After what had happened the year before, after what had happened in 2000 and 2001, to have the win and then lose it three times this decade, Mr. Weiss was braced for disaster. Aradhyula’s opponent, Cameron Donis, a sophomore from Elkhart, Indiana, had nearly half an hour remaining on his clock, and he was playing with the white pieces, and all he had to do was avoid a stupid mistake in the endgame, ensure the draw, and Murrow would win by half a point. “Protect the pawn. Protect the pawn,” said Dalphe, standing next to Mr. Weiss. “Take your time. Take your time.”
That they’d made it this far was perhaps Murrow’s finest achievement in all the decades Weiss had been coaching. Catalina Foothills had only gotten stronger, and arrived in 2006 as the unquestioned favorites, with four of its top players rated above 2000. And Murrow showed up without Oscar (who, improbably, was serving as a chaperone for the five dozen Chess-in-the-Schools students who came here to play—he was working at CIS on a regular basis and planned on attending a local community college in the fall) and without Willy (who, while technically still a student at Murrow—he was working on getting his GED so he could attend a vocational college—had already played at four national tournaments and had used up his eligibility here). In their place was Mikhail Furman, a freshman who greeted his teammates with an incessant array of handshakes and flitted about the room like a hyperactive character in a Disney film.
Certain things hadn’t changed: They were still petulant and rebellious, and Sal still resented Alex, except now he wasn’t alone anymore, after Alex took that gold medal at the World Youth Championships the previous summer. The word was that Alex had started playing tentatively afterward, that he was too content to take easy draws and had descended into a moral gray area, offering prearranged draws to other GMs so he could finish in the money at certain tournaments. And while Murrow had no trouble winning its fifth consecutive city championship, Alex struggled, weighed down by expectations and resentment. When he lost in the fourth round to an opponent rated 400 points lower, the Schadenfreude was palpable. It simmered all around him. This is how the Allies must have felt when Germany fell, someone said, and Sal, who could now avoid a rematch with Alex, who could avoid the temptation to beat him instead of taking another draw, thought that quote so clever that he wrote it on his hand. Then in the fifth and final round, Alex snapped at his father, shooing him out of the room, and he lashed out at another player, accusing him of talking during his game, of conspiring to cheat, and the kid jawed right back, saying, “You think I’d stoop down to your level?” Afterward, the whole thing degenerated into a shouting match in the hallway, everyone coming down on little Lenderman, with Sal taking pleasure in the whole fine mess. “I don’t get in physical fights,” Alex said when it was over. “Only mental fights.”
Sal exorcised some of that ongoing frustration with Alex at the 2006 U.S. Championships, which were held the same week as the state championship in New Rochelle (the competition was so lackluster at states that Murrow didn’t even need its two top boards to win). At the U.S. Championships, in San Diego, Sal beat Alex in forty-three moves—no more gentlemanly draws—and yet even afterward, their fates remained intertwined: Heading into nationals, Alex’s rating eclipsed Sal’s by a single point.
Funny, though, how all of this animosity faded once they got to Milwaukee. The memory of what had happened in Nashville still tugged at them, and nobody wanted to endure the indignity of a tie again. But there was more to it than that. By now they had been on enough trips together, had been trapped in enough cramped carpools together, that they understood each other. When they traded insults, as when Shawn referred to Ilya as “The Nose,” there was a certain grudging affection behind their words. When someone told a vaguely racist joke and Dalphe and Nile both laughed and Mikhail took offense, Sal had to explain to him how it worked: that this was the way they talked to each other, and that nobody should take anything personally. When that kid fell into a shouting match with Alex during a match at the city championships, it was Shawn, of all people, who was quick to stand up for him.
