Petanque Here Petanque There Petanque Everywhere

Mostly they’ll show up in the south of France — in Provence, the Côte d’Azur or farther west along the hard sand beaches of France’s western coast lines. But don’t be surprised to run across them in almost any village in France.
 
They’re easy to find. Just look for a reasonably level spot of ground roughly half the size of a tennis court, often but not necessarily in a public park. There you’ll almost certainly spot a voluble and gesticulating gathering of mostly aging Frenchmen (and women too) usually in shorts, sneakers and baseball caps, their arms, legs and faces bronzed by long hours in the sun.
 
More often than not they’ll be arguing about an inch or a few centimeters of ground, pacing back and forth, eyeing the lay of the land around a small wooden sphere about half the size of a golf ball, known in French as the ‘But,’ or ‘Cochonnet’ and in English as the ‘Jack’. In their hands they’ll be lovingly polishing with a cloth a bigger silvery metal ball (‘Boule’), or two or three, each slightly larger than a baseball.
 
They are playing Pétanque and they take it seriously and play it constantly.
 
Soccer may be a national obsession but Pétanque is a national pastime in France. The major manufacturer of Pétanque boules in France (4 million a year) estimates that some 24 million French men and women of all ages periodically play Pétanque. Even if somewhat exaggerated, that’s a lot in a country of more than 60 million people. Thus, this writer was pleased but not surprised one day to see famed French movie actor Yves Montand studiously engaged in a game of Pétanque with his neighbors in a local park in St. Paul de Vence, the town in Provence where he had a secondary home.
 
Historically it is not surprising that France, with more than 7,000 Pétanque clubs and some 420,000 of the roughly 600,000 officially licensed players around the globe, leads all nations in Pétanque mania and world championship titles.
 
Variations of the game of ‘boules’, or ‘bowls’ in English, date back to antiquity in Greece and elsewhere. Generally, however, it is accepted that the Pétanque as it exists today, with players standing feet together attempting to toss their boules closer to the Jack than those of their opponents, originated around 1910 in La Ciotat, a coastal port city just east of Marseilles.
 
It is a mutation of an earlier game of Jeu Provencal where the distances were longer and the players were free to get a running start for their boule tosses. Although Jeu Provencal still is played in various parts of Provence it largely has been replaced by Pétanque.
 
The main reason for Pétanque’s widespread appeal is its simplicity. An easy to play game, particularly for non-athletic oldsters, it requires a minimum of space and equipment.
 
More than 75 nations on five continents have national Pétanque federations, and when the world championships roll around annually the number of competitors, often more than 12,000, surpasses that of any other sports event in the world. This year the French city of Grenoble at the foot of the Alps was named host for the event from September 22-24.
 
Past championships there habitually have drawn more than 30,000 spectators a day. Those numbers may be topped this year because, for the first time, the global men’s and women’s team championships are being held at the same time and place.
 
Overall, Pétanque games can be set up by almost anyone anywhere. A terrain is sketched out with a stick or with simple finger traces on the ground. A starting circle just big enough for a player to stand in with feet together is similarly drawn. From it the first player tosses the Jack out on the ground anywhere from roughly seven to ten yards from the circle, usually closer to seven.
 
The object then is for members of each team, usually limited to three players at most, alternately to stand, crouch or squat but always with feet immobile in the circle and toss their ‘boule’ as close as possible to the Jack. The name Pétanque derives from the words ‘Ped Tanca’ which, in the language of Provence, mean feet planted together on the ground.
 
After each player has had a turn, measurements are taken if necessary. In every group of players there is certain to be someone with a ruler to make those close calls where boules of competing teams seem, to the eye, to wind up more or less equidistant from the Jack. The arguments about distance are constant and animated with various team members and sometimes spectators joining in.
 
When agreement on measurement is reached, a point is given to every boule of one team that is closer to the Jack than any boule of its opponents. Usually that means only a point or two for one team or the other. So the game continues.
A new circle is sketched out around the spot where the Jack finished up on the preceding round. (It often gets knocked to a new location during the boule tossing.) The Jack then is tossed out again and a new round begins. The team that eventually amasses 13 points wins the game and the losing team usually buys the after-game drinks at a local café.
 
Of course this isn’t like golf, where everything is done to keep from touching an opponent’s ball. In Pétanque it is not only permitted but desirable and applauded to throw a boule so as to knock an opponent’s toss away from its resting place near the Jack, or knock the Jack itself away from an opponent’s boule that has wound up in a potentially scoring position. If that isn’t competition, what is?
 
Even if you didn’t put Grenoble on your agenda this year, you can have just as much fun watching a local game in virtually any French village you pass through. For real French atmosphere it can’t be beaten.
C. Robert Korengold