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It’s a unique approach to Mother’s Day, I’ll give it that much…

“Sports promoters in a Peruvian city are honoring its mothers by inviting them to slip on gloves and head protectors and try to punch each others’ lights out. Sunday’s Mothers Day bouts took place in a grassy, makeshift ring in Huancayo, at 10,500 feet (3,200 meters) above sea level.”

Apparently it has something to do with Peruvian boxer Kina Malpartida being the current world super flyweight champion and how she’s inspiring women to take up the sport. So that clearly means moms need to get in the ring and chuck knuckles so hard that they knock each other to the ground. Mother’s Day Boxing. It’s just something that makes you stop and stare. Not because women or mother’s are fighting but because someone thought this would be a great promotion for mother’s day. On your special day, mom, I figured you’d like to beat the snot out of someone else’s mom.

I guess your mom could show off the fact that she’s the toughest mom around? But then why not Mother’s Day MMA? That actually sounds better. Kind of rhymes, you know?

This Sunday night, your mom will display fighting supremacy as she dominates other mothers in the octagon!

Yeah, I’d watch that. But not featuring MY mom. She’s better with a rifle than she is with hand-to-hand fighting.

Chess Boxing.

You play four minutes of chess, followed by a round of boxing, then four more minutes of chess and back and forth. This sounds like the ultimate expression of fighting and tactics in a single sport. Yes there are plenty of tactical choices in boxing and in any form of martial art competition and maybe you have a fistfight break out every now and then over a game of chess but this is the first thing to fuse them together. It also involves heavy metal music playing through headphones you wear while you’re playing the four minutes of chess but I don’t think that really adds to the contest. Some of my best work has been done while deafened to heavy metal music.

I didn’t really have anything more to say here. I just think that chess boxing awareness needs to be anywhere from 30 to 90 percent higher.

Thus, I link.

This.

 This sort of thing encourages my faith in humanity. Because there’s practically no political or public opinion gains to making this sort of bet. It’s just two (admittedly powerful) guys hanging out and making a friendly wager on their favorite team. It gives you hope that two world leaders are not complete assholes and it shows you the heart of what competition should be.

Nothing monumental on the line. You don’t want to lose but it won’t be the end of your life if you do. And you defnitely want to win because winning is sweet. But once the whole thing is said and done, everyone’s no more or less friendly than they were before. There was a great matchup, the winner was definitively determined, and one guy gets some beer. All in all, a great blueprint for sports in general.

Unless the other side was being a dick. Then you fight and then buy each other a beer. No hard feelings just a few expressive bruises.

There’s a lot of fair treatment in the world today. Don’t get me wrong we’ll never completely eliminate unfair biases but there’s not a whole lot of seperate water fountain lines out there and women and men are on a more even playing field than they were back in the 50s (because, you know, I was for sure alive in the 50s).

Even so, the sports world doesn’t really share this same practice. I’m not going to get into the hows or whys but you can’t deny that the lineups for the NBA and the WNBA are not equal in length. Hell, you could argue that the fact that it’s not MNBA and WNBA means a vast difference in interest. I have hope for a women’s league NFL but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

But then we come to curling. The good old Canadian sport which includes hanging out on a strip of ice hucking rocks and probably sharing some oat-based beverages. From what I’ve seen, it’s not a perfect balance. The Brier tends to get more attention than the Scotties do. If you want to nitpick you could say that because the former used to be sponsored by a beer company, they are a little more popular but that all depends on how you feel about beer. But when you stack it up against the other sports, curling is a shining beacon of equal opportuinty. The Scotties get a whole slug of attention and I, personally, am just as excited about Cheryl Bernard as I am about Kevin Martin (although the jury on my curling dream date is still out). Like I said, I’m not going to get into the hows and the whys – though I do suspect it’s because curling is awesome – but as far as gender equality goes, curling is ahead of the curve.

In summary, good job hosers. Now bring home some gold.