Anyone for a bout of baby boxing?
... not to mention fox tossing and goldfish swallowing! The barmiest sports in history
WHICH British king enjoyed competitive goldfish swallowing? And who emerged victorious when a team of one-legged cricketers took on a side of onearmed opponents? These are some of the questions answered in an entertaining new book by Edward Brooke-Hitching which looks back at the most bizarre sporting activities ever devised by mankind . . .
PUDDING-EATING CONTESTS
IN THE 17th century, no English country fair was complete without a speed-eating competition — and the foodstuff of choice was a glutinous dish of boiled milk and oats called Hot Hasty Pudding.
Heated in an iron pot to scalding temperatures, it was poured into basins in front of competitors who then scooped it into their mouths with their bare hands.
others took the time to blow on the pudding to cool it down. While this meant they initially fell behind, they often ended up triumphing over opponents who struggled to swallow with badly burnt throats.
FOX TOSSING
EvEN by the standards of the 17th century, when such barbarities as bear-baiting were common, the german practice of Fuch
sprellen (fox-tossing) was very cruel. usually held in the gardens of royal palaces, foxes were released into large enclosures, across which long strips of cloth were laid. Each team of two people took charge of one of these strips, the partners holding either end and yanking their sling taut when one of the foxes ran across it.
This sent the terrified creature flying as high as 24ft into the air, and any that survived the fall were finished off when the competitors stalked the enclosure and clubbed the wounded animals to death.
BABY BOXING
THESE annual boxing matches involved not babes in arms, but boys aged between five and 11. Staged until as late as the Seventies, they were the brainchild of former u. S. army sergeant Spike Webb who, in 1919, was appointed boxing coach at the u.S. Naval academy in annapolis, Maryland.
He believed the best way to toughen up the young sons of officers and civilians who worked at the academy was to don miniature gloves and fight several rounds with each other.
They were dubbed ‘ baby boxers’, and bouts were filmed for international newsreels.
GOLDFISH GULPING
Harvard student Lothrop Withington accepted a dare to swallow a live goldfish in front of 100 classmates. To settle his stomach, he followed it up with a side order of mashed potato.
Inter- collegiate competitive spirit being what it is — even when it comes to gulping down live animals — a gauntlet was felt to have been thrown down, and soon students across america were vying to gulp down the most goldfish, the record for the number swallowed in one sitting eventually standing at 210.
It would have risen even higher had universities not banned the practice, although not before george vI was said to have praised it on a visit to the u.S.
ONE-LIMBED CRICKET
THE weird challenge was for a team of one-legged cricketers to take on a side of one-armed opponents. and so a match took place in 1796 between wounded sailors who were cared for at greenwich Hospital in South-East London.
although the one-armed team outpaced their monopedal challengers, the advantages of two hands proved too much when it came to swinging a wooden bat, and the one-leggers won by 103 runs.
WATERFALL RIDING
For 19th- century daredevils, the great white waters of Niagara Falls were an irresistible challenge, and the first man to be sealed up in a barrel and thrown into the rapids was an English cooper named Carlisle graham.
after surviving a first ride down a stretch of the river (not including going over the edge) in 1886, he made a repeat journey the following year, this time with his head protruding unprotected.
Miraculously he survived, although he was left profoundly deaf.
as the 19th century drew to a close, the number of barrel riders was steadily increasing, yet still no one had dared attempt the ultimate barrel stunt: to plummet over the edge of the Falls. This was reckoned by every man in the game to be suicidal, but it took a woman to prove them wrong.
In 1901, a 63-year-old schoolmistress named annie Edson Taylor took the plunge.
Clutching her lucky heartshaped pillow, she survived the 150ft drop without serious injury, but it was not an experience she was keen to repeat.
‘If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat,’ she said.
‘I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon — knowing it was going to blow me to pieces — than make another trip over the Falls.’
CANNON BASEBALL
aLTHougH baseball is associated primarily with america, a forgotten pioneer was Charles Howard Hinton, an Englishman who taught at Princeton university in New Jersey during the late 1890s and noticed that many of his students had developed sore arms from pitching baseballs.
and so, in 1897, he invented a bowling machine — essentially a small-bore cannon, which fired balls with a loud bang. This was a precursor of similar machines used today, the important difference being they don’t make use of gunpowder.
