Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  This, in part, could be traced back to the president. It could be traced back to the president because his No Child Left Behind Act mandates the closing of underperforming schools. And in Brooklyn, if one of those schools is closed, well, where are those students sent? They’re sent to a stable (and already overcrowded) institution like Murrow; because the trend in New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg is toward smaller, more specialized institutions, large schools like Murrow become reservoirs for overflow. All of this is part of the radical attempts at reform by Bloomberg, who abolished the 160-year-old Board of Education, took control of the schools himself, and hired a litigator named Joel Klein as chancellor. It was Klein who set in motion a small-schools initiative, starting nearly a hundred and fifty specialized schools while phasing out many larger, nonworking schools.

  But what about the larger schools that still worked?

  This was a problem that Klein hadn’t foreseen: The initiative “foundered during his first term, when it set in motion a slew of ‘unintended consequences,’ the most visible of which was overcrowding of several large high schools,” wrote John Heilemann in New York magazine.

  In Murrow’s case, for those first few years, it didn’t matter if the transfers fit in with the system or not. Two years earlier, Murrow had been forced to take two hundred kids, most of whom were deflected there from closing schools. Around that same time, on September 30, 2003, according to police, a sixteen-year-old boy named Jose Diaz, who was not a student at Murrow, found his way inside the school. He was interrupted in the midst of a conversation with a female student by a freshman named Allen Bryant. Moments later, police said, Diaz stabbed Bryant in the back, and then he fled. “Murrow really is a safe school,” a student named Anna wrote on Gothamist, a New York City Web log, on the day of the stabbing. “Things like that definetly [sic] don’t happen everyday [sic]. But they do happen in general and it’s just awful how easy it is to bring a weapon into school. The results are awful too.”

  So the problem is this: How does a school made great by its acceptance of personal freedom go about curtailing freedom? “Keep giving me No Child Left Behind kids, kids whose schools are closing, and put them in an environment like this,” Ron Weiss says. “You’ll watch this school go down the tubes.”

  You still won’t witness many blatant acts of truancy at Murrow, unless you count the kids sneaking smokes in the parking lot across the street, or someone writing Got Pot? on a desk in Eliot Weiss’s classroom. Most days after school, the bulk of the student body floods peacefully toward the subway turnstiles at Avenue M, and the first-floor hallways are clotted with disabled special-ed students. The easy solution to any serious problems, of course, would be to install metal detectors at the front entrance, but that would render Murrow into an altogether different type of school, a bastardized version of what it was born to be. How can a feeling of freedom prevail amid a lock-down?

  This is not something the new principal would prefer to see happen. He insists that most of the kids haven’t complained about the subtle changes he’s made, that the courtyard—now off-limits to students—was a petri dish for bad (and borderline illegal) behavior. And he’d like to maintain Murrow’s essence, despite all the outside pressures. If he had been brought in, after nearly two decades as a drama teacher and administrator at Port Richmond High School on Staten Island, to turn Murrow into, say, Midwood, then he wouldn’t have taken the job in the first place. He’ll admit it: The whole Murrow system scared the hell out of him when he first happened upon it, just as it had shaken Ron Weiss thirty years before. “Things had to be tightened up,” Lodico says. “But the whole philosophy they built this school upon? I really believe it can still work.”

  A week before the cities, Sal wanders into the chess club meeting, appearing lost and disoriented. He’s still trying to catch up with all the school he missed, and he’s hoping Eliot Weiss can speak to his teachers, perhaps afford him a temporary reprieve. “I have a lab I need to make up right now,” Sal says, “or I’m going to flunk.” That’s fine, Mr. Weiss tells him, and then he shows him a copy of a New York Times article that appeared the same week, about players studying online databases of previously played games to determine each other’s tendencies. Before the state championship and the national championship, Mr. Weiss tells him, when Murrow might actually have competition, they’re going to study their opponents’ tendencies.

  It is a notion to which Sal does not react with enthusiasm. But then, that’s been a trend lately. Ever since returning, Sal has felt lost and overwhelmed, and his demeanor has been erratic.

