The Big Throwdown

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Spend a few minutes with a 'master,' and it's a short leap to starting to believe that there's something very real going on here. As Graham Walker, cofounder of the World Rock Paper Scissors Society, says: 'The game is simple. It's the gamesmanship that makes it complex.' Think about it. Poker? Competitive eating? Cherry-pit spitting? Golf? These are marginal activities created to pass the time or sell advertising. Rock paper scissors is played around the world in different variations, it has a history as a conflict-resolution device, and its champions are as mentally disciplined as any professional athlete. It sure feels like a sport to me.

Today's big-time tournaments feature trained referees and official rules (strictly forbidden are both the controversial 'fourth throw' of dynamite¹ and the blatantly illegal vertical paper, or 'the handshake'²) and have created legends like C. Urbanus (he of the Urbanus Defense, a strategy in which one intentionally loses the first throw) and historic moments such as Pete Lovering's 2002 'rock heard round the world.' For those of us whose life-or-death college decisions (like who had to clean the bong) hinged on rock paper scissors proficiency, the allure of competitive RPS is too strong to resist.

Along with the pageantry, there's a visceral energy that also helps explain why so many are being drawn to the sport. Over just a few months, I personally witnessed dozens of extended stalemates (identical throws that result in a tie), all of which made a marathon volley between Agassi and Sampras look like a game of patty-cake.³ While stalemates are infinitely exciting during street matches--my cousin claims he and a chum once tied 27 straight times in a Rome back alley to determine who would get the last piece of a particularly delicious pizza--they are even more rousing under the bright lights as hundreds (or a handful) of spectators gaze on, slack-jawed, punch-drunk with delight.

According to various sources, the origins of this grand sport can be traced to somewhere between pre?Homo sapiens (where it was called 'rock rock rock') and various ancient Asian cultures. The book Children's Games in Street and Playground (Oxford University Press, 1969) by Iona and Peter Opie hypothesizes that RPS came to London by way of 'Jan Ken Pon,' a Japanese game based on sansukumi: a nontransitive system in which the snake fears the slug, the slug fears the frog, and the frog fears the snake.

Children's Games also references a London traveler who discovered a version called 'earwig man elephant' in Indonesia, as well as a scene in a tomb in Egypt that points to the existence of finger-flashing games as early as 2000 BCE. And the reason for the commonly used term roshambo? It's widely believed that Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, also known as the count of Rochambeau--and lieutenant general of the French forces during the American Revolution--was responsible for bringing RPS to the United States.

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