And then one day a few years back, Rita was in a taxi on her way uptown, and the driver had the radio on, and a news station was broadcasting a report, no doubt cribbed from one of the daily newspapers, about a high-school chess team in need of money in order to play at the national tournament, which that year was being held in California. They were talking about holding small fund-raisers here and there, about selling brownies and cookies and muffins and candy, and Rita thought, “How much money can you make from a bake sale?”
So she called the radio station and got the name of the high school; she’d never heard of Murrow, but she called the principal and the principal put her in touch with Mr. Weiss and she told him, “I’ll pay for your trip.” Soon after, she had rescued him from fifteen years of public pleading, and she has paid for every trip and every possible expense since then, to state tournaments and national tournaments, and if it were to happen, she would pay for their trip to Washington, D.C., to visit the president. Even now, though, Mr. Weiss refuses to ask her for money outright, so that every time they speak, Rita has to say, “What do you need money for? What’s coming up?”
The whole business of kids playing chess fascinates Rita. She’s never played before, and her late husband dabbled in the game a little, but he wasn’t very good. But these children, my word! She could stand here for hours and watch them play, except that, really, this isn’t her place. She prefers to be invisible, to write her checks and slip off to her Sunday matinee virtually unnoticed, after delivering a brief statement to the team, which goes something like this:
“Thank you for winning. Because I don’t like to lose.”
And then one day, just like that, the White House called Eliot Weiss back.
So on a Wednesday in mid-December, a month after George W. Bush won reelection over John Kerry despite losing the New York City vote by a three-to-one margin, the Murrow chess team and its entourage (Weiss’s son and daughter), accompanied by a Democratic senator, Charles Schumer, and a Democratic congressman, Anthony Weiner—two more men Mr. Weiss had needled and needled while attempting to set up this day—trundled into the Oval Office to meet the forty-third president of the United States of America. It was an abbreviated visit, of course, part of a three-day tour of D.C., complete with trips to the Smithsonian and the National Mall, and how it went really depended upon your point of view. Perhaps this is why, in the photos of that moment, pictures that would eventually wind up on the plaster walls of apartment buildings in minority-dominated neighborhoods where the man at the center would not be particularly welcome, the top boards on the top chess team in the nation wear expressions that can be described only as uncomfortable, verging on bored.
Still, for the briefest of moments, the doors to the Oval Office closed and they were alone, or at least, as alone as a group of multiethnic teenagers from Brooklyn could ever get with the president of the United States. He made small talk. He asked them where they were from. Puerto Rico, Oscar told him, and then, the way Oscar tells it, “He just gave me a blank stare.” Then the president—the president of the United States!—asked Ilya what it was like to captain a winning team, and Ilya didn’t really know what he was supposed to say. Nobody did, not Willy (who had boasted to a reporter from the Bay News that he was going to ask “about his No Child Left Behind Act and how he came up with the idea”), not Alex, not even Sal. And certainly not Nile Smith, who wore a suit that appeared about three sizes too large, the pants drooping at his thighs like a pair of carpenter jeans, and who, in the photo that appeared in the Daily News the next day, is the only one who has his eyes cast toward the floor. It was an act born not of defiance, but of pure and overwhelming shyness.
Nile and his family live on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up in a mostly black section of Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood that gained a certain amount of notoriety in 1991, when in the midst of a series of racially charged riots a Hasidic Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death by a sixteen-year-old African-American boy, Lemrick Nelson Jr. It was a crime that exposed the city’s underlying racial tension for a new generation, and arguably paved the way for a Republican, Rudy Giuliani, to become the mayor of New York City.
Nile’s apartment is part of the Sterling/St. John’s houses, a city-subsidized co-op a few blocks from the Utica Avenue subway stop, near a business strip occupied mostly by Caribbean restaurants and African braiding and nail salons with names like “Hair It Is.” On a Saturday afternoon, a cluster of people are gathered on and around the front steps of Nile’s building, including one woman who appears to be standing sentry at the door.
