Outside the doorway of a small storefront on Vincennes Avenue, the world is falling apart.
Like many South Side neighborhoods, the area is distinguished by boarded-up apartments, long-vacant shops and oppressively empty streets.
But inside the open door of 7402 S. Vincennes Ave., amid all the decay that has come to define America’s inner cities, is a vibrant strand of an intellectual network that reaches across the globe. It is a place that steadily pulses with life.
Life, and checkers.
“Most of the time, this is where we hang out at,” mused Therman “Chicken George” Earnest, 56, as he pushed the hard plastic pieces along the checkerboard in front of him. “This is our harbor, our life-checkers. I work, sleep, then I’m here.”
As a battered sign above the window points out, this old storefront is now home to the Chicago American Pool Checker Club, a tight-knit group of 20 men from across the city who come here as often as five times a week to chat, pass the time and play game after game of pool checkers.
Their small group is part of a national and international group of pool checker players that has taken some members of the Chicago club to places as far away as France and Russia-where the game is widely popular-just to play the game.
And it’s a game many have been playing for decades, a competitive matching of wits long popular among blacks on street corners and front porches in inner-city America. Their tiny club is a throwback to a time when pool checkers filled hours of time for many black Americans, a time that may be passing as the inner cities continue to deteriorate and youths are drawn increasingly to gangs and drugs.
The brand of game played by these men is not the checkers many of us played as kids.
That kind of checkers is called straight checkers, in which game pieces can move forward only and kinged players can move one space at a time. In pool checkers, pieces can move forward or backward, and a kinged piece can move across the board if necessary. The difference between the two is slight, but it’s one that gives pool checker players a sense of reverence for their game.
“I’ve watched chess being played before, but I find it boring; it’s dull,” said Thomas Scott, the 80-year-old president of the Chicago club. “But pool checkers is electrifying. It really boggles your mind and makes you think.”
The Chicago club is one of 14 in the American Pool Checker Association, which has about 700 members. The local group has been around since 1976.
Its 20 members are all African-American men from the Chicago area, although women and whites would be welcome. Most are retirees, but the group also includes a lawyer, a computer technician and a handful of men who come to play after a day of factory work.
Most of them are friends, but there is no secret about what prompts them to drive to a rundown clubhouse in a dangerous section of town.
“What draws us all together is the game,” said club member Clorius L. Lay, 52, of Gary.
And they all take the game very seriously.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and weekends, the door to the clubhouse, which they rent for $250 a month, is usually open before 6 p.m. The four tables with wooden checkerboards on them fill up quickly most nights, with pairs of men huddling intently over their game boards, pondering every possible move. Often, the games last for hours, sometimes until the next morning.
“It sure beats hanging around the taverns and the gin mills,” said Eddie Smith, 65, who has been playing pool checkers for close to 25 years.
In their spare time, club members pore over books, trying to learn the perfect moves to corner their opponents.
“This is not relaxation,” Lay said. “It’s competition. You have to study-it’s work. You study checkers the same way a student studies English.”
“Once you get involved in this game, it’s very addictive,” agreed Fred D. Shurn, 57, a systems analyst who comes to the clubhouse three times a week from his home in Maywood.
To the players in the Chicago club, pool checkers is no different from any other sport. It has a national championship, which will be held from Sunday to July 24 in Hattiesburg, Miss.
The game has its die-hard fans, such as the 50 or so people who packed the clubhouse on Vincennes to watch a recent checker match between a player from the New York Pool Checker Club and a Chicago club member.
The game’s rookies are called “scrubs,” and there are various skill levels, from the Blue Ribbon category to the Top Masters.
And the game has its legends, in this case Carl “Buster” Smith, a member of the Chicago club until his death earlier this year. Smith was recognized by many as one of the best to ever play the game.
“Buster was Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson all rolled into one,” Shurn said. Stories about Smith abound, ranging from the plaque he received from Charles de Gaulle in France to the trip he made to the then-Soviet Union, which paid for Smith to tour the country and play some of Russia’s best players.
Another story about Smith involves a match he played in the United States against an up-and-coming prodigy from the Soviet Union.
“Buster just trounced him,” Shurn recalls. “The kid hardly knew what happened.”
Although Smith died earlier this year, a fading newspaper article on the clubhouse wall remains to inspire other players.
These days, however, the members of Chicago’s pool checker club can find very little inspiration when they happen to look up from their deliberations over the game board.
Many in the Chicago club are fearful that their game may soon die out, that it, too, will fall victim to the gangs, drugs and crime of the inner city, much like the neighborhood around them has died.
“All this,” said club member Lay, referring to the streets outside the clubhouse, “is probably going to cause the game to die out, especially among blacks. When I came along, checkers was a way to stay off the streets. I’d like to see it help young kids now.”
Shurn blames the decline in pool checkers’ popularity on the American push to always earn a quick buck.
“For people (in the United States), it’s too boring, takes too long,” Shurn said. “Everyone’s in such a big hurry these days. The only thing that will attract people here is money.”
Lay, a lawyer from Gary, credits pool checkers with keeping him out of trouble when he was growing up and giving him the chance to go to law school.
As a child, he would play checkers against adults, the stakes a dime to buy a pop.
He wishes checkers would begin to draw in kids once again.
“It’s very difficult for a young person to get in trouble doing something bad if they’re sitting here moving checkers,” Lay said
The club has tried to draw in new, younger members by posting fliers in surrounding neighborhoods and by occasionally taking their game on the road to spots in the community. But their efforts have come to little-the youngest club member is 35, and he joined the group in the early 1980s.
Club members do admit that their recruitment efforts stem as much from necessity as from a desire to get kids off the street. With only 20 regular members paying $10 monthly dues, the club is short on cash. Members often dig into their pockets to pay rent, heat or other club necessities.
Indeed, the club has its own special methods to raise funds. For instance, any member who loses five games in a row must place 50 cents in what’s called the “Mug Box,” sort of a loser’s donation to the common cause.
But even the group’s best efforts are barely enough to scrape by.
Only a higher membership and a burst of interest in pool checkers would help the club reach what is now just a fond dream: moving from the clubhouse on Vincennes Avenue and into a better facility.
After five years in the current clubhouse, members have grown weary of the dangerous neighborhood around them and the boarded-up apartments overhead.
“Yeah, this place is a dump,” Shurn said. “But right now this is all we got. And this is where the game is at.”
