Put Your Ax Into It, at This Los Angeles Restaurant

Instructors play the part of both coaches and babysitters, helping players to adjust their technique, remember their grip and control their aim. Once you get the hang of the overhead, two-handed throw, you can graduate to others, and once you learn how to stick the ax fairly consistently into the board, you can compete, or play gently competitive games. Players aren’t allowed more than three drinks while throwing. (Also reasonable.)

Deep into the routine of throwing and retrieving my ax, I wondered how long I’d last in a zombie apocalypse, and how my newfound skills might fit into a changing, collapsing world. Normal stuff — though my instructor helpfully noted, “Please keep in mind that if you throw your ax at a zombie, you have to retrieve it.”

In 2016, archaeologists in Australia found remnants of one of the world’s oldest handled axes — a chip from a basalt blade over 40,000 years old. It might have been thrown, all those millenniums ago, but ax-throwing was codified into a sport in 2006, when Matt Wilson, a former bartender, founded the Backyard Axe Throwing League in Canada.

There are now many leagues in the United States and abroad that operate like bowling, though their growth has been largely ignored by those outside it, dismissed as a passing novelty — like swing dancing in the ’90s. But this December, the World Axe Throwing League’s championship will air on ESPN, gratifying the thousands of players who’d like to see it taken seriously as a sport.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/dining/axe-throwing-los-angeles-mos-house.html