Wednesday, August the 2nd, 2006

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Mansfield

Fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol won fame as a sprinter, and it is not commonly known that he was also a champion player of mansfield. It is likely that his cantankerous trainer, Old Halob, kept this quiet, for mansfield is a brutal and dangerous contact sport played with agricultural shovels. It is also illegal.

To the untrained eye, a mansfield match is indistinguishable from a whirling tangle of peasants smashing each other in the face with their shovels. Jaws get broken, blood flows from head-wounds, eyes are put out, and all sorts of other head injuries are the inevitable result of a well-fought tie. There is a lot of shouting, and a lot of groaning and howling in agony. Volunteer ambulance services are usually on hand, and keen young medical students offer triage at the side of the pitch.

It is the pitch itself that tells us we are witnessing a proper sport, with codes and rules, and not just a fight in a muddy field, and it is the form of the pitch which explains why the sport is called mansfield. As with other sports, the rules developed gradually, and for many years mansfield was little more than an excuse for roaming bands of countryside persons to bash each other about with shovels, spades, hoes and rakes. Often it seems that games resulted from rivalry between one farm and another, or were a way of settling disputes about hedges, duckponds, and hen coops.

Legend has it that a passing fortune teller one day watched a particularly violent brawl in which over a hundred peasants were embroiled, a fight so blood-drenched that vultures circled overhead, and carrion crows swept in from the west. Unusually for a magus for whom the stars in the firmament were as simple to read as an infant's story about Popsy The Pig, the fortune teller had a passion for bureaucracy. As much as he could appreciate the celestial order of the universe, he was equally, if not more, concerned with the lower level order of rules and timetables and regulations, often arbitrary and senseless. They had their own beauty for him, and he was a very mundane magus.

So it was that, watching toothless and mud-begrimed peasants whacking each other brainless with a jumble of different farm implements, the fortune teller saw what no one else could see. He peered into the future and saw an organised sport, still a brutal, impassioned fight, but one which would adhere to a coherent system, a sport like lacrosse or water polo or, his favourite, ping pong. The mundane magus sat down on a tuffet of spurge and rummaged in his magus-bag, pulling out an astrological birth chart for the writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). Its central circle showed a number of lines, crosses, squares and triangles, in green and red, which struck him as the perfect pitch-markings for the sport he foresaw, and are of course now familiar to mansfield aficionados in rural backwaters across the globe, wherever the game is played. On the back of the chart, he scribbled down with a thumbelina pencil a swathe of rules, ditching all farm implements but the shovels, insisting that each side belimited to forty players apiece, sketching the Katherine Mansfield bob-wigs they must all wear at the starting whistle, and adding such enticing details as the offside rule and the so-called Pantsil gambit.

Intriguingly, the magus was busy on his tuffet codifying the rules of the game on the very day in October 1922 that Katherine Mansfield fetched up at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, where she was hoping to find treatment for the tuberculosis that was killing her. And she did find treatment, for Gurdjieff, the one time carpet salesman and ridiculous old fraud, had her chopping up carrots in the middle of the night and sleeping, when he allowed her to sleep, in a loft above the cow-barn, reasoning that the heady stench of gathered cows would benefit her. She was dead by January.

By another uncanny coincidence, she died on the day that the mundane magus blew a whistle to begin the first ever mansfield tournament where the game was played in its modern form. In the final, the Blister Lane Gaggle o' Peasantry beat the Pang Hill Orphanage Groundsmen convincingly, with a tally of forty three broken bones to six, more than double the bloodshed when measured in pails, and three players' entrails eaten by vultures as opposed to twelve.

Next week we will be looking at various tactical tips, including the notorious double-shovel to the windpipe, and how the top teams limber up for a needle match by reading Katherine Mansfield's In A German Pension aloud, huddled around a gas stove on a wild winter night.