On Old Friends and New Realities

People ask me sometimes how I came across ideas, and I never really know how to answer. Often, it's just good fortune. In 2004, I was working at Newsday, covering high school and college (and occasionally professional) sports, and I came across a press release, which had been faxed by a chess coach at a school I'd never actually heard of. I'd never heard of Edward R. Murrow High School because it doesn't have any sports; and yet for years it had a reputation as one of the best public high schools in Brooklyn, a place for the creative and the unusual, a place where students could design their own curricula amid a plethora of elective courses.

I spent over two years at Murrow, hanging around on Thursday afternoons, traveling with the chess team, befriending a math teacher and chess coach named Eliot Weiss. I met with the school's founder, the late Saul Bruckner, whose obituary includes this key paragraph:

"When other schools cut out all the 'thrills,' as they called them, Saul said, 'I'm not letting go,' " said Mr. Weiss*. He recalled the difficulties of keeping electives such as portrait drawing, investigative journalism, abnormal psychology and Java programming.

Murrow was unique. It was like no other school I'd ever seen, even then, besieged as it was by the realities of economics and overcrowding. But Murrow needs to maintain a delicate balance in order to preserve its uniqueness; and according to an article in today's New York Times, it's getting more and more difficult to preserve that balance.

I wrote about Murrow and high-school chess for a lot of reasons, mostly because the people fascinated me. I didn't think I was writing about the type of school that could no longer exist in the modern urban landscape, and I hope I wasn't. But it's always depressing to realize that the universe you spent so much time laboring to depict may not live on forever.

*This is actually a different Mr. Weiss, the assistant principal of the school. No relation to the chess coach.

On Chess-Related Fabrications

A while back, I was asked to write a short piece for an anthology of chess-related fiction. Well, that collection has finally been released, and is available now, if this is your kind of deal. I should note two things: A.) All the proceeds from this collection go to selected chess schools and clubs, and B.) There are number of impressive writers of fiction* who contributed, including Wells Tower, who recently made this list.

*As I have now failed to complete a book-length work of fiction for the past decade and counting, I do not count myself among them.**

**Although, while I'm at it, I might as well mention that the Chicago Sun-Times included Bigger Than the Game in its summer reading preview. Under two months remaining to pre-order...

On Olympic chess?

Most of the time, when I tell people I've written a book about chess, they make presumptions. This is understandable. To the majority of Americans, chess is an inscrutable game practiced by inscrutable geniuses who wear tin-foil belts and hear Russian radio broadcasts emanating from their teeth. There's a lot of confusion, and understandably so, because chess is an intricate game, but not so intricate that a novice like me--someone who never really played much chess at all before he started writing about it--can't comprehend the general idea of what's happening, of who's winning and who's losing and who's nervous and who's not and what the general tenor of the game is.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as we Americans observe a group of men and women position forty-pound stones on a sheet of ice. The other day, I was watching the United States men's curling team blow off a match against somebody (seriously, has there been a more milquetoast Olympian than poor John Shuster? If I may get all Reilly-esque for a moment, he makes Charlie Brown seem like Norman Vincent Peale), and the loony female color commentator made an allusion to curling as "chess on ice." At some level, this felt patently ridiculous to me; so many people compare chess to so many things (football, politics, military manuevers, WB sitcom plots) that its meaning is essentially lost. Anything that is complicated and zero-sum now becomes a "chess match." I would like to rebel against that, except this is also the game's greatest selling point. This is the reason why chess continues to exist--because it is the purest manifestation of a complex, zero-sum, human endeavor.

Anyway, the other thing people tend to ask me when I tell them I've written a book about chess is whether I imagine chess to be a sport. I find this question irrelevant. To me, chess is a competitive pursuit, and I find that I'm generally interested in any competitive pursuit, though some obviously interest me more than others. I also know that I've spent eight hours in a hotel ballroom during a chess tournament, and while it's true that chess is not, and could not, be classified as a "physical pursuit," it is also true that any mental pursuit, engaged in for hours at a time, naturally leads to physical fatigue. Therefore, I would argue that chess is as much a sport as golf. I would even argue that chess is as much a sport as curling, and, given the proper broadcast team and presentation, could also be just as fascinating for a broad television audience.