Without Oscar’s enterprising influence, they were more studious this time around. Alex, in an uncharacteristic display of leadership, declared a moratorium on late-night card playing, and his teammates appeared to have taken him seriously. Even Shawn was less distracted, and a win in the final round gave him 5.5 points, tied for fourteenth place in the championship section among a field of 365. A half hour after Shawn finished, wearing an oversized T-shirt promoting an album from a hip-hop artist named Tone Kapone, his palms were still damp and his forehead was glistening and he made a revelatory confession. “I think it was easier this year,” he said. “I didn’t make any blunders in my games. Even the game that I drew, I saw the win.”
Perhaps this was the miracle everyone had been waiting for. Perhaps Shawn Martinez was finally coming to terms with his impending adulthood. He’d been placed in a special program at Murrow, a more strict curriculum that mandates class attendance and is meant to help its students earn promotion to the next grade. He still looked upon his classwork with contempt, and a few weeks earlier at that high school in New Rochelle where Murrow won its seventh consecutive state championship, Shawn had stayed up so late the night before doing god-knows-what that he’d fallen dead asleep in his chair during one of the morning games. But who knows? The past few hours had unfolded like an epiphany—maybe it was time for Shawn’s epiphany as well.
Because Sal and Alex each lost games to inferior opponents in earlier rounds, Murrow trailed by a full point heading into Round Seven. But then Shawn won, and Alex somehow salvaged a victory over a 1920 from what appeared to be a dead draw, and Sal, going head-to-head against Catalina Foothills’ Christopher De Sa, rated at 2012, played the sort of brutal, ego-crushing chess that had propelled Fischer to the world championship in 1972. De Sa chose to give up some of his time to prepare for Sal, and he showed up twenty minutes late, setting down his backpack, languorously removing his jacket, and playing his knight to the f3 square. Sal did not hesitate; he played pawn to c4. An hour later, Sal was suppressing a grin and De Sa kept leaving the board to get another drink of water and to attempt to salvage what remained of his dignity. Sal checked with his queen, then checked with his rook, then captured a bishop, then another check, and then finally De Sa resigned with a helpless shrug. Facing the most important match he had ever played at Murrow, Sal did not just win; Sal performed a ritual emasculation. “My God,” he said when it was over. “That was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
In the end, each of Murrow’s top four scorers (Sal, Alex, Shawn, and Mikhail) and six of Murrow’s top seven (including Dalphe, who had sublimated chess for hip-hop dancing, and who was performing regularly at New Jersey Nets games with a troupe of youth performers) won their final-round games. In the end, with six seconds remaining on his clock,Aradhyula recognized the futility of his efforts to pull out a victory, and he accepted the draw, and at 5:45 on a Sunday afternoon, Eliot Weiss removed his toes from a line of masking tape, hurried upstairs to his hotel room, and got on the phone to the newspapers. His team had won the national championship by half a point, the sixth in school history and the third in a row, if you counted last year (and who would argue if he did?). Either way, the local Chuck E. Cheese was already anticipating their arrival.
Later that evening, they waited in the back of the room for their names to be announced, so they could pick up another cheap trophy they’d have to squeeze into the overhead compartment on the plane ride home. They were all here, gathered around their coach, though Sal kept wandering off to flirt with some girls he’d met and Ilya was doing one last interview, over the phone, with a reporter from the New York Post.
It would all continue to change when they got home: the makeup of their team, the makeup of Murrow itself. Within a few weeks, Dalphe would transfer to a small high school closer to his new home in New Jersey, choosing his dance career over his chess career (in June, he would land a bit part in a Disney film). And that same month, a
notice would appear on Murrow’s Web site, reflecting a citywide change in policy:
Message Regarding School Safety Scanning
April 2006
Dear Parents:
We are committed to provide a safe, secure learning environment for all students in our school.The New York City Police Department has assisted us in achieving this goal and in implementing a coordinated approach to school safety. As part of the safety initiative for New York City Schools, Mayor Bloomberg has announced that on some days students will be asked to go through metal scanning machines like the kind used to screen airline passengers for the purpose of detecting weapons.These scanning devices, deployed by the New York City Police Department, will identify not only weapons but other objects that are never permitted in our building and will help us to keep everyone safe in our school. . . .