  “I couldn’t care less about him,” Ilya had said a few days earlier. His description of Sal’s behavior while in Washington borders on the unbelievable: that when he was interviewed by a local television crew in D.C. about their visit to the White House, the first thing he said was, “I didn’t want to come here in the first place.” That he spent much of the trip yearning to get back home, and that at one point they held a team meeting and discussed throwing Sal off the team, but Mr. Weiss convinced them to give him another chance. That Sal kept saying, “You need me.” And it was true, they did need him in order to win, and maybe this was just Sal’s way of posturing, his way of reasserting his worth during this time of crisis.

  “I don’t know what it was,” Ilya says. “But he’s going to have a fun time getting to Saratoga for the state championships. Because he’s not riding in my car.”

  “You know when the cities are?” Mr. Weiss says.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Sal says. “I have the flyer at home.”

  “When are they?”

  Sal gives him a puzzled look, as if he cannot quite determine the precise meaning of the question, as if he is shocked—shocked!—that someone would require confirmation of his knowledge of such facile information.

  “January twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth?” he says.

  “No,” Mr. Weiss says.

  “No, right. January twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth.”

  “It’s only one day for high schools,” Mr. Weiss says.

  “Right,” Sal says. “Right.”

  Silence.

  “January thirtieth,” Mr. Weiss says.

  “Right, right, right,” Sal says. He curls his upper lip, and then he edges out the door before Mr. Weiss can corner him about something else. He has to go. Wherever Sal is, there’s always someplace else he could be. But then, he knows where he’s needed. Even if he doesn’t know exactly when.

  PART TWO

  MIDDLE GAME

  NINE

  THE THIRTY-NINTH ANNUAL GREATER NEW YORK SCHOLASTIC TEAM AND INDIVIDUAL CHESS CHAMPIONSHIPS

  Manhattan

  A vertical village, where every vote of the citizens sends two thousand servants scurrying to satisfy their daily whims, is making history in the heart of New York. This town, which rises instead of spreads, reaches 43 stories toward the skies at Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue—The New Yorker, Manhattan’s largest and tallest hotel. The New Yorker is a vertical city, for without stretching a point to make a phrase, it includes everything that any town has—and in many aspects, much more.

  —From a 1938 brochure

  In a hallway on the third floor of the New Yorker Hotel, amid the signs urging silence and order and propriety (SHHH! KIDS PLAYING CHESS!), the boys of Manhattan’s exclusive academies, the boys of Dalton and Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School and Buckley and the Browning School, the progeny of some of the wealthiest families in America, are performing a timeless primary-school aria, which goes something like this:

  PPPPHHHHMTTTTTT . . . PPPPHHHHMMMTTTTTT . . . PPPPHHHRRRTTTTTTTMMMPPPHHHTT . . .

  Here is the paradoxical nature of the city chess championships and, for that matter, of virtually any chess tournament that happens to involve young children: At the merchandise tables, manned by members of the Rochester Chess Center, they sell dense manuals and intricate DVDs offering instruction in the Caro-Kann and the Grunfeld defenses, right
next to boxes of Super Balls and Silly Putty and sputtering whoopee cushions that form the percussion instruments in a symphony of flatulence. Inside the closed doors of the Grand Ballroom and the Crystal Ballroom, to observe the absolute silence of several hundred first-graders is to bear witness to a low-grade miracle. And in the public areas, the shouting and drooling and weeping masses toss footballs and trip down the stairs and hurl uneaten bits of bagel at each other and mimic bathroom noises in abundance and behave in the way you’d expect first-graders to behave when they’ve been shuttered indoors on an otherwise fine weekend afternoon.