Nile is easy to misjudge, especially when that judgment is based strictly on appearance. Most days, he wears his hair in cornrows, and he wears do-rags and baseball caps with the purchase labels still affixed to the brim, and he favors oversized athletic jerseys and baggy jeans and Nike sneakers. He can go hours without uttering a single word. People who don’t play chess tend to have a preconceived notion of what a chess player looks like, and Nile is not it. (You wonder if, upon bursting into the Oval Office that day expecting to find the geeks he’d avoided at Yale and instead coming upon a group comprised largely of underrepresented minorities—blacks, Puerto Ricans, Eastern European immigrants—treading on the presidential seal, George W. Bush felt the same way.)
Nile answers the door to his apartment wearing a pair of bright red cutoff sweatpants and a white T-shirt that appears to have suffered a long and difficult existence. His forehead is beaded with sweat. His father, Ken, is standing behind him, shirtless—they’ve been lifting weights all day long and their phone service was shut off and Nile’s AOL Internet service was too expensive to maintain, so they’ve essentially been isolated from the outside world.
Nile’s father is broad-shouldered and has a shaved head and a thin goatee. His wife is on the job (she cleans aircraft at John F. Kennedy Airport, which is where Ken used to work as a baggage handler), and in the meantime, the boys have reconfigured the living room into a home gym, outfitted with a weight bench and an old stationary bike and treadmill that Ken acquired through a friend of his. The couches have been pushed into a corner near the television set. The floor is plain white linoleum; on a wall above where the stationary bike stands now, there is a pencil sketch of Malcolm X and another of Martin Luther King, with I Have a Dream written underneath. They’re taking a break, and Nile—who was named after the river—has already destroyed his father in a game of chess, and now he’s eating pizza and studying music videos.
Ken is trying to build Nile’s upper body. He thinks Nile has the same frame as he once did, that he can build up quickly if he puts his mind to it. “He’s gonna be so big, and so strong,” Ken says. “But it’s gonna take time. I tell him it takes ten years to get that kind of build.” He’d like to see Nile build up his body in the same way he’s built up his mind through chess. These days, Ken works at a print shop in midtown Manhattan, and he’s laminated workouts from the pages of Men’s Health magazine, and they’re working through those. At the moment, Nile is just lifting with an empty bar, so he can get acquainted with the mechanics and the range of motion. When asked how he feels about this regimen, Nile gives a noncommittal shrug.
Ken’s older brother, Charles, was a strong chess player, and Ken used to go to the Village to watch him play. He was never as good as Charles, whose rating was around 2000, and whose nickname was “Dark Angel.” “He used to take care of a girl whose family owned a chess shop,” Ken says. At one point, he invested in a one-hundred-dollar Aztec Indian chessboard, the same one he uses to lose to his son these days. “I’ll try to do something unorthodox, and he’ll notice anything on the board, and his dad will be talking and talking over the board, while he’s quiet,” Ken says. “And then the game’ll be over. He’ll beat me in two or three moves.”
Ken is absolutely sure that Nile used to watch him play when he was too young to understand the game, and that this is where he first picked up chess, although Nile insists he didn
’t learn until he started attending I.S. 318 in Williamsburg, and took classes with the chess teacher there, Elizabeth Vicary, the same woman who discovered Willy and Oscar and Shawn and Dalphe. Ken, in fact, went to 318, as well, as did his brother (who has since moved to Alabama) and his sister, Cookie, who went to Howard University and now works at a museum in California. Their mother worked at the post office.
