culture
Sporting Goods: Cardboard Warriors
Step one: don box(es). Step two: fight!
Sports coverage tends to focus on major league teams, but every day in Toronto people make fun (and sometimes wacky) activities an important part of their lives. Sporting Goods looks at some of these.
Skull Man prepares for Box War battle.
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Remember that feeling as a kid when a chesterfield or a large appliance was delivered to a house on your street and the humongous box it came in would sit by the curb? Faster than soggy tissue takes to shred, a swarm of neighbourhood kids would be converting the box into a fort, or a spaceship, or a castle. Back then, childhood imagination, combined with discarded cardboard, led to hours of inventive fun.
Thought cardboard-themed amusement ended in childhood? Skull Man and his troop of paperboard warriors think otherwise. Instead of constructing forts and rocket ships, though, these corrugated bad boys (yes, the majority of Box Wars participants are male) focus instead on the design of body armor and weaponry—only to have it torn to bits.
Box Wars has been declared. Prepare to be recycled.
Box Wars defies definition. Cue the screamo and then imagine what would result if an extreme sport and a live action role-playing game crashed an origami convention, drunk on Jagermeister. As best we can describe it, Box Wars is a creative, unconventional, physically demanding mash-up of athleticism, arts and crafts, and larping.
Leave it to the Aussies to come up with the idea. Box Wars originated in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002. After discovering him on this website, the Australians approached Skull Man, based here in Toronto. Excited by the concept, Skull Man established a Toronto chapter of Box Wars in 2005.
The Canuck version varies from Australia’s every-man-for-him-or-herself approach. Skull Man tweaked the rulebook, adopting a team-oriented approach. Battles last between five and 30 minutes. For the duration, referees patrol the war zone, making certain combatants don’t get too aggressive. The objective is to destroy your opponent’s cardboard costume, not hospitalize them.