This proved the downfall of Hinton’s invention. apart from the deafening noise which caused terrified batters to dive instinctively out of the way, his baseball cannon also tended to cook and harden the leather surface of the balls, giving them all the elasticity of flying bricks.
CAR POLO
aN ENTHuSIaSTIC polo player, the Queen’s grandfather, george v, took particular interest when in 1913 two teams visiting England from america demonstrated an exciting new variation on ‘the game of kings’: using a motor car instead of a polo pony.
Keeping one hand on the steering wheel and the other on their huge mallets, they dribbled a large ball — about the size of a basketball — past their fourwheeled opponents.
‘It would be hard to devise a game in which the players took bigger chances of mishap,’ wrote one journalist — and there were indeed many accidents, with players frequently thrown from the Model T Fords, which they favoured for manoeuvrability.
These ‘auto-polo’ players so impressed george v that they were invited on a two-week tour of Europe. By the Thirties, however, enthusiasm had waned as the public turned to newer excitements including ‘ auto rodeo’ in which cowboys lassoed and rounded up steers from motor cars.
BALLOON JUMPING
THE ‘jumping balloon’, invented in the Twenties, was a helium balloon attached to your body with a harness so that you could bounce across the landscape, clearing cars, trees and even small buildings.
altitude was gained by leaping into a mild to mid- strength wind, and, unlike with hot-air balloons, the weight of the balloonist would slightly exceed the upward pull of the balloon, minimising the chances of disappearing into the stratosphere.
Claims that only minimal training was required to operate the balloons caused particular excitement, prompting speculation about a future in which businessmen might balloon-jump their way to work, while schoolboys rained down from the sky.
one enthusiast was Sherlock Holmes writer Sir arthur Conan doyle, who said balloons might help people go about their days ‘swiftly and without fatigue’.
However, balloon jumping was incredibly dangerous, as became clear in 1927 when an raF parachutist trying it out was killed when he hit a power line.
after that, interest in balloon jumping withered and never quite ‘took off’ again.
CHEETAHS Vs HOUNDS
SurELy one of the strangest events in British sporting history was a series of races between cheetahs and greyhounds, which took place at romford stadium in Essex on a winter’s day in december 1937.
The three cheetahs had been brought from Kenya by raymond Hook, an exporter of exotic
wildlife to zoos all over the world. He hoped to profit from staging such events, but early trials in front of invited guests had not proved promising.
Although cheetahs are the world’s fastest land animals (reaching speeds of up to 75mph), these specimens showed little interest in pursuing the raw meat strapped to the electric hare and, instead, padded over to the bookies, who ‘scattered like pigeons’ according to one observer.
Two of the cats proved similarly uncooperative on race-day, but the sell-out crowd was not to be disappointed, thanks to a third cheetah, who cleared 50 yards before the dogs had even left their gates and bounded over the finish line in first place, covering the 265 yards in 15.86 seconds and smashing the canine record of 16.01 seconds.
This performance turned out to be an exception, and the cheetahs proved stubbornly indifferent to the pursuit at subsequent meetings. So, the experiment was abandoned.
AERIAL GOLF
IN THE Twenties, being hit by a stray ball was only one of the dangers on golf courses. There was also a serious risk that people might be dive- bombed by light aircraft flown by participants in aerial golf, a game that involved dropping flour-bombs on targets below, obliterating manicured English greens in explosions of white powder.
Popular with both male and female aviators, these competitions were played around the world and continued until the outbreak of World War II, when priorities shifted.
PHONE-BOX STUFFING
IN THE Fifties. a group of students in South Africa claimed to have set a record by cramming 25 people into one telephone booth.
This novel challenge was instantly taken up by others.
The rules were simple: the door could be left open and a person was counted if his or her body was at least halfway inside.
Even so, a group of London university students managed an unimpressive total of only 19 people, and the South African world record still stands today.