The Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn has been a successful progressive school, whether despite or because of its mixture of Puerto Rican and black students along with immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. It has been a radical experiment in public education, allowing pupils to skip classes and to make up their own schedules, curricula, or independent study projects. There has been a high level of student graduation and subsequent enrollment in college. The school might now be succumbing to No Child Left Behind mediocrity because it is being forced to admit students who are refugees from neighboring schools that have been closed due to failing their evaluations, but one of its brightest successes has been its chess team. The team won its first NYC championship in 1989 and has gone on to national championships. This meant that they were up against lots of other schools with teams that could afford tutors or chess camps during the summers. _The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team_ (Gotham Books) thus has the dependable appeal of a David vs. Goliath story, as sportswriter Michael Weinreb followed the striving, scrappy students while they aimed toward another national championship. Though the book conveys excitement in the competition, as any sports book ought to, it is most rewarding in its picture of awkward teens being able to fasten onto something meaningful before turning into adults.
The Murrow team is the brainchild of Eliot Weiss, a former hockey player, ski instructor, beer vendor, and taxi driver who more than anything else wanted to be a math teacher. He does some coaching and teaching, but plenty of his students are far better players than he is. He works at organizing trips to tournaments, and a lot of what he does is drumming up money for the travel and for entry fees and for pizza to recharge the players. The kids are the heart of the book. Weinreb spends some pages on each of the main players, telling about their backgrounds and families. There is Oscar Santana, a Puerto Rican prodigy who is a whiz at chess but can't focus on his schoolwork. He does, however, bring home a straight A report card. Unfortunately, he did so by hacking the Board of Education computer and boosting his grades. Oscar brings home chess trophies so regularly that his family can't display them; they started storing them in garbage bags, and then started throwing them away. Also winning trophies is Alex Lenderman, a little Russian émigré, the second-highest rated 15-year-old chess player in America, but he knows that big trophies are just something else to lug through the subway system. What Alex, and the others, really want is to win some money, which they can do in a small way through tournament prizes, and in a larger way though wagering on games, often "blitz" chess played in lightning-fast games timed by a chess clock set to three minutes or even one minute. Alex's foe is blond Lithuanian Sal Bercys; the two players dislike each other but have mutual respect. When they are pitted against each other in tournaments, they choose to play out staged (and not strictly legal) draw games, but afterwards go at each other seriously in blitz versions. Sal grows throughout the book, becoming a stronger player by accepting his weaknesses. There are plenty of other supporting characters, and like the main ones, they wear baggy and unsupported pants, they love hip hop music, they can't figure out girls, they can't get enough pizza , or they keep ear buds firmly in place at all times.
As Weinreb asks, what is the point of these kids continuing to play an infuriating and exacting game, when they get almost no recognition, especially compared to kids who win spelling bees or even hot-dog-eating contests? The "notion of chess as a charity, as an educational tool, as a cultural equalizer in underprivileged neighborhoods" is a relatively new one, and holds considerable potential for social change. About a kid named Shawn who plays brilliant blitz chess but can't display energy for much of anything else, a teacher asks, "Where would Shawn be _without_ chess? What would his life be like then?" And maybe some of them are going to get a sort of living from the game, but more realistically they might get benefits like scholarships, so there must be some value to the endeavor. Weinreb, however, quotes a chess instructor who points out that they already have gotten the value, in becoming mentally tougher, more creative, more acute at solving problems: "The benefit will last the rest of their lives." They live in a strange world of their own, and don't worry if you don't know about chess, for it is all explained at a layman's level here and requires no previous expertise. Weinreb's gift is that he has been able to invite us into that world and make us care about the oddballs that live there.
