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Chessville
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Kids. Playing chess. In New York. Kids playing chess in New York! When I first approached Michael Weinreb’s The Kings of New York I did so with a bit of trepidation. Hadn’t this one already been played out? An endlessly hard-working chess coach in an over-stressed and under-funded (but special in its own way) big city school takes charge of an unlikely bunch of Bad News Bears-style pawnpushers and they kick a ton of pawns and take plenty of names… Man, I’m busy reading Predator at the Chessboard… Readers: don’t repeat my mistake and put off reading The Kings of New York. It’s an engaging and whimsical read from a skillful tale-teller. I should have realized this after reading my chessfriend Geoff Chandler’s words:
Yeah, Geoff, I told myself, and we both read Nunn’s Chess Openings for the plot and the characterizations, too. We read chess books – because they have chess in them. Weinreb is a freelance sports writer whose words have appeared in Newsday (where he once was a staffer), The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, ESPN the Magazine, The New York Times, and SLAM Magazine. In fact, The Kings of New York has just won the Quill Award for the best sports book of the year, beating out titles about Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, Bobby Thompson and Ralph Branca, and the year the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. How cool is that? A few years ago Weinreb was in the sports department of Newsday, which had been patiently absorbing a stream of news releases from Eliot Weiss, a math teacher and the chess coach at Edward R. Murrow High School. The school offered “a nontraditional curriculum and a selective admissions process” which allowed a diverse student population – ethnically, socio-economically and, well, among other things, motivationally. (Spoiler alert: not all chess players have great grades, or even go to class regularly.) Weiss was constantly hustling to get his team exposure and financial support, despite his team’s impressive recent chessic successes (e.g. 5 city championships, 7 state championships, national champions 2004, 2005 & 2006). He had been doing so for a couple of decades. The sports writer saw something in all of this. He got the go-ahead to hang out with the coach and the members of the chess team – day-to-day at school, at Washington Square Park, at tournaments at the Marshall Chess Club, at the 39th Annual Greater New York Scholastic Team and Individual Championships, at the 2005 state scholastic championships in Saratoga Springs, at the 2005 Supernationals in Nashville, and the 2006 National High School Championship in Milwaukee. The guys even got to visit the President at the White House. In The Kings of New York the reader is taken on a breakneck trip which often looks like Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole. It begins at Murrow HS, academically advanced and rigorous, but still where halls “are painted in unfathomably hideous shades of yellow and orange” and the “white tile floors in the hallway are stained gray…”
But before the concrete can harden on the Reader’s agreement with the book’s subtitle referring to the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses the author pulls back his camera a bit, to let us see the wider world of scholastic chess:
Chess Madness?! – or simply adolescence? You have to wonder. Are teenage football or basketball players any more sedate or homogenized than this crowd? Weinreb take it all in and shows us all about it. The result is reminiscent of Jim Bouton’s rowdy Ball Four. That The Kings of New York is written by a non-chess player is part of its strength – we get all of the wide-eyed wonder of the observer and little of the expected cynical detachment. (There are a few chess notation mistakes in the book that may grate against the sensibilities of serious players, and the game related on pages 179-181 has goofs in some of its moves and in a diagram; but the majority of readers will sail right through, unaffected.) The author focuses on the players and their chess lives, but he rounds them out with personal glimpses into the classrooms and the homes. These are kids. Who play chess. It’s almost a relief to see that not all of the students book up or consult computers between rounds at a competition (or even sleep at night) – some are too busy winning money at cards or just goofing around. And of course, when they lose, they have their explanations – “ ‘I had time, man,’ Oscar says. ‘I was up…’ ”; “ ‘Just one bad move,’ ” Robert says. And then there is:
There are many “stranger in a strange land” style encounters when coach Weiss takes the kids out of New York City. Weinreb’s description of the team’s side-trip to the Jack Daniel Distillery during the Supernationals in Nashville is so hysterical, it almost makes the entire book. The story of the players ends at a horizon that is tantalizingly hard to see beyond – years will pass, current students will move on to be replaced by new ones, and when Eliot Weiss retires from his teaching at Edward R. Murrow, will his chess team continue? The Kings of New York finishes with a chapter of Acknowledgements, a Glossary, a Bibliography and a list of Web Sites. (In an oversight likely to be fixed in a second edition, Weinreb misses an important chess site – Chessville: www.chessville.com. Tsk, Tsk.)
All this, and the Quill Award for the best
sports book of the year. That is so very cool.
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