Nile’s mother and father met in Brooklyn. She was from Bush-wick, and she was on her way to a typing school, and he started talking to her, and “the rest is history.” Since then, Ken has held a variety of jobs. He was a messenger and he worked in a mailroom and he worked as a receptionist at an employee benefits agency in Manhattan, where the money was better than anything he’d made before or since. He spent twelve years there, and wore a suit to work every day, and used to work out for free at the employee health club. Times have gotten harder since then, but he’s doing his best. For a while, when Nile was younger, they lived in the Lindsay Park co-ops in Williamsburg, right near I.S. 318, and then, a few years ago, they moved here, though Ken’s still not sure about this neighborhood. (He worries often about his car, a 1985 BMW 725i that he keeps parked on the street.) At one point while he’s sitting in the living room, someone in an adjacent building throws a towel out the window, and for a second, Ken wonders if there’s a body inside. “There’s always people hanging out on our stoop,” he says (later that evening, they’re playing games of dice). “But I’ve gotten used to it by now. I figure there’s no park near here, so they don’t have no place else to go.”
Unlike many of his teammates, Nile, who’s a sophomore, is a conscientious student. He goes to virtually every one of his classes, and he studies for his tests, and he’s thinking about becoming a stockbroker someday. He’s got a head for math, which is perhaps why he was able to pick up chess so quickly. One of his first teachers at I.S. 318, Jen Shahade, noticed it right away: He started playing later, but he caught on faster than most of the other kids. “Sometimes,” she says, “you can just see it.” Now, even though he has only about three years of experience, Nile’s a strong tactical player with a rating around 1600, although he has a tendency to get intimidated against higher-rated players, when he has a feeling they can read his thoughts. At last year’s seven-round national tournament, he scored three points, which felt like something of a disappointment.
Nile first won money playing chess on December 1, 2002. He knows this date because the check remains uncashed, placed next to his other trophies and a series of laminated photographs and newspaper articles, on an end table in the corner of the living room, near the portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. The check, from the Right Move, is for $3.57. It sat on the table for more than a year, and at some point Ken figured what the hell, he’d try to cash it, but the bank didn’t let him. “Then he started bringing home more checks,” Ken says. “And I realized he could make money from this.”
But it was about something more than that. Ken had never really left Brooklyn, had never even been on a plane despite all that time spent at the airport, and here was his son, fifteen years old, spending a week in Milwaukee, a week in Dallas, a week in Florida, all for chess. One day a few weeks earlier, Nile had brought home the photo of himself with Hillary Clinton. Ken brought it to the print shop to get it laminated, and they could hardly believe it. Ken’s son with a United States senator? Turn it over, they told him. Let’s see the backing. Let’s see if that’s a real photo or just a novelty.
From the Daily News, December 16, 2004:
By Kenneth Bazinet
Daily News Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON—Eight chess champs from Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School were applauded by President Bush yesterday.
... Bragging about Kotlyanskiy, Rep. Anthony D. Weiner (D-Brooklyn) said outside the White House, “He can think through 10, 12 or 15 moves in his head.”
“No, he can’t,” Oscar says. “Ain’t nobody can do that.”
“Even Kasparov can’t do that,” Willy says.
A month later, on a frigid Sunday afternoon in mid-January, at the last Right Move tournament before the city championships, they’re still wringing laughs out of this one. This qualifies as politically inspired hyperbole of the type Weiner will unveil in great shovelfuls during his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic mayoral nomination nine months from now. It’s the sort of assumption that the uninformed tend to make about elite chess players, as if they have the power to calculate every possibility of a game from beginning to end. Grandmasters, in certain cases, can think ahead eight or nine moves on a specific line or tactic. Players of Ilya’s caliber, if they can see three moves ahead—your next move, your opponent’s next move, and your ensuing move—are often in good shape. The rest of the game is often dictated by feel; once you know the fundamentals of the game, you see a position and you can eliminate the moves that don’t make sense. Bruce Pandolfini calls the three-move maxim “The Rule of the Three.” If you can do that, you can be a 1600- to 1800-rated player, no problem, which is what Ilya and Oscar and Willy and Nile and Dalphe all are. It does not require a great amount of genius, but it does require an ability to focus and think ahead and consider the consequences of one’s actions. “It’s very simple,” Pandolfini says. “It’s nothing profound. It’s not what people think.”
