Petanque and pantacourts

I have witnessed something 100% French, folks. My village hosted a petanque (peh-tahnk) tournament this past week. Actually, we have a permanent petanque court across from the town square, but so far I've only seen a few old men lurching around it unpredictably. I had no idea it was actually for a game of some sort.

What is petanque, you might well ask. As far as I can gather, it is sort of a French national game, and people of all ages play it, generally just when the weather is warm. (Look it up on Wikipedia, if you'd like a better explanation - my grasp of sprting events is usually somewhat skewed.) It's a summertime game, like croquet or bocce or lawn darts, and has elements of all those in it! It's played with teams of either two or three players each, and each player (depending upon how many there are, total) gets either two or three small, heavy steel balls to throw. (They are about the size of medium apples or oranges.)In a tournament, there are six balls total for each side, so if there are two teams of two, each player gets three balls each. If there are two teams of three, each player gets only two balls. There is also a small, hard wooden ball, about the size of a big gumball, called the cochonnet (koh-shone-ay) that is thrown out before play starts, and this marker is the place to aim - where you want your balls to go. (And, as you can imagine - and as I heard many times that afternoon - jokes about "your balls" abound when you're around any number of people playing this game.)

Each player takes turns tossing these hard, steel projectiles at the cochonnet, trying to get closest to it. You use a strange, underhand throw, along the lines of a softball pitch, but much slower and more controlled. The ball you're aiming at is between 18 and 30 or so feet from where you're throwing, so they've developed all these different sorts of throws, to do different things. One of the more popular defensive moves is to throw your ball so that it lands right next to an opponent's ball, knocking it away from the cochonnet and further out of play. (Sort of like croquet, non?) The tournament players take the game really seriously, and apparently you have to be licensed to even play in one of these things. Yep. At the end, after all players on both teams have thrown, the winning team is the one whose ball or balls is closest to the cochonnet. It's that simple.

And that complicated! These tourneys actually have a dude assigned to be there with a regulation measuring tape, and it's his job to measure distances between the players' balls and the cochonnet, to see whose is closest, if there is any dispute and it's not clear who is really closest. Seriously, he has this dippy little case on a strap with his measuring tools in it and everything. And the competitors are very, very serious about the game. There is some smiling and back-patting when a throw goes well, but mostly it's just a bunch of guys (at tournaments, I'm told, it's almost exclusively a male game, in lots of places. No one seems to know why. Lots of women play with their families, but I guess not so much in competitions) pacing around on a semi-smooth patch of gravel and hard-packed dirt, eyeing the court and looking like they're trying to do calculus and geometry proofs in their heads, simultaneously. (Perhaps they are.) I saw very little in the way of poor sportsmanship - when a bad shot occurred, the man involved would generally just grimace slightly and look at the ground for a while, and there seemed to be little in the way of cat-calling or general ribbing, like you'd see in practically any American sport. Very civilized, indeed.

I didn't see the very end of the tournament, so I've no idea whose team finally triumphed, but there were some shiny trophies and (I think) a cash award for the winners of the day. The tournament started at 3; Patrick and I watched a little more around 10 that evening, when things were down to the last eight teams. The locals we talked to seemed to think things would be wrapped up by 11:30 or so. Almost nine hours of play! On a Thursday. I love it. Patrick has a "non-regulation" set of petanque balls; he's going to teach me to play. I'm looking forward to trying it out myself, although the balls seem to weigh about 2-3 pounds apiece, so passersby had better be wary when I'm throwin'. Yikes.

Watching petanque in the afternoon sun and heat (well, we'll call it "heat", as it was warmer than it has been - maybe 72 or 75 degrees. Nothing for a Floridian!), I became aware of something else very European that I've seen more and more as the temperatures warm up in this region. French men, apparently, do not approve of shorts as we know them. You almost never see a French man wearing anything that leaves all of his knees bare. Bermuda-length shorts are seen here and there, but by and large they wear something called pantacourts (pahn-tah-coor), which translates roughly to "short pants". You Americans may know them as "capri pants", or, as my sisters and I have often said, "man-prees". About three out of every five men were wearing some sort of capri-length pant - the rest were in regular long pants. Maybe five or ten men out of the whole crowd there that day had on what we'd call "shorts", and maybe ONE of them in anything shorter than knee-length.

                                                                           

I asked Patrick about the man-prees. He confirmed that French men, in general, find regular, American-style shorts "too confining" and prefer the pantacourts much more for summer wear. "Confining"? Really? This is a country where, at most public pools, men are required to wear Speedos, for heaven's sake! And shorts are too confining? I am frankly mystified. And a little tickled, truthfully. Seeing lots of what seem to be very manly men wearing a type of clothing I have heretofore classified as women's wear is pretty entertaining. (Especially when they pair it with a fanny pack - no, I am not kidding.) I worried, before I came to France, that my fashion sense would be completely outrun, even out here in the country. I imagined an effortless stylishness that I'd never be able to live up to or replicate. After seeing the dress code at the petanque tournament, I am greatly relieved. I have nothing to fear - not as long as my pantacorts hold out.