Nimble young fingerswrap around a black rook and drag it forward, knocking a white pawn off the board. Hasta la vista, baby. Another one bites the dust.
This is Tony’s turf, a 64-square battlefield with 32 plastic warriors and no mercy. The 11-year-old chess prodigy doesn’t like to lose, and he doesn’t lose often: Jose “Tony” Rodriguez Jr. is ranked 24th in the country in his age group and No. 1 in Illinois.
He got there by spending a lot of Tuesday nights in quiet combat on the vinyl chessboards at Rudy Lozano Branch Library on the near Southwest Side. He plays with scores of other kids under the expert tutelage of Hector Hernandez, librarian, chess fanatic, role model and founder of the 11-year-old Knight Moves Chess Club.
On a recent Tuesday evening, Jose and his father leave their house and walk the few blocks to the library, which sits in the heart of the Pilsen neighborhood. They head toward busy 18th Street, where commuters are inching their way home in the darkened rush-hour slush. Mexican restaurants dot the street, neon crackling in frosted windows and the aroma of corn tortillas warming the January night.
On the other side of a streetside window, a family watches television, bathed in the flickering cathode-ray blue. Tejano music beats from behind an apartment door. The neighborhood is speckled with family-owned establishmentstaquerias, mercados, coffee shops and clothing stores.
Pilsen is predominantly Hispanic and blue-collar, a family enclave. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, first settled by Czechoslovakian immigrants in the late 19th Century. By the 1920s, Mexican railworkers began settling in this industrial corridor, which sits between the Chicago River and the West Side rail yards.
Today, Pilsen is a vibrant community, an explosive splash of color in what was once a gray urban landscape of rusty factories and cavernous warehouses. In the 1950s, the Mexican arts community began texturing the area with colorful murals and ornate mosaics. While spirited and creative, community life still suffers the effects of drugs, gangs and crime. It is definitely not the first place you would go looking for a children’s chess club.
As they enter the Lozano library, Jose Rodriguez and his father pass a window display case housing a monumental trophy, just one of 30 or so awards racked up by the younger Rodriguez since he started playing chess at the venerable age of 4.
The Knight Moves club members are gathering in the library’s modest auditorium, where the avuncular Hernandez, 47, paces the fluorescent-flooded room as a cluster of wide-eyed children follows along, tugging at his suit coat and firing questions.
At least 30 people are here, mostly Hispanic, mostly male and mostly kids. The cry of “jaque mate,” Spanish for “checkmate,” rings out along the two long rows of foldout tables where the chess boards are set up, actually thin vinyl sheets that unfurl like fruit roll-ups. Several parents also sit down to play, most of them facing quick defeat at the hands of their precocious offspring.
Hernandez insists on good sportsmanship: All games end in a handshake. But there is the occasional dust-up.
“Move your bishop here,” an older boy commands a preteen, pointing at the chessboard. The younger combatant throws a fit, crossing his arms and refusing to play.
With nearly a dozen games in high gear, Jose grabs a seat and studies the green and white chessboard in front of him. As the game unfolds in his mind, his gaze hardens.
“Tony will be a master before he’s out of elementary school,” says Hernandez matter-of-factly, referring to his star pupil by his nickname, which comes from his middle name, Antonio.
Becoming a master in chess equates to earning a black belt in karate. Master status is granted through a rating system created by the 60-year-old U.S. Chess Federation, the governing body for the sport in America. Ratings range from 100 to 2,800, with a national average of about 1,300. When players reach 2,200, earned by defeating opponents of a higher rank, they become masters. Jose has a rating of 1,406. To be ranked as a grandmaster, a player must compete against other grandmasters and win a certain percentage of those matches.
“Becoming a master is a major accomplishment,” says Barbara DeMaro, spokeswoman for the chess federation. “It’s not easy.”
It would seem especially daunting for young people easily distracted by the culture of MTV-style television and rat-a-tat-tat video games, passive pursuits geared to short attention spans and instant gratification. Chess is, by comparison, another planet: It rewards patience, anticipation, deep concentration, sharp analysis and a well-cultivated memory of winning scenarios.
So, why does 11-year-old Jose choose chess?