  In order to accommodate all ages, the city championships are a full weekend event. The first day, Saturday, is given to the junior-high sections (ninth grade and under) and the primary sections (third grade and under); the elementary sections (sixth grade and under) and the high-school sections (twelfth grade and under) are held on Sunday (higher-rated players are welcome to “play up” into another section—for instance, a seventh-grader with an especially high ranking might try to play in the high-school section). And since many of the A-list private schools in New York have massive chess programs aimed at the lower grades, Saturday is largely their day. The best schools, the most prestigious schools, are set up in their own private team rooms (an expense of several hundred dollars that no public school could afford), and they are tutored by men like Bruce Pandolfini, who coaches at Browning, a $29,000-a-year, hundred-year-old academy on the Upper East Side, and Joel Benjamin, the former New York City and three-time U.S. champion, who teaches at Columbia Grammar and Prep, a $26,000-a-year, 240-year-old institution on the Upper West Side.

  “If you have any problems during a game at all,” another of the Columbia coaches is saying to a small army of children in electric-blue Columbia Knights T-shirts, “you shouldn’t let it go and complain about it after the game. Don’t let it get to you if they’re doing something abnormal. Pay attention to your game. Do not get into an argument with your opponent; don’t waste your energy.”

  And then he repeats it once more, in case they couldn’t hear him above the din in the room, above a raging game of Monkey in the Middle taking place in the hallway of a hotel that once played host to senators and film stars and big-band legends: “I don’t want you arguing with your opponent.”

  The New Yorker Hotel, a forty-story Art Deco skyscraper on the west side of Manhattan near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, was erected for $22 million back in 1930. At the time, it was the largest hotel in the city and the second-largest hotel in the world. It was sparkling and state-of-the-art, with elevators that traveled at eight hundred feet a minute, radio speakers in each room, and a forty-two-chair barber shop purported to be the largest on earth. In those early days, the New Yorker hosted celebrities and luminaries like Spencer Tracy and Joan Crawford and Senator Huey Long. Nikola Tesla, the scientist and inventor, lived in room 3327 for the final ten years of his life. Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and all the giants of the Big Band Era played the Terrace Room in the forties and fifties, and the Brooklyn Dodgers used it as a headquarters during the 1941 World Series, which they lost to the New York Yankees.

  But not long after Hilton purchased the hotel in 1953, its luster wore off, and people stopped coming, and in 1972, as the surrounding neighborhood decayed, the New Yorker was shut down. The French Polyclinic Hospital attempted to buy it and convert it into a hospital and medical school, but their plans fell through, and in 1976, the same year the Reverend Sun Myung Moon declared at a Yankee Stadium rally that “New York has become a jungle of immorality and depravity,” his Unification Church bought the New Yorker for $5.5 million and renamed it the World Mission Center. It became church headquarters for the next eighteen years, and its members (many of them single missionaries) used it a residence, as a gathering place, as a meeting spot for men and women who consented to mass marriages performed across the street at Madison Square Garden, and as “the hub of church activities,” according to one ex-Moonie.

  Of course, Moon’s attempt to recruit new members and make his church the world’s “third central religion,” behind Judaism and Christianity, didn’t last long before it receded into the cultural woodwork. By 1984, Moon was serving a thirteen-month prison term for income tax evasion, and in 1994 he and his church decided to reopen the New Yorker as a one-thousand-room hotel. Five years later, the New Yorker, though still owned by Moon, became part of the Ramada hotel chain and a temporary refuge for another awkward religion, a gathering place for the oddballs who play competitive chess. For a brief period before its death in 2002, the Manhattan Chess Club was headquartered here, in Suite 1521. Today, the city championships are held in the New Yorker on a regular basis, along with fur sales and vintage jewelry bazaars and whatever else brings in revenue.

  Much of the action on Saturday takes place in the Grand Ballroom, on the second floor, in the same massive space where Reverend Moon once delivered his speeches, watched over by his disciples from the balcony high above. The ballroom is still painted a stark shade of white, and garish French chandeliers refract pink sparks of light, and it’s into this room that parents lead their children before each of the five rounds, grasping their hands, ushering them to the proper table, and reminding them to think before they move, reminding them to write down their moves, reminding them . . .

  “PARENTS, WOULD YOU PLEASE LEAVE THE ROOM. PARENTS, COACHES, PLEASE LEAVE THE ROOM.”

