SO WHEN'LL NIKE SIGN HIM :

Ghetto Superstar : Maurice Ashley -- Harlem's grandmaster sets a new chess standard (Robin McDowell, SportsJones)

Eliot Majors, age 9, slides his queen diagonally across the chessboard, then inexplicably halts one square short.

Check.

Several watching youngsters groan.

"Nooo!" cries one, clutching his chest, and falls to the ground in dramatic disbelief. Maurice Ashley, age 34, removes his dark sun glasses and his leather jacket. "You sure you want to do that?" he says.

It doesn't take long for a group of kids to gather round. At the Harlem Chess Center, Ashley is treated by the young players with respect usually reserved for professional athletes or rap stars. He's got star power. He is after all, a grandmaster, a title shared by only 500 others in chess including Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov.

The difference is, Ashley is black, and the only black to have achieved that rank. You might say he's done to chess what Tiger Woods did for golf or what, three decades ago, Arthur Ashe did for tennis.

Back in the 80's when Shelby Lyman and Edmar Mednis used to do a show for PBS where they'd analyze the World Championsip matches, they' try to get kids interested by having youngsters on the show. So there was a young girl, she may even have been Judit Polgar and a black kid, who I think was from the team that Mr. Ashley coached, the Dark Knights. It was great when the kid would denounce some move that Kasparov or someone had made and Mednis would politely
disagree at first, but as the kid refused to budge you could see that Mednis just wanted to strangle him. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2002 8:57 AM