The Joust

When I first saw that there was such a thing as the National Jousting Championship, I knew that this was the sort of story that I enjoyed writing. When it comes to journalism, I’m a feature writer. I don’t like newsy types of stories that follow what we call the “inverted pyramid,” stories that require you to tell the most important facts first and then go from there, putting the mundane but sometimes interesting parts of the story at the bottom for an editor to cut out, assuming there is no room for the story.

My writing style tends to focus instead on what I like to think of as “factoids,” throwing in random facts into the story that supplement and help people understand what the story is about. I tried to do this with my jousting story for Loudoun Extra, but I don’t feel like that the medium truly captured what I was trying to convey in the story: that family, like it or not, is what jousting is about now.

Jousting has undoubtedly changed from its violent roots from the 12th century to now. While it was popular in Europe during its heyday between the 13th and 16th centuries, Jousting certainly was very violent, and the Tilt, while sometimes ceremonial, had just as nasty of grudge matches as anywhere else.

King Henry II of France was killed because of jousting, and his death was probably the most popular the sport has ever seen. His jousting career ended after Gabriel Montgomery, a captain in the Scottish Guard, scored a hit on the king which broke his lance. The shard of his lance penetrated the King’s visor and mortally wounded him (Wikipedia goes into more graphic detail on where he was wounded.) The King lingered for 11 days until his death on July 10, 1559.

Considering all of this, and from some research I’d done on the internet, I knew that the sport was no longer practiced in this way in the United States. Sure, you’ll see tilts happen at Renaissance Fairs and whatnot, but professional jousting in the United States has two qualities: it’s regional and it’s a family sport. No one hits each other anymore, and there’s a severe lack of steel armor.

But that wasn’t what I found most interesting. What I found most interesting was the way in which all of the jousters interacted with one another, as if there really wasn’t any competition between them. Strangely for a sport born of Royal feuds and blood ties, of knights charging at one another at full speed on horseback wearing armor, there wasn’t any sense of competition between two people. And I was told why by Linda Minnick, who took me under her jousting wing for two weekends while I researched and wrote the story.

“Everyone knows one another and we see each other at most of the events,” Linda said. “So we try to not have a lot of drama going on.”

Drama seems to be one of the main contributors to why sports figures get in trouble in the first place. If Kobe Bryant, Barry Bonds and Michael Vick aren’t shining examples of why drama should be kept out of sports, than what is?

What I found most interesting about the sport are the family dynasties that have developed, like the Enfield/Minnick dynasty. Linda’s father Leon Enfield was a two-time champion jouster during the first two years of the National Jousting Championship, which ran its 40th joust this year outside of Aldie, Va. Linda herself has participated in nearly every National Jousting Championship with the exclusion of one because she was pregnant with her son Craig, who participated in this year’s joust. Her son Corey Minnick is now a two-time National Jousting Champ himself having won this year’s and the 2006 joust. Linda’s brother, Ken, was the 1988 Jousting Champion. Corey Minnick’s five-year-old son rides as well in what’s called the lead-line class, the first in a long process of becoming a national jousting champion.

Other families are like this as well in the sport, though honestly I haven’t had a whole lot of time to investigate how deep the dynasties go.

But how, you might ask, did jousting go from a sport that involved two armored men riding at each other with dull tipped lances to a sport where a single rider runs down the track and tries to collect rings? The Civil War was a big culprit in bringing back ring jousting, and like many interesting practices, we can thank Southern cavalrymen for bringing the sport back.

The genteel planter’s son was a typical cavalryman because, like most plantation owners during those days, the boys spent a decent amount of time on horseback, thus gaining the horsemanship skills of balance, timing and a relationship with the horse needed to joust. Naturally the young men were already skilled riders by the time the War of Northern Aggression began and they transitioned from their peacetime riding to the more challenging and dangerous wartime cavalryman. And when southerners get bored, we tend to try things out. Jousting just happened to be one of those things, and it has stuck around ever since.

