French ball game, Petanque, joins Experience Louisiana lineup

College athletes are to play softball and baseball during the Experience Louisiana Festival, but there will be another thoroughly French ball game occurring at the LSUE campus.
Mike LeBlanc of Lafayette will bring petanque to the festival.
Petanque is game played in France where the player stands in a circle and rolls boules (balls) on the ground.
“You go to any town in France and you go to all the major parks in Paris and people play this,” LeBlanc said.
“This game goes back. It probably goes back to when the tribal people inherited Europe,” LeBlanc said.
Petanque is similar to bocce played in Italy, he said, But petanque’s roots probably go back to at least Egypt during the time of the pyramids, he said.
“We don’t know exactly what the rules were,” LeBlanc said of those ancient games. “The Romans played it. The Greeks played it.”
For LeBlanc petanque is way to tap into France and being French.
“What happens is there are little traditions and there are big traditions,” LeBlanc said. “What I mean by big traditions from France are like opera, city-building, grand literature But there are little traditions. There are little things common, everyday people play. Those little traditions can be imported and brought into Cajun culture and that is what I’m trying to do. Those little traditions link you into a much grander set of relations. If you know how to play this game, you can go anywhere in the francophone world and become an instant member of a game if you care to.”
Petanque’s rules are difficult and the vocabulary associated with the game is fairly basic, he said.
“You learn to count in French,” LeBlanc said.
“It is pretty simple stuff. It isn’t like reading literature,” he said.
“If we can import little traditions from France, we can give them some of our little traditions,” he said.
“We play petanque, but I offer them boudin,” he said of the cultural exchange.
Petanque exists as an ongoing game at 2 p.m. on the fourth Sunday at Gerard Park in Lafayette where it is played under the oak trees by a core group of 15 to 20 people. They even have a tournament every March, LeBlanc said.
Bernard Champey, who LeBlanc said is a world champion petanque player, visits Lafayette generally every year. “He is like the Babe Ruth of petanque,” LeBlanc said.
The game seems simple enough. The cochonnet, which is golfball-sized, is thrown out first. The players then take turns standing in a circle and trying to throw their boules (balls) close to the cochonnet. A game goes to 13 points.
LeBlanc will demonstrate and teach people to play petanque at the festival.
“The hidden agenda is to make them speak French,” he said of teaching people to play petanque.