Mental Melee

The Undertones of chess in working-class society

as appeared in Xpress Magazine April 2008

In the 1850s, a chess player named Paul Morphy arose– the biggest thing in chess since marble pieces. He played professionally by the age of ten and beat his first grandmaster before he needed to shave. Clubs were filled with players trying to be the next Morphy. By 1858 everyone in America was playing chess because of his influence on popular culture. Sadly, less than a decade later, Morphy went off the deep end when he felt that his chess stardom had pigeonholed him.

Morphy spent much of his older life despising chess and trying to get his law firm off the ground. When it failed with the start of the Civil War, he began roaming his hometown of New Orleans in a bathrobe, acting brashly toward female strangers. He was found naked and dead at his home in July of 1884, surrounded by a plethora of women’s shoes.

Morphy became forever known as the “Pride and Sorrow of Chess” — at least until Bobby Fischer came around. Fischer, a chess prodigy from Brooklyn, New York, became the youngest U.S. junior champion at the age of fifteen. He beat Russia’s Boris Spassky during the height of the Cold War in the early ’70s and became an American hero for beating the Communists at their own historic game. Some of his most famous matches have inspired countless chess players.

“Fischer/Spassky. I saw a special on PBS about their match-up, and I’ve never looked back. I saw him as a hero,” says Jon Donaldson, director at the Mechanic’s Institute Chess Club, the oldest chess club in San Francisco.

With a new generation of chess players coming into the fold, the future of chess seems uncertain. More people are playing now compared to when Fischer was the talk of the town thirty years back, but the landscaped has changed.

The biggest player today is the computer. Chess software is better than ever, allowing anyone to practice with a highly-skilled opponent. Websites like Chessclub.com harvest more and more players and connect people from different countries, such as India and China, which have little history with competitive chess but are beginning to pick it up. The current world champion, Viswanathan Anand, is from India.

Young children make up the largest demographic playing the game. Kid’s tournaments and groups are generally better funded than the adult variety. There is also an older generation that emerged out of the Bobby Fischer era that plays in chess clubs. Between these demographics are young adults, who make up a small percentage of the chess community. They are a group more inspired by the film Searching For Bobby Fischer than they are the player himself.

“My mom took me to see a movie after I lost in a tournament, and I had no idea what the movie was. I was so bummed. All I wanted to was go home and forget about chess,” says Jessica Lauser, also known as “Chessica” because of her infatuation with the game. “The movie came on, and I was completely enthralled. When it was over, all I wanted to do was play chess and get really good.

Chess competes with video games, the Internet, and five hundred cable channels. It doesn’t seem to hold the same enthusiasm it used to.

When Morphy was touring Europe, representing the U.S. against some of the nineteenth century’s greats, chess experienced its first boom. The Industrial Revolution was kicking into gear, and entertainment elsewhere came in the form of pony shows. Chess clubs emerged. The momentum was built on Morphy’s tour de force, but it collapsed after the Civil War and hibernated until its next surge during the Great Depression.

In America, chess regained its popularity due to the mass poverty that swept the nation after the stock market crash in 1929. It was inexpensive, and many felt its increasing media attention was a way to climb the social ladder. Today, most people who play chess come from working class families of all cultures and creeds.

“During the Great Depression most of the chess players were from the lower class…it was a way for them to pass the time while they waited for work,” says chess historian Kerry Lawless. “That is hwy we produced some of the great chess teams during that time.”

Although World War II sent most of our chess greats to Europe and Eastern Asia to fight, chess still thrived throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. It was featured in national papers and magazines, and there were even celebrity tournaments. Humphrey Bogart spent his youth as a chess hustler on the streets of New York, years before starring in classic films like Casablanca.

At about this time, a young Fischer was rising through the ranks. He played in eight U.S. Championship in the late 1950s and 1960s, winning a perfect eleven to zero record in 1964. He proved to be someone to root for, with his charming personality and mysterious behavior, and the spotlight focused in: he was likable, handsome and reminiscent of Morphy.

At the age of twenty-nine, Fischer became the only American to win the World Chess Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland, beating Boris Spassky. However, when he refused to defend his title in 1975, the World Chess Federation stripped him of his champion status.

Afterward, he isolated himself from the chess world. It took twenty years before he rematched Spassky in 1992, when he immortalized his inner rebellion against the country that once embraced him: he spat on the U.S. order mandating that he not play in Yugoslavia because of the United States Nations embargo that sanctioned sporting events. He was slapped with an arrest warrant and never returned to the States.

His exile, anti-Semitic sentiments, and, later, his defense of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, had the U.S. calling him not just a kook, but also a traitor. He died in Iceland in January of this year and was worth an estimated one-hundred-forty million Icelandic Kronur, or about one million U.S. dollars.

A running joke in chess is that you’re only good if you’re crazy. As with Van Gogh, the romantic scenario of a vernal grandmaster walking the tight rope between brilliance and insanity is pervasive in the community.

“Even though he flipped, he was the best. I wouldn’t mind being potentially crazy if I could be that good,” says Max Rosenberg, a casual chess player.

If there is ever going to be another Fischer or Morphy, he or she will come from a place like the Mechanics’ Institute on Post Street in San Francisco. Here Fischer is ever-present. Old magazine covers of him at a chessboard fill the shelves, and framed photos are mounted on walls overlooking players like nine-year-old Nicholas Nip as his knights take bishops and his pawns eat pawns. Palms slap double clock-stoppers; it’s the only sound in the dead silence of minds turning as they guide chess moves.

Take a stroll through SoMa and checkmates are being dealt out by some of the city’s more impoverished citizens, like Chessica, who is also partially blind. The crowd is a grab bag of small kids with big brains, blue-collar immigrants, and the bereft educated. You have youth like Nip, playing against dour teenagers, and shaggy college students playing against gray-haired old men. With no ethnicity dominant, the players here on a late Tuesday evening seem destined to be there.

“When I was a kid, all we had was chess. I couldn’t imagine playing anything other than chess,” says Frisco Del Rosario, a competitive chess player and a chess coach working out of the East Bay. “Now the kids have so much more, and in teaching chess, I can only hope to teach them skills they can use outside of chess– using your imagination to solve problems and being confident in their choices.”

Ultimately, the chessboard is the great equalizer. It doesn’t ask a player’s size or strength. The only thing that counts is the player’s brain and how well he or she plays the game.