  The opening anecdote of Searching for Bobby Fischer describes a scene at the 1984 National Elementary Chess Championship, in which a lone father began whispering moves to his son, prompting a number of parents to start whispering at each other, prompting their children (six, seven, and eight years old) to call for quiet, and finally prompting a pair of frustrated fathers to fall into a fistfight.

  It is, of course, the youngest and most vulnerable competitors who tend to inspire such protectivist feelings in their parents, and it is the young ones who, for much of the past two decades, have been purposefully sequestered by tournament directors and officials. The hard part is not making a decision like this (although one can imagine the outcry if this happened in, say, a suburban youth soccer league). The hard part is getting the parents to leave the room once the tournament begins, and then keeping them out. This is largely the duty of a smallish woman inside the door, whose job is simply to keep it closed. “If you could,” she says, once, twice, three times, “please move away from the door.”

  Once the parents are gone, once they’ve returned to their newspapers and their books and the endless game of waiting on the other side of the door, the silence comes rather quickly. The tables are set up in long rows, and when a tournament official gives the OK to start, there is only the clicking of time clocks and the clacking of pieces. Here is a boy standing over his board, surveying the position, and here are boys with baseball caps turned backward and angled sideways. They tap their pencils in their hands, and they cram erasers into their nostrils, and they scratch behind their ears. For five minutes, the games go on, a hundred at a time, and then the first one ends: A blond girl (one of the only females in the room) wearing a white turtleneck slides her queen toward the back rank, takes a pawn from her male opponent, and whispers “Checkmate.” She raises her hand, and over comes a man named Harold Stenzel to verify the position. When it’s finished, the boy attempts to fold up his pieces within the rolled-up foam-rubber board they’ve been playing with, but it crumples in his fingers and the pieces rain onto the ballroom’s plush carpet with a series of dull thuds.

  “You’ve got to fold it in four pieces,” Stenzel whispers. “Like a crepe.”

  Stenzel has been officiating chess tournaments for more than two decades. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that he happens to resemble a roadie at a Journey concert. He has a blond mullet and a matching mustache, and his pants are pulled up high above his waist, and he’s wearing a bright yellow T-shirt. He teaches chess at schools and in private lessons on Long Island, and
to make ends meet and support his children he works as a piano tuner. He also claims to have “the highest level of tournament-directing credentials in the country.” Exactly what this entails remains a mystery, but Stenzel has been at this, the business of directing chess tournaments, for much of his life, and considering it is not exactly a lucrative business, his dedication is weirdly admirable.

  “You have to show a little more latitude with the little kids,” Stenzel says. This is because they’re often easily intimidated: One kid showed up this morning, saw the size of the crowd in the ballroom, and decided he didn’t want to play. Also, young kids often don’t know the rules, and even if they do, they tend to want to take advantage of them. For instance, if they make a bad move, they may attempt to make it back by “adjusting” a piece. In common tournament parlance, this is a compulsive gesture in which a player moves a certain piece to the center of its respective square in order to neaten the board. Among the younger kids, it takes on an added dimension: Pieces magically shift from square to square. This is often their best attempt at cheating, and most of the time, Harold Stenzel says, they’re not very good at it.

  Meanwhile, the woman manning the door is working to beat down the masses. After fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, the parents begin lining up outside the doorway to the Grand Ballroom, as if waiting for their luggage to flop onto the carousel at the airport baggage claim. “It’s awfully noisy in there for your kids,” says the woman at the door. “Could you please keep it down?”

  By force of sheer numbers, the private schools dominate most of the primary-school divisions on Saturday, and in the junior-high varsity division, the Collegiate School (Upper West Side, tuition $25,000), led by a former national primary-school champion named Sarkis Agaian, defeats I.S. 318 by two and a half points. And by the time the trophies are awarded on Saturday evening, the children of private schools, the sons and daughters of scions of industry, are wrestling on the floor and hurling projectiles of varied shapes and sizes and locking each other up in vicious half-nelsons.