World Sand Marble Championships??

So I’m going to the mall
one day last week, just minding my own business and BAM, I run smack into a
qualifying leg of the World Sand Marble Championships. Right
there in the mall in Caluire et Cuire! Who knew?

I always liked marbles as a child. As I remember it, there were little
marbles called “marbles,” and then bigger marbles called “shooters.” There was
also a string tied in a circle, maybe 40-50 centimeters in diameter: the
marbles went inside the string, and each player took turns trying to knock
marbles outside the circle via the shooter. When all the marbles were knocked
outside the string, he who had the most marbles won. Pretty simple: sure, there
were different rules concerning how one was allowed to employ ones shooter that
varied from one house to the next—and of course there were the Bohiggis boys
from up the street who would just take your shooter, smash it against a rock
and declare victory—but in the end the game wasn’t that complicated. I think I
was pretty good at it, too.

Man, were we poor white trash or what? These people know what marbles are
all about.

The first thing that struck me was the extreme level of organization: all
French administrative organs should take lessons from the
marble people. There was a team of sand workers, dressed nattily in matching
“World Sand Marble Championship-Staff” outfits and brandishing
fancy tools, shaping an improbably complicated path out of nothing but sand and
water. There were tunnels, bridges, guardrails lining the sharpest turns,
tricky embankments and precipitous hazards, all placed and formed with expert
care. Others worked a registration table. There was also some sort of class
happening: young children were learning the ropes…

…but this isn’t just for kids, as the concentration and commitment
demonstrated by the two competitors above clearly shows. These guys mean
business. Clearly, a little research was in order.

According to their homepage (to
which, incidentally, www.worldmarbles.com redirects: an English site in the
works, perhaps?), sand marbles is a traditional game with “ancient roots” that
were somehow lost during World War II and did not again
resurface until 1982 in Royan, a beach community in the French
department of Charente-Maritime. A local radio station in need
of cash—selling on-air advertising was illegal in 1982 France—came up with the
idea of a sand marble tournament, and the World Sand Marble
Championships were born. Local qualifying events take place either in
malls, city centers or (ideally) on beaches, where one is not obliged to schlep
in truckloads of sand.

What I really like about all of this, besides of course the utter weirdness
of it all, is that the construction of the “course” seems to be as important as
the competition itself. The people
who build these very specialized sand castles are referred to unfailingly as
artists, and seem to travel from venue to venue, plying their skills. I have
been unable to verify whether or not they are paid, but I’m thinking there’s
probably not much money in Sand Marble Course Construction…especially when
there is no charge to participate. How often do you run across that
nowadays?

Profitable or not, a fair amount of resources go into this operation:
each circuit uses four tons of sand mixed with water and molded to
create a 25-meter elevated path, across which the competitors attempt to roll
their marbles (standardized diameter: 16mm) in the fewest number of
flicks. It seems that the forefinger flick is the accepted protocol,
as opposed to the thumb flick technique that was my trademark back in my
marble-flicking prime. Each circuit is different and very much determined by
the artists themselves, who are often referred to on the website as “artists of
the ephemeral.”

There is also an air of eternal and improbable optimism about all of
this that really works for me: despite what appears to be a very small
fan base, the people who keep up the www.mondialbilles.com website insist on
referring to the event as the “World Championships” of the game, stressing over
and over the international character of sand marbling and its practitioners;
they even go as far as to suggest that players come from “the four corners of
the world” to participate. True, there do seem to be a few events in and
players from Switzerland…but, even if the technical requirements of an
“international game” are thusly met, don’t you have to involve more than two
adjacent countries to conform to the spirit of the phrase? I don’t
know…I suppose that the NFL calls the Super Bowl winners “World Champions,”
even though American football is about as popular and well-understood in Europe
as sand marbling is in the States, so why not?

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