Boule d’Or
Especially for Esquire, an essay on pétanque, by Joe Dunthorne
it was high summer and the animal living inside my wife had finally locked its head into position, ready for launch. We had been told to carry on living “as normal” because only five per cent of babies are actually born on their due date. This was why we thought it OK to travel to Kennington in south London on the hottest day of the year and take part in an amateur boules competition.
Boules, or pétanque, is a throw-big-things-at-a-smaller-thing game. It can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who threw stones at other stones. It is not a game for athletes. As we joined the other teams on the tree-lined strip of gravel, I could see at least six stomachs that were more bulbous than that of my fully pregnant wife. Sun-cooked men with taut, gaseous beer bellies — these are the gods of pétanque.
Our team consisted of me, Maya, and our friend, Dylan. He arrived late and had not been to sleep. He had been to see Guns N’ Roses the night before or, to be totally accurate, he had met some people who had been to see Guns N’ Roses and had been caught up in their atmosphere of Eighties excess. Dylan is not a man who needs much encouragement. Behind his shades, the whites of his eyes were angry pink. We handed in our team name: Raging Boules.
Things started well. The first team we played asked us to explain the rules. We showed them how through the medium of a ruthless drubbing. The second team we played had a 10-year-old in it. We all know young people hate to be patronised so we focussed exclusively on exploiting his weaknesses. In our final group stage match, we played a man wearing a Breton-striped T-shirt and a beret. He wore them without irony. OK, he wore them with some irony but not enough, and we punished him for this.
Without too much thought, we found ourselves in the quarterfinals. This is when things got serious. One of our opposition had a special clip on his belt to which he attached his tape measure. Even their boules looked different, looked historic, like actual cannon balls. It was a very close game — eight-all — when, suddenly, Maya started to feel weird. We had already been playing for four hours in the sun. She asked for a medical time-out and sat down on a bench in the shade. As we stood around her, it was impossible not to imagine our newborn son rolling out onto the gravel, nestling snugly against the jack.
After a few minutes, Maya sent me on an urgent mission and I ran, I literally ran to the pub, pushing through the crowd of people at the bar with the special righteousness of a father-to-be. They saw fear in my eyes. I returned with both arms full of crisps and scampi fries. She ate them all, licking her fingertips to make sure she got all the salty pink dust from the corners of the packets. It wasn’t deliberate gamesmanship on our part but there was no question that disrupting the game because one of our players was maybe about to give birth had unbalanced the opposition. Postcrisps, Maya threw with devastating accuracy. Her first ball was so tight to the jack that the opposition expended all their shots trying and failing to dislodge it. We cleaned up and won 13–8.
In the semi-finals, we faced the president of the London pétanque association, the organiser of the competition. His nickname was “Speed” and the cumulative age of his three-man team was more than 200. Though they had huge amounts of experience they had also been drinking brown ale all day. Again, our secret weapon was Maya: she carried us to victory with a performance of unimpeachable soberness.
Somehow, we were in the final and every other team gathered round to watch. We’re talking 40, perhaps 45 spectators, many of whom paid attention. We could no longer claim to be plucky underdogs and, because we realised we might win, we got nervous. Maya and I kept throwing long, watching our boules run under cars in the road. We immediately went 9-3 down. There was a sense that our luck was up. But cometh the hour, cometh the zombie. Dylan — who by this point had been awake for 36 hours — entered “the zone”.
It wasn’t the zone where sportsmen attain a higher level of consciousness but the other one. The dead zone. It was impossible for him to feel nervous or intimidated because those were emotions only available to people who had been to bed. He played brilliantly. He led us to a 10-13 victory. We screamed and hugged and kissed the trophy. We were amazed to discover there was a cash prize. Dylan took the notes and someone said, “Make it rain” and he did, tossed the cash into the sky, six £20 notes fluttering through the evening air, falling like leaves, and, moments later, the three of us were scrabbling around to pick up those six notes because £120 is a lot of money.
Afterwards, we went to Silk Road in Camberwell to eat a celebratory Big Plate Chicken, a dish spicy enough to encourage the onset of labour. And though the baby did not come, we nevertheless agreed it had been the happiest day of our lives.
A week later, our son was born. Maya gave so much of herself during those three savage days of labour that when our son finally did emerge — a purplish, screaming, blood-covered lump with a completely cube-shaped head, a head like a Tetris block, squished from days in her pelvis — she felt nothing. She was beyond the dead zone. Any fears that we might have to lie about what day was the happiest of our lives were quashed by the reality of childbirth.
This summer, we will return to the Boule d’Or as reigning champions with our championship-winning baby. He has just started crawling and it’s hard to imagine a worse environment than somewhere where heavy steel objects are constantly dropping from height. Still, he needs to be there. He is the only boules player on earth who has never lost a game.