History of chess boxing

An earlier version of combining chess and boxing took place in a boxing club outside London in the late 1970s. The Robinson brothers were in the habit of playing a round of chess against one another after a training session at their boxing club.The concept of chessboxing was first coined in the 1979 kung fu film Mystery of Chessboxing made by Joseph Kuo, where it referred to the Chinese variant of chess, xiangqi. In homage to the film of the same name, the band Wu-Tang Clan brought chessboxing into popular consciousness for the first time in 1993, when they released the song "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'".
The first chessboxing event was put on by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh. Rubingh's idea to create a new sport fusing the two disciplines, chess, and boxing, originates from the 1992 comic Froid Équateur, written by French comic book artist Enki Bilal, which portrays a chessboxing world championship. In the comic book version, however, the opponents fight an entire boxing match before they face each other in a game of chess. Finding this to be impractical, Rubingh developed the idea further until it turned into the competitive sport that chessboxing is today, with alternating rounds of chess and boxing and a detailed set of rules and regulations.