The chess player with a broken wrist

Brad walked into gymnastics practice with a long arm plaster cast, suited up and ready to work out with two legs and one good arm.  Coach Peters spotted him, and his face immediately flushed bright red.

“Brad? Oh m-my g-god! What’d the doctor say?” Mr. Peters was mostly concerned about covering his own butt. He had pushed Brad to work out on the painful wrist for weeks, taping it for support so tightly that his hand would turn blue. Its only a sprain, he would say.

“The doctor said I have a scaphoid fracture and I have to wear this for 6 months!”  said Brad. Coach’s eyes were darting back and forth between the cast, Brad’s face, and his teammates who were gathering around. He must have been wondering what he would do if he couldn’t coach anymore.  Somebody got a marker, and guys started writing things on it, like “heal soon”, and “don’t be a wimp!” In a whiny voice Coach advised Brad he couldn’t come back to the gym without a doctor’s release, and asked if there was any way he could help.

“Can you keep my spot on the team? I’ll be back as soon as it heals!” Brad said. He had already earned the number two spot on the team as an all-around gymnast and was expected to be an elite level gymnast by his senior year, eligible for a full scholarship.

“You got it!” Coach said, with pretend confidence. The guys were already back on the apparatus. As Brad left, the squeak of the high bar and thumps of bodies landing on crash pads were like music in his ears. He would even miss the smell of teenage boy sweat and chalk dust.

“Can you come by next couple of week and let me know how it’s going?” Coach called to Brad’s back on the way out.

“Yeah,” Brad said. Nobody he knew had ever seen an athlete work out for weeks with a fractured bone. He must have gotten such a high pain threshold from Natalie. A couple of years ago he had watched his Dad punch her hard in the mouth, and all she did was laugh and say Is that all you got, punk? They were both drunk though, so maybe it was the booze. He had to tell his paper route manager who winced when he saw the cast, and found a substitute.

Now Brad had a new problem – what was he going to do  with the time spent in the gym and throwing papers? A flyer for the high school’s chess club advertised a ranking tournament coming up. At home, he grabbed the second oldest of the 5 boys. “Hey Jeffrey, play a few games?”

“No!” Jeffery said. He had beaten him every game the last time they played, until Brad screamed and threw the pieces across the room.

Mo could imitate a good father on occasion. Being one of those hustlers who would play chess in the public park for a few dollars, he wasn’t a bad player. He had taught the boys to play chess as soon as they were old enough to talk, hoping to use them in his hustles, but Natalie wouldn’t allow it.  Brad believed Jeffrey had been getting secret lessons from their Dad, and had given up chess entirely.

“C’mom Jeff, I’ll give you a quarter for three games.”

“Okay!” he said, holding his hand out until he got the precious coin. Money talks and bullshit walks, take the money, Mo had taught them.  Brad lost the first two and controlled his temper. On the third game he slowed down, controlled his pieces, and played more defensively. Jeffrey cracked in the mid-game and forgot to protect a bishop. It was all over in ten more moves, and Brad forced checkmate.  They played every day after that, Jeffrey winning most of them, but Brad ate the humiliation, feeling he was improving, and he once beat Jeffrey two games in a row.

The ranking tournament came soon, and 16 high school chess players showed up.  Brad was nervous and sweaty, worse than before a gymnastics meet.  He had to learn how to use the clock, and lost time on several games. He repeatedly blundered, forgetting to remember touch move, a rule that Mo always ignored.  When the results were tallied he was ranked 13th out of 16.

“How’d you do in the tournament?” demanded Jeffrey. “Can we play again?” Brad ignored him, feeling dead inside, except for the burn. The burn was the feeling of his soul being cooked from the inside out. It always happened when other people proved they were better than him. Holding his fists clenched, he wanted to smash something or hurt someone. His mind finally cleared enough to consider the options, which led him to the library to find chess books.  For weeks, all of his time outside of classes was spent with books and a chessboard.  When he walked on the sidewalk the squares were part of a chessboard, and he would step like knight. Chess played in his mind all day, as if it had a life of its own, and it came to his dreams at night.

Then one day he gave Jeffrey another quarter, because he knew Jeffrey was going to get hurt.

Jeffrey lost game after game, and finally cried in frustration and wouldn’t play anymore. Mo came around the house for a while, he had a job doing some handyman work, and was trying to make things right with Natalie. Brad got him in front of the chessboard, and crushed him three times in a row. His father jumped up before the last game was over, strutted like a wounded rooster out of the house, swearing at that smart-ass kid who needed to get a boot put up his ass.

The ranking tournament came, and Brad beat all the guys who had stomped him 2 months earlier. He was declared 1st board, and would represent the school against other school’s 1st board players.  Nobody could believe it. The teacher who sponsored the club wanted to know how he did it.

“I stayed up late every night and memorized half the games in Bobby Fischer’s book My Sixty Memorable Games. I played them out every day, and tried to think like Bobby Fischer, and imagine how he would feel if he lost. Bobby didn’t like to lose. I don’t either!” He didn’t share that the months of meditation in Grandma Mary’s basement had given his mind the capacity to sustain prolonged focus, and an ability to be creative and solve almost any problem. There was a problem coming, however that no amount of mental acuity or study from books could solve.

How do you get a girl you care about, to like you?