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Play Ball, French Style

While accompanying his wife on a business trip to Paris 2 years ago, 37-year-old Joe Zajac of Rochester, MI, wandered into a park near Les Halles and started watching a bunch of older men playing a game that involved tossing around metal balls - kind of a grown-up game of marbles.

"In fact, there were guys playing it everywhere I went!" he says. Rather than try to escape rogue ball tossers, he decided to join them. The game, he quickly learned, was called pétanque (pronounced "pay-tonk.") Was it fun to play? Oui!

The nearly 100-year-old French pastime involves rolling or tossing 1.5-pound steel balls at a small wooden one (often while drinking the French licorice-flavored alcohol Pastis).

The goal is to get the ball as close as possible to the little one or else to knock the small one farther away from your opponents' balls.

Similar games of European origin include the Italian "bocce" and the British "bowls." These, however, require rather specific, prepared, and manicured surfaces; in pétanque, the unpredictability of whatever the terrain-of-choice adds to the challenge.

"You can play almost anywhere, and you don't need a lot of equipment - just the balls," says Zajac. When he got back to Michigan, he hunted down some local games and quickly became the president of the Michigan Pétanque Club in Detroit, which has nearly a hundred members ranging in age from 10 to 85.

In Europe, pétanque and its cousins are games that are associated mostly with older generations, but in the U.S., younger people can often be seen playing in bars and on campuses - at Louisiana State University, students even formed their own competitive team. (A list of clubs and regular games in cities around the U.S. can be found at Pétanque-America.com.)

"I've traveled to many states to play, and always find that [pétanque] players accept and treat other ones as part of a family," says Zajac. "I also like that it appeals to all ages. It's kind of a nice way to get kids doing something other than playing video games indoors."

And if they get to do something that links them to another generation? Well, that's kind of nice, too.

 

Posted on May 29, 2006