The real world championships
by Steve Rushin
Posted: Wednesday October 27, 2010 10:03AM
Updated: Wednesday October 27, 2010 10:03AM
Sports Illustrated
It’s that time of year again — October — when we crown another deserving World Champion. I’m speaking, of course, about the just-concluded World DJ Championship, which was contested among turntable wizards from 25 nations and won — I hardly need to tell you — by the French spinner LigOne at club KOKO in London.
By contrast, the other World Champion crowned next week will have vanquished teams from two countries en route to winning the World Series. The World DJ Championship, we are left to conclude, is a far more cosmopolitan event than the World Series will ever be. The only thing the two events have in common is a lot of scratching.
So why in the world do we persist in calling the winners of America’s domestic sports leagues “World Champions”? It has often been noted that the NFL is about as international as the International House of Pancakes. But that simply isn’t true: IHOP has franchises in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Virgin Islands. The NFL does not have a franchise in Los Angeles.
The governing body of the World Chess Championship, FIDE, comprises 158 national associations. Given that the United Nations only has 34 more countries than that, we might consider FIDE a truly global operation. If any victor, then, has the right to slip into a “World Champion” T-shirt and duck-walk around a field of play as Tina Turner sings “You’re simply the best” over the sound system, it is 40-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, the reigning world chess champion. It would certainly make the tournament more lively.
Instead, Anand, who took a 40-hour bus ride to Bulgaria to earn his title in May, pronounced himself “relieved” to have won, then treated himself to a flight home. This backs up what Francis Bacon once said: “The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it.”
Of course, that was the 16th century, and Bacon today would no doubt be tweeting us all a link to his Bacon Bits blog, where he’d have posted several more aphorisms like that one. But the point remains: “World Champions” protest too much.
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/steve_rushin/10/27/world.champs/#ixzz13aAaSZOz
Chess is the real world championship.
I lol’d at Bacon Bits.
Well my teacher Bobby Fischer was never defeated for the World Title to begin with and as far as fide’s top match in Bulgaria , it doesnt take a rocket scientist to look at the White House and then play Ng4(Leap of Faith- U.S.C.F. i read your mag. thats the real reason he moved the knight.), actually from an Ultramodern perspective vishy’s lack of understanding about this new idea is clear by the games hes playing in Nanjing right now. When President Obama came to Buffalo, N.Y. i went downtown to see why you over there in Europe seeing Aliens and moving that knight in a circle, so when your TOLD we living in a time of CHANGE!!!,and then the chessboard changes, why then do you wanna believe that this Universal Occurance has anything to do with Fide’s Chess World Championship or Vishy or Kasparov, why would a chessplayer, a reasonable thinking individual in the United States look at how much different CHESS HAS CHANGED!!! look at the White House then act CONFUSED, about what to do in the Midterm Election? We dealing with a Universal Truth thats sitting in the White House and i hear Rush Limbaugh on the radio makin silly noises and Sarah Palin spittin rhetoic, this is for our children’s future and Chess is showing the whole world that its not “just a game”.