HARVEYSBURG, Ohio — On a sunny, early fall Saturday in Harveysburg, about 45 miles northeast of Cincinnati, a crowd of some 2,000 people has gathered around a fenced-in dirt area of the 30-acre Ohio Renaissance Festival grounds.
Gnawing on 1-pound roasted turkey legs or drinking from plastic cups, they gaze up at two large men sitting on even larger draft horses, facing each other from opposite ends of a 180-foot-long stretch. Each is wearing full armor and wielding an 11-foot lance made of solid Douglas fir.
"Do you want to see two grown men hit each other with big sticks?" shouts Jason Armstrong, the armored knight serving as emcee for the show, from atop his horse.
The crowd roars approval.
Thus begins the full-armored, full-contact, unstaged sport of jousting, whose top players are betting that many more people are interested in watching grown men (and some women) hit each other with big sticks.
They believe that jousting is poised to become the next big extreme sport, capable of attracting sponsors and television coverage not unlike mixed martial arts, thanks in part to a wave of interest created by a July New York Times Magazine article.
Harveysburg could be the center of it all, thanks to Shane Adams. The 40-year-old Canadian is the reigning international jousting champion and a driving force behind the movement to launch jousting to national prominence. He now makes his home in Harveysburg.
The road to Harveysburg began in Acton, Ontario, a small town about an hour west of Toronto. Adams grew up on a horse farm there, dreaming of becoming a knight ever since he first watched a Robin Hood movie with his grandmother.
He realized his dream could become a reality when, at 16, he visited the Medieval Times dinner theater in Orlando. At 23, he left his full-time construction job when he was hired as a knight at Medieval Times in Toronto, in part because he looked the part: He stands 6-feet-4, has a long beard and a mane of wavy red hair almost as long as his horse's. But the novelty of being a knight wore off.
"After three years, I finally came to the realization that I wasn't really living my childhood dream," he says. "Instead of being a knight in shining armor, I was a knight in shining polyester and tinsel."
So Adams left Medieval Times to create his own Medieval-themed traveling road show, acquiring some light draft horses and a 150-pound suit of armor to stage choreographed jousts.
In 1997, a promoter contacted him to represent Canada in the first international jousting championships at the Longs Peak Scottish-Irish Highlands Festival in Estes Park, Colo., which this year offered a $50,000 purse. Adams has been the grand champion there four years running.
He had never competed in an un-choreographed joust, but Adams left Estes Park with four broken ribs, a broken hand, a broken wrist and the world championship belt. He says the English team told him they believed he had been "reincarnated" from a previous life as a medieval jouster.
"They realized that it wasn't just a fluke, that I had some innate natural ability to be able to hit somebody with a stick," he says. "Hello, I'm Canadian! That's all we got to hit people with."
Of course, there's much more to full-contact jousting than hitting somebody with a stick. Jousters must be skilled equestrians with a keen sense of aim and timing and unafraid to hit and be hit at 20 to 25 miles per hour.
Assessed by a panel of judges as they make four passes, jousters receive one point for a strike to a metal chest plate called a grand guard; five points for a broken lance, and 10 points for the ultimate goal: Unhorsing an opponent.
"This is jousting. You're going to get hurt. It's just a matter of when and how bad," says Adams, whose has jousted at various times with a fractured scapula, hand and thumb bone.
As for medical treatment and insurance: "I'm Canadian. I go across the border every six months," Adams says.
Adams left Canada in 2005 to promote full-contact jousting in the U.S., settling in Harveysburg after falling in love with the Ohio Renaissance Festival, one of the five largest in the country. He and his wife, Ashli, whom he met when she was managing the famous Stanley Hotel in Colorado, married there three years ago and now have a 2-year-old daughter, Paige.
He says he likes that his new Ohio home is just four hours from the border and centrally located to other Renaissance festivals. He and his 20-member troupe, the Knights of Valour, travel to about 20 other fairs every year with their horses; Adams says he has rescued most of his from slaughterhouses or farms.
The Knights of Valour is one of about four troupes of about 100 worldwide that do full-contact jousting, Adams says. Most others use lances tipped with balsa wood to lessen the impact of the hits.
People flock to their jousts for the same reason they go to NASCAR events in the hopes of seeing crashes, or hockey games in the hopes of seeing fights, Adams says. Knights in shining armor atop beautiful steeds provide another element of attraction, he says.
"It doesn't matter if you're a 5-year-old boy or an 80-year-old man, you've thought about being a knight someday, or being that prince," he says.
"It's the same for girls. What damsel out there doesn't want to get rescued by a knight in shining armor? Charlie rescues one every weekend," he continues, as fellow jouster Charlie Andrews walks into the knight's encampment, essentially a shed where the knights store their gear and relax between shows.
"Every show, what are you talking about?" cracks Andrews, a 42-year-old former Navy SEAL and veteran of Operation Desert Storm and Operation Restore Hope in Somalia who wears his hair in a short, red-tipped Mohawk.
A Utah native who jousts with a full-contact troupe called the Knights of Mayhem, Andrews is also one of the top competitive jousters today. He was the reserve grand champion in Estes Park this year.
"Right now, the dominating force in the sport are guys like Charlie and I, who are basically 40-year-old men trapped in 25-year-old Adonis bodies," Adams says matter-of-factly.
Andrews invites a visitor to feel his biceps as proof.
"Superman wears Charlie pajamas," he whispers.
But the sport of the Middle Ages might not always be dominated by middle-aged men. This summer, Adams was contacted by equestrian college officials who wanted to know if he could train instructors so they could create intercollegiate competitive jousting teams.
"You've got high school rodeos," Adams says. "Why can't you have high school jousting?"
Evidence of jousting's growing appeal is at the Renaissance festival last weekend. She's 24-year-old Jessica Post of Radnor, a town of about 200 people 35 miles north of Columbus, and she's been taking lessons from Adams for the past year, ever since she saw a demonstration at the 2009 Ohio Equine Affaire in Columbus. It was her third weekend jousting in front of a crowd.
"I love the partnership you have with the horse. I love going up against someone at 5,000 psi (pounds per square inch), the adrenaline that goes through you," says the tall, soft-spoken Post, who's been horseback riding since she was 5 and also has experience in full-contact sparring. "It's just fun."
Jousting lessons aren't cheap. Adams charges around $100 an hour, but he also pays jousters $500 for a weekend that typically includes just a few hours performing in front of a crowd.
Post says she's able to afford lessons because she still lives at home and works full time, fortuitously, at an insurance company. With no serious injuries yet, she wants to devote as much time as possible to her hobby.
"This has become my passion, so I hope there's a future in it," she says.
Adams is certain that full-contact jousting has a future. After the New York Times Magazine article appeared online, he began fielding phone calls from production companies and television network presidents.
Adams' ultimate goal: To bring jousting back to its 13th and 14th century glory, so that it's widely recognized as a professional, elite, extreme equestrian sport.
"It may not be able to beat out football, but jousting's pretty damn exciting," he says. "All you have to do is come out and see it."
Information from: The Cincinnati Enquirer, http://www.enquirer.com