Black & White Photos of New York

(Who do you think is winning? Black has a passed pawn. White is ahead in material.)

I was once a fairly decent chess player (back in college). In fact, for a semester I made pocket money playing chess. One day I entered a chess tournament - for the fun of it. I was unranked. I beat the first two guys I played who were also unranked. On the third day, I was scheduled to play someone with a fairly decent ranking - but he got the flu and never showed up - so it was credited as a win and I had a ranking. Now - if the rest of the players would have been sick I might have progressed but that was the last game I won.

I was (as you might expect) an instinctive player - which is to say I knew a couple of openings and a couple of end games - but everything else I had to figure out for myself. One day I was playing for pocket change with a guy from South America - I don’t remember his name except that it was long and he was named after every facist dictator in S.A., i.e. Franco, Batista, etc. - and that he had been a boxer; I believe he won the teenager golden gloves in S.A. He had huge, hardened knuckles. I remember that.

So anyway - I was beating him pretty badly - he was in one of the end games that I actually knew and before he knew what had happened I checkmated him. He got up and knocked the board off the table calling me a bunch of names in Spanish - some of which I knew. He had a sidekick - a guy named Slim from Harlem who was the top hustler in the dorm - and I asked what all the fuss was about. Slim was trying to calm his giant friend down (he was good at that) and eventually I learned that the big guy thought I had cheated somehow.

It was like one of the moments in the old westerns. Except that being something of a physical coward I slid his money back across the table. Better than getting my teeth knocked in and that calmed him a bit - though he went to one of the walls and slammed his fist into it - making an indentation that me and my roommate had to pay for at the end of the term.

Ah - and to make matters worse - every few weeks (and this is more than twenty-five years later) I get calls from the University of Buffalo asking if I want to donate to the school. If they only knew.