These days we often hear that added security measures are “a sign of the times.” In our school, however, I see this additional security resource as a sign that placing students and staff in a potentially unsafe situation is unacceptable.We must all commit to ensuring the safety of everyone in our community. . . .
Sincerely,
Anthony R. Lodico, principal
This was not Lodico’s idea. This was a citywide initiative, and he had no choice but to post the letter and send it out. As of the end of the 2005-06 school year (when Ilya and Willy became two of the 660 members of that year’s graduating class), the scanners had yet to show up at Murrow. But it was there, lingering, as a warning and a threat to the precarious balance Lodico is expected to maintain between a safe school and a free school, between a disciplined student body and a creative student body. “Most of the students come up to me and say they don’t notice any difference from the changes we’ve made,” Lodico said at the end of his second year as Bruckner’s heir. “In a way, it’s a very positive change that’s very subtle. After we closed the courtyard, I had two kids come to my office to complain.”
Times have changed since the 1970s, since Bruckner’s vision first came to life. And that’s all Lodico is trying to do, is adjust to these times, to keep his school both safe and productive, to keep kids from waking up during their senior year, like Oscar and Willy did, and realizing how much more they could have done.
For now, the chess team remains a constant at Murrow, the school’s most potent public-relations tool: Every time Lodico attends a citywide principals’ meeting, his colleagues come up to him and say, Edward R. Murrow.That’s the chess school, yes? Someday in the not-too-distant future, of course, Eliot Weiss will take that teacher’s pension and he will leave Murrow to the next generation. What happens then is anyone’s guess: This is his team, his legacy, and where it goes when he goes is a question that cannot be answered any more easily than the question of whether chess will ever be able to penetrate mainstream American culture.
But for one moment, at least, Weiss wasn’t caught up in all of the vagaries of the future. Sitting in that chair in the back of the room in Milwaukee, waiting to pick up another national championship trophy, he permitted himself a certain measure of satisfaction. He had done all he could, had transformed an after-school club into a national dynasty. He had done as much for the reputation of a single public high school as any teacher in New York City, and he had done it all for free. There was nothing left to accomplish. There were no more mile-stones.
Were there?
“Hey,” he said. “You guys want to go meet the president again?”
AFTERWORD
MORE THAN 1,400 PLAYERS PARTICIPATED IN THE 2007 NATIONAL HIGH School Chess Championships at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, a record-breaking number; but as had been the case in years past, the two top seeds both came from the same school: Alex Lenderman and Sal Bercys. They were were playing as teammates for the final time.
By this time, Alex and Sal were seniors, and they appeared to have reached an understanding: They were still not friends, but they had matured enough to fashion a method of co-existing. Alex, his rating at 2471, spent the week before the nationals preparing. When he arrived, he went to bed at midnight, and ordered eggs from room service before each morning round. He won six games, drew one, and took the individual championship on tiebreaks. Sal, his hair long and shaggy, his bangs nearly trailing over his eyes, his rating at 2491, drew twice and finished with 6.0 points, tied for fourth place. Shawn Martinez, his rating at 2009, finished with 5.5 points, and three others, including Nile Smith (1792) and Mikhail Furman (1696), finished with 4.0 points each.
Once again, Catalina Foothills High School had more depth. Their top four boards, Landon Brownell, Christopher De Sa, Vaishnav Aradhyula, and Sean Higgins, were all rated over 2000, and their fifth board, Pavel Savine, was at 1923. For much of the weekend, Catalina Foothills led and appeared as if it would win the championship outright, but things turned in rounds five and six. Heading into the seventh and final round, Murrow led by a point. In the end, Nile Smith, facing Ben Marmont, a 2000-rated player from another Arizona High School, needed nothing more than a draw for Murrow to win outright. Mr. Weiss insists that he tried to signal to Nile, to catch his attention, to get him to offer a draw, but Nile, so fixated on the win, didn’t process the directive. A couple of errant moves later, Marmont won the game, and as in 2005, the teams tied for first place, with 22 points each. Again, Catalina Foothills won on a technicality—the cumulative tiebreak. This time, says Mr. Weiss, the teams agreed to share the championship.