So: Why not open up the Olympics to competitive chess?

All right. I can hear you laughing. But come on; how many Olympic sports have become Olympic sports simply because they are physical pursuits disguised as sport? The reason people enjoy watching curling rather than snowcrossdancing or skiboarding is because it incorporates actual thought; when I watch a curling match, it feels like doing Sudoku or a crossword puzzle. At least I'm using my brain, and that should count for something, especially at a sporting event that rests its reputation on such lofty ideals. Why shouldn't the Olympics be as much of a mental pursuit as a physical pursuit? Why shouldn't one of the oldest and purest games in the world command our attention once every four years? It might not be as physically draining as cross-country skiing, but it might actually be more exciting.

On Golf, Beer Bellies and the Definition of Sport

A few years ago, I wrote a book about chess. It was, by all accounts, a curious decision, one I couldn't fully explain even now, except to say that I found what I thought was an excellent story, and I wanted to share it with the world (and in an ideal world, the process of finding an idea would be just that simple, every time around). And in the process of promoting said book, I was surprised how often I was asked a question that seemed, at least to me, entirely irrelevant--the question of whether chess, in any way, shape or form, could somehow be considered a "sport."

I suppose most rational humans would agree that the answer is pretty obviously negatory, though I also rationalized my answer by noting that golf is considered a sport, and is reported about on the sports pages (including by me, for several years), when, in fact, golf is not really a sport at all. I still believe this, and apparently I am not the only one: Tom Watson's near-miss at the British Open, at age 59, has motivated skeptics like CBS Sports' Mike Freeman to make the same point. And yet I find myself somehow disagreeing with Freeman even as I fundamentally agree with him.

I have nothing against Freeman; I once shared the microphone with him at a book reading, and I find him an entertaining and provocative columnist. But he seems determined to denigrate golf by repeatedly likening it to bowling, as if bowling is somehow the bane of the Western world, as if somehow men with beer guts are incapable of feats of athleticism (which would most likely elimate every relief pitcher before 1982, as well as several backup quarterbacks). At one point, I believe he becomes the first sports columnist since Westbrook Pegler to use the word "casuistry," and it is all very interesting, except whenever I read something like this--a pointed argument assaulting our liberal definition of the word "sport"--I find myself asking a simple question:

Who cares?

Perhaps I am the exception to the rule here. Perhaps there is some validity to Freeman's argument that golf, given its long history of haughtiness and racial separatism, deserves to be taken down a peg. But while it is true that there are certain "sports" I would prefer to watch, and while a case can be made that certain sports may seem less relevant as the nation evolves around them, I also think there is simple truth to sportswriting, and to journalism in general, which is that a good story is a good story, no matter what dubious form it may take. And Tom Watson at the British Open was a good story (as Freeman eventually acknowledges), and Roger Federer at Wimbledon was a good story, and LeBron James in the NBA playoffs was a good story, and Bobby Fischer in '72 was a good story, and Earl Anthony when...he was, like, Earl Anthony...was a good story, and all of these men were incredibly skilled--perhaps even geniuses--at their given avocations, be they "sports" or "specialized skill sets."

I mean, let's face it: In an ideal world, we would spend our time analyzing rivalries between neurologists and cell biologists and algebra teachers, and we would value all of these avocations more than the ability to hack at a ball with a stick. That is not how the world works, but until it is, I see no reason not to extend the notion of public genius as far as it will go.

(Photo: AP/Alastair Grant)

R.I.P., Landon Brownell

My book The Kings of New York tells the story of a motley group of teenagers from Brooklyn's Edward R. Murrow High School, who happen to be perennial contenders for the national high-school chess championship. And one of the subplots that develops later in the narrative is Murrow's ongoing rivalry with a school in Arizona, Catalina Foothills High School, whose best player was a lanky kid named Landon Brownell.

Well, I was horrified to read that Landon Brownell died this week in a car accident. He was 19 years old.

I didn't know Landon at all, but some people who did know him share their stories--and their memories of a match depicted in the book, in which Landon scored a pivotal victory over a highly rated Murrow player at the 2005 national championships--here.

(You can also make a donation to the Southern Arizona Chess Association (SACA), in memory of Landon Brownell, P.O. Box 42407, Tucson, AZ 85733)