The Oval Office was fine, Oscar says, but it was hardly the highlight of the trip. There were other things going on, and these are the things Oscar would prefer to recount. Like the fact that he won some money. Enough money, in fact, to sustain his existence while in D.C. He left town with ten dollars in his pocket (his parents had nothing more to give him), and he spent six of that on a Subway sandwich and the other four on a new deck of cards. Then, on the short flight from New York to Washington, he won twenty-two dollars from one of his teammates, then took a bundle more while he was there. He’s also accumulated a couple of hundred dollars in winnings through a friend’s account on a poker Web site, and it’s all so easy, and so much more lucrative than chess could ever be.
The crowd at the Right Move is more dense than usual this week, because it’s almost crunch time, because this is one of the last opportunities to prepare for the cities, which are in two weeks. Willy splits the one-hundred-dollar first-place prize in the sixty-six-person open division with two others: a senior at Molloy, a Catholic school, and Eugene Belilovsky, a squat boy with a 1759 rating who’s the No. 3 board at Stuyvesant, which is the only school with even the slightest chance of upending Murrow at the cities. (Stuyvesant finished third at the high-school nationals in 2004.)
The four newbies, the sophomores who joined chess club this year—Rex, Renwick, Robert, and Adalberto—are also here, making their final preparations for the city championships. They’ve never played in a real tournament before; they have no idea what to expect. They’ll play in the junior-varsity division at cities, but they’re still feeling a little bit lost, like outsiders crashing an exclusive party. They’ve come to the game so late, years after most of their teammates fell into it, and they’ve had only the most basic of instruction from Mr. Weiss, who usually leaves them to their own devices on Thursday afternoons, who’s usually busy washing his chalkboards or grading papers or heading down to the computer room to do some programming work, for which he gets paid a little extra cash to supplement his teacher’s salary.
“I’m still playing chess on Yahoo! a little, but that’s about it,” Renwick says. Clearly, so has Rex, a tall Asian boy with a perpetual look of bewilderment, who wins three of his four games and becomes the first of the newbies to win a medal at a Right Move tournament (sixth place, under-800 division). Still, the four of them have seen the veterans, and they’ve seen Alex and Sal, the top boards, the masterly duo, and they cannot imagine playing at such a level, and they have no idea how to go about catching up.
The sign appears at Murrow sometime in late December, on walls and doors and in stairwells, printed in stark black lettering: AS OF JANUARY 10, 2005, STUDENTS WILL
BE REQUIRED TO LEAVE THE BUILDING AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL DAY, UNLESS PARTICIPATING IN A PRE-APPROVED AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAM. DOCUMENTATION WILL BE REQUIRED IN ORDER TO STAY IN THE BUILDING.
It could be said that this is one of the sacrifices of the modern educational system, that freedoms are often curtailed in the interest of safety. But this is Murrow, and Murrow has never fit the mold. Murrow was always different. Murrow was a safe school, with freedom to roam and freedom to goof off. But this is the new reality at a school marred by overcrowding, and victimized by its own lack of power. There are no metal detectors, but security has been upgraded by the new principal, Anthony Lodico, and more deans have been hired to help with discipline problems (and to make sure those kids who are hanging out in the hallway aren’t supposed to be in class), and students are required to swipe their ID cards when they show up in the morning.
Back when it was recognized as an elite school, back when Bruckner was at the height of his powers and Murrow was drawing nationwide attention for its system, it was easy enough to encourage kids who didn’t fit with the system, who simply weren’t mature enough to handle the freedom at Murrow, to transfer to other schools. There were places for them to go. “But now the kids can’t move anymore,” says Ron Weiss, the school’s longtime assistant principal. “Opportunities have been thwarted. I can have a parent begging me to transfer their kid, but I have no place to send them.”
Game of Kings Page 11
