COLUMN: An unlikely chess master

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99A spoiled professional basketball player turns down $70 million with an exciting and competitive team in Minnesota and eagerly runs off to sign a $70 million contract with a horrible team in New Jersey. Priority check? Gotta love professional basketball. It's better to just avoid the front page of the sports section, especially because all of the really good stuff doesn't even pop up in the USA Today skybox or before the first commercial on SportsCenter. There's some fun stuff going on out there that you don't want to miss. Stuff like the recent triumph of Maurice Ashley. It would be easier to feel good about Ashley if people knew who he was, I guess. Ashley is a 33-year-old Brooklyn resident and Jamaican immigrant. Last week, Ashley passed the final set of rigorous challenges to reach the pinnacle of his profession. Maurice Ashley is a chess player and on March 14, he became a grandmaster. He's the first black person in the world to reach that level. There are 470 grandmasters in the world and 45 of them live in the United States. I would be lying to you if I said that I had a very good grasp on what it takes to become a grandmaster. I think it has to do with beating people. Lots of people. And beating me doesn't count. I'm more of a Connect 4 kinda guy. From what I understand, great chess players can think 40 or 50 moves in advance. This sort of clairvoyance impresses me to no end and Maurice Ashley seems to have it. On the surface, his is an exceptional but hardly rare story. He grew up playing his game, honing his skills in parks and on the playgrounds. And if I told you that Maurice Ashley was a basketball player, you wouldn't care less. Rising from the streets of New York City to play pro ball is hardly unusual. Rising up from the benches of Brooklyn's Prospect Park to play pro chess is a different story. Of course, it's all about the games we play and more importantly, the games we think other people play. Chess is a country club game. Old people play it with snifters of brandy in smoke-filled rooms and young upwardly mobile white computer nerds network around the world to play on-line. Maurice Ashley is a direct challenge to those misbegotten but probably fairly accurate images. "We're understood as physically gifted and great entertainers, but when it comes to something intellectual, that lags behind," says Ashley of perceptions of African-Americans. Chess, for those of you who don't play, requires few physical gifts and its entertainment value, or lack thereof, speaks (in a hushed whisper) for itself. Only the dozen people who haven't read volumes and volumes disproving The Bell Curve believe there is a connection between race and intelligence, but there obviously is a connection between race and economics and the games and sports people play. For some reason, tradition holds that white people play soccer and lacrosse and swim and play chess and tennis. And black people play football and basketball and sprint. There's no reason why this should have to be true. Serena and Venus Williams and their tennis trailblazers -- like Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson -- don't think so. And the national high school 60-meter sprint champion this year was a white guy. There's great importance in finding somebody to look up to. Ashley should be seen as something of a hero because he bucked racial statistics to become a grandmaster. He looked to a world that didn't automatically want to include him and, with no black chess idols to emulate, he went his own way, mostly on his own. Ashley is a legend in the New York City chess community. A member of the Black Bear School of Chess, a group of park chess enthusiasts, he took his experience and skills and coached the Mott Hall Dark Knights, a Harlem middle school chess team. In interviews, though, he doesn't sound as if his achievements are meant to prove a racial point. In reality, they prove so much more. If the degradation of sports is getting you down, take a look at Maurice Ashley and appreciate his economic, intellectual and (of course) racial triumph. It's good news and good sports.

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