Evans On Chess. March 22, 1996. Copyright Chesstours. All rights
reserved.

                              CHESS HALL OF FAME

The Hall of Fame was established in 1986 to honor American players.
Initial inductees were Paul Morphy, the first world champion, and Bobby
Fischer, who won it this century.

THE U.S. CHESS HALL OF FAME is a nifty 170-page book by Macon Shibut with
over 40 annotated games, 15 photos, and pen portraits of 23 stars. He
captures their spirit as well as seminal events that shaped American
chess from Morphy to Fischer.

Few people realize that the first official American world champion was
Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900). Born in Prague, he spent the last 17 years
of his life on these shores and died a pauper. In 1894 he lost the title
to Emanuel Lasker in a match held at Montreal and New York.

European chess got another jolt from the New World in the person of Harry
Nelson Pillsbury, an unknown Yankee who set sail in 1895 to conquer the
strongest tournament of his day at Hastings, England, ahead of the
world's leading masters. Yet America too often neglects its own heroes;
when he died at age 33 in 1906, the New York Clipper noted: "Was there
ever a chess player who was a great man? Of course not, and never will
be. Great skill at chess is not a mark of great intellect but of great
intellect gone wrong."

Samuel Reshevsky (1911-1992) was already a famous child prodigy when he
arrived from Poland at age nine. His career spanned nine decades, and he
was the touchstone against which my generation measured its progress. A
colleague predicted we would beat Sammy when he got old; meanwhile we got
old waiting for him to get old.

Chess was now subsidized in Russia, which used it for propaganda, but the
difficulty of earning a living at the game drove many talented Americans
into other fields. Arnold Denker, the first whose name was not spelled
Reshevsky to win the USA crown in 1944, reluctantly left the arena to
make his fortune.

"Returning in the seventies, I was surprised to find it had become much
harder," Denker said. "The natural move no longer offered itself too
readily. I felt like a boxer who had lost his footwork and timing."

Today nobody would link a player's style to his nation, yet after WWI
people spoke of a new Americanism in chess, associated vaguely with
simplicity, clarity and pragmatism. "American games are free from all
plodding depth of thought and have a refreshing effect upon the onlooker
through the energy of their execution," opined Richard Reti in his book
Modern Ideas In Chess.

"It's no great stretch to connect Reti's image of American chess with,
say, the simple functional beauty of an Amish quilt or the designs of
Frank Lloyd Wright," argues Shibut. "Pillsbury's play was admired for its
long clean lines, and Morphy's games are celebrated as models of
straightforward development."

The paperback is $14 from the publisher, U.S. Chess Center, 1501 M St.
NW, Washington DC 10005. The Center also houses the Hall of Fame just a
few blocks from the White House, runs tournaments, and teaches the royal
game to inner- city kids.
