Chesstories

The First Black Chess Grandmaster
by Melissa Ewey
(Ebony, Issue: July, 1999)

Goddesschess is pleased to present this excellent biographical article on American GM Maurice Ashley, who devoted all in the pursuit of his personal Caissa. From the July, 1999 issue of Ebony, by Melissa Ewey.

Find out what motivates this personable GM, who earned his final GM norm in 1999, shortly before this article was written. Read about his efforts to bring The Game of Chess to impoverished children in New York's Harlem neighborhood and elsewhere. Man, husband, father, chessplayer, teacher, businessman. Maurice Ashley is all of these things, and more.

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The best of the best gathered from Russia, Europe, the Far East--and Brooklyn, U.S.A.--to take part in international combat. The competition was fierce, but the Black man from Brooklyn didn't break a sweat. One by one, he conquered his opponents with fierce determination and incredible skill. When it was over, 33-year-old Maurice Ashley became the first Black chess grandmaster in history.

Not bad for a guy who wasn't good enough to play on his high school chess team.

"I played chess for three hours every day at school," he recalls, "then I went home and studied chess books for a few more hours. I still didn't qualify." That disappointment was merely a bump in Ashley's road to the top. Today, he is one of the world's highest-ranked players, and his influence as a coach has encouraged many underprivileged youths to embrace the game.

Ashley is one of 470 grandmasters in the world, the highest title in chess short of world champion. To become a grandmaster, a player has to score high performance ratings, known as "norms," in three tournaments against top-rated chess players. This is no easy task, and most chess players spend a lifetime attempting to reach that level. Considering that Ashley picked up the game of chess at a relatively late age, his achievement is all the more remarkable.

As a child growing up in Jamaica, chess was just one of the dozens of games Ashley played with his siblings. It wasn't until his family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., that he began taking the game seriously.

"I was in the 10th grade and playing chess with a friend of mine," Ashley recalls. "I'm a very confident and competitive person, and I tend to win most of the games that I play, so I was sure I could beat him. He crushed me. I was so stunned. I didn't have a chance from the beginning."

While recovering from that embarrassing defeat, Ashley stumbled across a book on chess at the library. "Maybe at the time I was thinking revenge, like I could learn some things and go beat that guy," he says, "but instead, I was amazed. The whole majesty of the game, the strategies, plans and ideas ... I just jumped in headfirst and fell in love. "Chess is life or death," Ashley continues. "The pieces are alive ... [but] what actually happens on the chessboard is about 1 percent of the game. It goes on in the heads of the opponents, at almost a psychic level, and that's what makes it so absolutely intense. To me, it's like the golf shot that wins the Masters, or like Michael Jordan taking the last shot to win the NBA finals. Chess has that kind of intensity from the first move."

Although he couldn't play for his high school team, Ashley began to play on his own in local tournaments. "I was nothing in the game," he recalls. "I was this guy who didn't make his high school team, dreaming of becoming a grandmaster." Ashley lost his first game, but quickly recovered. His chess success continued in college, where his ranking jumped from expert to master to senior master. He also played frequent games with members of the Black Bear School of Chess, an informal group of Black men who gathered in Brooklyn's Prospect Park for heated chess matches.

Ashley's prowess caught the attention of the American Chess Foundation, who asked him to coach chess teams in Harlem and the south Bronx neighborhoods of New York City. His passion for the game quickly inspired his young students. "They just started eating up my intensity and my love for the game," says Ashley. "Chess is an exciting game in and of itself, but on top of that, I really wanted to teach them and get them excited."

His first team, the Raging Rooks of Harlem's JHS 43, stunned the chess establishment when it won the national championship in 1991. "These were not kids who had chess tutors when they were 5 or 6 years old," Ashley explains. "They had only been playing chess for a couple of years, and they defeated the top private schools in the nation. That was a stunner." Ashley went on to start a chess program at Harlem's Mott Hall Middle School, the Dark Knights, leading that team to three national championships.

Ashley's skills were now in demand. While continuing to coach, he designed a CD-ROM chess tutorial and flew around the world to do play-by-play commentary for chess tournaments. However, his own chess game got lost in the shuffle.

"My game took a nosedive," says Ashley, who wasn't performing well in tournaments. Despite all of the success he was achieving in the chess world, Ashley's heyday as a player appeared to be over. "My dreams of being a grandmaster were undercut by all of the other things that I was doing. The player in me was screaming to come out." He recalls his second-to-last-place finish in a 1997 chess tournament as a turning point. "I felt the frustration of seeing my future behind me, and I decided I had to focus on one thing--playing."

Ashley quit coaching and spent a minimum of six hours a day perfecting his game.

With the support of his wife, Michele, he would take their daughter, Nia, to preschool and devote his time to studying chess. He downloaded the latest games off the Internet and played chess once a week with a friend, who was also an international grandmaster. Eager for more insight, Ashley hired a chess trainer. "He came to my place once every two months and stayed for three days," says Ashley. "He would put my game through the ringer. He looked at my game inside-out, upside-down, backward and forward." The intense study and rigorous training schedule quickly paid off, and Ashley's tournament performances dramatically improved. He earned his first norm in 1993 and a second in 1997. The third norm came during the Manhattan tournament in March.

"It was a pretty good tournament," Ashley says confidently. "I played very well." Now a grandmaster-elect, his status becomes official in October. Making it to the grandmaster level, says Ashley, "is like trying to make the All-Star basketball team. Nobody's going to hand it to you. Your opponent is fighting you to the bitter end."

Perhaps the only thing more gratifying than making it to the grandmaster level is watching his former chess proteges soar to new heights. "I look at the kids who are so successful now, who are graduating from Vassar and Yale, and I think, `You guys are the knuckleheads that I taught in junior high?!'" jokes Ashley. "Children learn so much from chess; it's beautiful to watch. Problem-solving, goal-setting, concentration, focus, patience ... these are all the wonderful things you want kids to learn. Just getting a kid to sit and think for a little while is a miracle in some cases ... to have them working out their ideas and focusing over long periods of time is great."

And that, Ashley believes, is what chess is all about. "You don't get good if you don't use your mind. You have to sharpen your mental skills, and that's exactly what it does for kids. It gives them that mental acuity so they can become confident about their mental abilities."

Ashley's latest project is designed to attract even more young people to the game of chess. He is the director of the chess program for the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, which is opening a state-of-the-art chess center in Harlem in September. "I want to promote chess in our community," he says. "We're hoping the Harlem Chess Center will be the prototype for other centers around the country."

This time around, he vows not to let his own game suffer. "I still have some playing years left in me," says Ashley, who dreams of being the first African-American to compete in the U.S. Championships. "Right now I don't qualify, but maybe within the next couple of years ..."

In the meantime, Ashley has his hands full teaching his 5-year-old daughter how to play chess. "Every time Nia saw me at the chessboard, she wanted to learn," he says. "She hounded me for months, and I tried to tell her to wait until she was older. Finally she got me, and I sat her down and showed her how to play. She already knows all of the rules. She's very serious."

Could Nia be the second-generation grandmaster in the family? No pressure, insists Ashley. "I'm not going to push her; she'll do whatever she likes. But I'll make sure that she won't go through what I went through," he vows, recalling his first defeat. "When she goes to school, there won't be anyone who will crush her in a game of chess."

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COPYRIGHT 1999 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group