Punchestown from a commitment he felt obliged to ride in Tokyo. The “announcement” was low-key, matter-of-fact; on a wet winter Tuesday.

No ego, or dramatics. Pure Mickey Joe.

He created the mould subsequently adapted by other Irish flat and jump jockeys by resolutely basing himself at home, and he even resisted the gold-plated blandishments of Sheikh Mohammed in 1993, a year also memorable for Kinane’s piloting of Dermot Weld’s Vintage Crop to the first European-trained win in the Melbourne Cup.

Self-aware, self-possessed, self-contained, he overcame high-profile Breeders’ Cup losses on Coolmore’s Rock of Gibraltar and Giant’s Causeway, and when the “welcome” became chilly on the Ballydoyle gallops, that stable’s knee-jerk loss became John Oxx’s calculated gain, culminating in this season’s Perfect Six on Sea The Stars.

Mick Kinane, as has been his constant wont, kept his own counsel back in 2003, and this week Oxx said of him: “He always conducted himself perfectly.” (In offhand Oxxspeak, that’s frothing hyberbole.) “I’ve a few mares, but at the moment you would describe me as a small-time farmer,” Kinane told the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday. That, from a man who has already co-bred Authorised, an English Derby winner?

Watch this space.

MUCH ASCroke Park lustily adopted Schalk Burger as its resident pantomime villain last month (his eye-gouging of Leinster and Irish Lion Luke Fitzgerald still fresh in the memory: and we do love to nurse a grudge), England's RSA-born batsman Kevin Pietersen has once again been getting the full brunt of South African crowds' hostility as he tours his native land, batting poorly.

Their dislike of him – and it cuts right through the support, regardless of colour – is not just based on the notion of him as turncoat. It's to do with the graceless manner in which he left, gurning about the race-balancing quota system that he felt was denying him his game-time due.

And then there's also his face-to-the-world demeanour, an image of himself entirely lacking irony and which the Australians long since captured in the acronym FIGJAM.

That's Ozspeak executive summary for F**k I'm Good, Just Ask Me.