A few weeks later, trailed by a pair of documentary filmmakers, the members of Murrow’s latest championship team—the seventh in the school’s history—met with the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.
In May, for the first time in recent memory, with Sal and Alex and Shawn and Nile all absent, Murrow High lost the high school division of the Brooklyn borough championship tournament, sponsored by Chess-in-the-Schools. They did not lose to another high school, however. They lost to Intermediate School 318, coached by John Galvin and Elizabeth Vicary. Already that spring, 318 had won both the elementary (K-6) and the junior high school (K-8) national championships; so Galvin decided to challenge his team at the borough championships by pitting them against Murrow. A couple of days later, The NewYork Sun ran a story headlined “I.S. 318 Youngsters Dethrone New York Chess ‘Kings.’ ” Mr. Weiss was not entirely pleased at the implication (“It’d be sort of like Michael Jordan playing with a bunch of three-year-olds,” he told the paper), but he conceded that 318 had constructed a dynasty.
By summer 2007, Vicary had finished her masters thesis (“Encouraging Middle School Girls’ Success and Involvement in Chess”) and had also begun playing competitively again. In the fall, she planned to begin teaching full-time at I.S. 318, no longer working for Chess-in-the-Schools. Already, she has established herself as one of the better female players in the country; in July, she was one of ten women to compete at the U.S. women’s championship in Stillwater, Oklahoma. She finished ninth, although she did win a “brilliancy prize” for one of her games. A Murrow graduate, Irina Krush, finished first.
The loss at the borough championships, however contrived, might have served as the symbolic end of Murrow’s own dynasty, at least in the near future. Sal was headed to the University of Texas at Dallas, having accepted a chess scholarship that he once scorned; Alex was moving on to Brooklyn College, also with a scholarship, and planned to study to become a math teacher. (He gives a number of simultaneous exhibitions and lessons through the Internet Chess Club.) The other fixtures of that 2005 team were long gone: Ilya was still toiling at Baruch, and hoping to transfer; Oscar was still working at Chess-in-the-Schools and attending a local community college; and Willy had moved out of his mother’s house, still on the verge of getting his GED and starting school. Nile had started college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. They’d mostly lost touch with Dalphe after he’d transferred from Murrow to the much smaller Satellite Academy in Manhattan and embraced dancing and acting over chess. And Shawn? Well, no one quite knew what
would happen to Shawn. In April 2007, shortly after this book was published, a reporter named Timothy Williams wrote a feature article about Shawn, headlined “Teenage Riddle: Skipping Class, Mastering Chess,” which appeared on the front page of The New York Times. By then, Shawn was spending most of his time hustling chess at an atrium on Wall Street. “It wasn’t weeks [of school] that I missed, it was months,” he told Williams. In the aftermath of that story, Mr. Weiss says, he received dozens of e-mails offering Shawn help, with a job or financial assistance or a starring role in a documentary. Whether Shawn responded to those e-mails, Mr. Weiss could not say. He was supposed to start a GED program at some point, Mr. Weiss told me, but when that would actually happen—or whether that would ever happen, or whether Shawn might return to Murrow to enroll in a GED program at the school—he could not say.
With Sal gone, and Alex gone, and Shawn almost certain not to return to school because he rarely showed up in the first place—he had somehow earned three credits in three years, and how he even earned those remained a mystery—Mr. Weiss would be forced to rebuild, to await the next aspiring master who might land at Murrow from some faraway land or some nearby middle school. No longer was I.S. 318 proving a reliable pipeline: The school’s academic reputation had grown to the point that many of its best players were now able to gain admission through competitive examinations to other elite schools, such as Brooklyn Tech.
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