Of course, being southern gentlemen, riding around in armor would not have been fashionable at the time and therefore the tilt wasn’t going to work. Besides, the south needed all the healthy men they could get to fight in the war, so hitting your opponent with a lance wasn’t exactly a sport they could practice their riding skills with and not expect to hurt or kill someone. Thus, ring jousting came into popular form, and that’s how cavalrymen during the Civil War

The rules of jousting are simple and straightforward, though there are some technicalities involved, just like with any sport. Riders have eight seconds to ride down an 80 yard track and collect three rings. If they do it in over eight seconds, the ride doesn’t count. The rings determine your placement, and you get two or three rides (depending on the tournament) to collect as many rings as you can for placement.

The rings range in size from 1 ½ inches to ¼ inch in diameter, and they go down in size as riders tie with each other. Thus, the smaller the ring, the harder it is to grab on a horse galloping down a track while trying to balance a lance.

Lances can be made out of anything including, but not limited to, the opposite ends of pool cues. Metallic lance tips of a standard length seemed to be the standard. I imagine that the pool cues tend to be lighter than custom made affairs that are wood, like the Minnick’s used. And the ways in which riders hold them depend entirely on how they feel comfortable: some hold them in a weird position, twisting their wrist so the lance is above the hand. Others hold them like you’d see in the movies with the end of the lance tucked into their armpits to help with stability. Some even held their lances like they were about to throw a spear.

Results varied from rider to rider as far as performance went, but overall everyone was evenly matched within their classes. But while the sport is a family affair, and while riders do tend to compete with one another on points, the sport relies totally on individual ability. If a rider is, for instance, uncomfortable on their horse their likelihood of their winning is lessened because control of the horse is just as important as balance.

One of the things that I found so remarkable about the sport was not the competition itself, but how friendly and open the people were to talking to me. They were genuinely excited that I was there, and they were willing to share with me all sorts of facts about the sport and about the people involved. I was told that people’s weddings were sometimes planned around when competitions were going to be held. One wedding was even held under an arch used for jousting, and during the reception they held a small tournament that both bride and groom participated in.

The jousters also liked to share as well: I can’t tell you how many times during the two Saturday’s I spent with the Minnick family I was told to get myself a sandwich and something to drink. (As a sidenote: The Enfield Butterscotch Brownies are indeed one of the sweetest and best dessert foods I’ve ever sampled, though only once. Funnel Cakes still top the list at this time, followed closely by my mother’s Chocolate Pie and Junior’s Cheesecake.) During the National Championship, Corey Minnick’s three-year-old daughter Rachel at one point started handing me Utz Barbecue Potato Chips like she was feeding me.

The children are just as active of participants as the adults, though they were mostly limited to the lead-line and Novice classes (though technically the lead-line class is a sub-class of the Novice, I like to think of them as separate for the mere fact that the lead-line class doesn’t really involve itself in the competition but is rather the “training wheels” class.) Kids from five years of age up into their teenaged years rode down the track just like their parents did, sometimes doing a better than their parents.

Jousting, to children, is also a sport that teaches the values of sharing. Because these are average people competing in the sport, they don’t have a horse for every rider. Thus, it is typical for a family to share either one or two horses between them, meaning that if the kids want to ride they have to be willing to share. And since Jousting is a family activity, the idea of getting everyone in the family involved including the children, kids are forced to share with one another for the precious amount of time needed to practice and develop a relationship with said horse or horses.

But overall, jousting is one sport that is true to its nature, and every participant has fun one way or the other. Jousting might not have corporate sponsorship, NCAA status, large stadiums packed to the gills with fans and a union, but it does have one thing that all other sports don’t: a real sense of family and of openness. Jousters don’t hold grudges against one another, there’s no penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct. No one gets thrown off the tournament grounds for arguing. In fact, the only argument you might hear at a joust is between mother and child, where mother is trying to get said child to wipe the peanut butter off of their face.

It’s comforting to know that the dedicated participants of the sport are teaching their children how to joust, so that it will survive in the years to come. But overall, jousting is a fringe sport, meant only for participants who are willing to take the time, and have the patience, to overcome great obstacles to achieve, at least in their small circle, great success.