N.Y.C.'s youthful masters of the chessboard

A sports writer looks at the unlikely rise of America's best high school chess team.

By Marjorie Kehe

from the March 6, 2007 edition

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Some years ago, I visited a children's summer chess camp in a tony New York suburb. Indelibly stamped in my memory is the image of a towheaded 6-year-old, kneeling on the seat of his chair to better reach the board, nearly routing one of the highly ranked adult instructors.

Almost equally unforgettable, however, was the air of affluence that surrounded these young chess enthusiasts. Many enjoyed private lessons and one-on-one tutoring from experts throughout the school year. I didn't have to see the Mercedes SUVs into which these children scrambled at the end of the day to understand that theirs was a world apart.

These are not the players profiled in Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team. Weinreb's subjects are largely the children of immigrants – scrappy, New York City public school kids. Their parents have no money for private tutors or summer chess camp.

Then again, they don't actually seem to need such help. These boys (and one girl) are already among the best of the best.

Their school – Edward R. Murrow, a Brooklyn public high school – won its first city championship in 1989 and has never since ranked lower than second. This book chronicles the Murrow team's pursuit of its sixth consecutive state championship and its second national title.

How did these kids get here? And, in the end, does it matter?

For this is not a feel-good story of young geniuses leveraging their chess skills into high grades, big cash prizes, and grand careers. On the contrary, some of these teens are struggling just to finish high school.

Their accomplishments, Weinreb explains, are lauded "within an artificial hierarchy contained to nondescript hotel conference rooms and debated on Web sites and online message boards." Outside such confines, however, Weinreb watches one young chess master slip out of a winning match alone. Here on the city streets, Weinreb notes, "where most people on Eighth Avenue can't even begin to comprehend the strange beauty of what Oscar has just accomplished, he's scratching together his cash to pay for a Quarter-Pounder."

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