“I like something I can win at,” he says. “And I like to win.”
Which suggests one reason that chess can take root among the video-game crowd: It’s basically a medieval battle.
“Chess is a violent sport,” champion Garry Kasparov has said, echoing the sentiments of other grandmasters. “When you beat your opponent, you destroy his ego.”
But while the advance, attack and kill nature of chess may well appeal to the aggressive instincts of young boys, to Jose the game is more than just Mortal Kombat or Streetfighter minus the gory graphics. For one thing, it’s more absorbing.
“Chess has slow action,” he says. “Most kids don’t seem to like that, but I do. I don’t like the shoot-em-up video games. The violent stuff is unnecessary.”
Jose doesn’t fit any chess-nerd stereotypes. He likes soccer and basketball, has a Michael Jordan poster on his bedroom wall, listens to Lenny Kravitz and Carlos Santana, and likes to play Tiger Woods golf on his dad’s computer.
“The people who call chess players nerds,” says Jose, “are just jealous because they don’t know how to play chess themselves.”
In addition to his considerable skills, Jose has a supportive family and a savvy coach. Hector Hernandez is one of those quiet urban heroes Hollywood rightfully lionizes as symbols of inner-city achievement and hope. Hernandez is putting his own chessboard ambitions on hold while he teaches kids to play the game and, in the process, absorb some lessons about growing up.
“I teach the kids how to become better players,” says Hernandez, “plus whatever social skills come into play when people interact with each other in a chess game. It teaches discipline. It teaches direction.”
It also is cheap and accessible. “Chess is a sport that is open to anyone,” Hernandez says, reflecting on the game in his soft-spoken voice, as families file into the library’s auditorium for a brief lesson and then a game or two.
“It is not based on physical size like football or basketball,” he says. “Kids from the inner city can be as good as kids from the wealthy suburbs. Everybody’s on equal footing.”
On this evening, Hernandez begins with a brief lecture on the game, a bit of history and a discussion of brain-teaser game scenarios. He points to an easel with a diagram of a chessboard on it.
“What’s the best move here?” he asks. Kids sit restlessly on the edge of their seats. More often than not, they have the answers to their coach’s puzzles, and their arms fire up into the air.
After the lesson, Hernandez begins making the rounds from chessboard to chessboard, setting up difficult game scenarios for his pupils to ponder. During the two hours that the group meets, the auditorium is hushed.
Hernandez has been the head librarian of the Lozano branch since it opened in 1989. Though not the largest branch in Chicago, at 18,000 square feet and with one-quarter of its 80,000 books in Spanish, Lozano can boast that it has the largest collection of Spanish-language materials in the Midwest.
Named for a slain community leader, the facility also houses three of the four busiest public-access computers in the city. Kids line up to do their homework on the machines, play computer games and surf the Net. It is a family library with parents reading to their children and helping out with homework and, on Tuesdays, with many attending the popular chess club sessions.
“Hector really wanted to incorporate chess into the library’s programming for kids,” says Mary Dempsey, commissioner of the Chicago Public Library. “And we loved the idea. Chess is a wonderful, peaceful, structured way of challenging young people to think.”
Hernandez first encountered chess after his family immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 13, and he later learned the rules from a friend at De La Salle High School on the South Side. Then, in 1972, while he was a freshman at the University of Illinois at Chicago, something big happened: Bobby Fischer.
Fischer’s prodigious skills, if not his eccentric behavior, brought to American chess what Michael Jordan brought to basketball: universal appeal and international recognition. Mikhail Tal of Latvia, a former world chess champion, once called Fischer “the greatest genius to have descended from the chess heavens.”
Born in Chicago in 1943, Fischer became the first–and only–American to hold the title of world chess champion when he dethroned champion Boris Spassky in 1972. He appeared on the covers of Life, Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. Then in 1975, Fischer shocked the world by not showing up to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov. After a dispute over ground rules for the match, the temperamental genius forfeited his crown and disappeared into a life of seclusion.
But during his reign, Fischer inspired a generation of young chess players, including Hernandez, who started snatching up chess book after chess book to fully comprehend the game. “I was hooked,” he says.
According to the Chess Federation’s DeMaro, membership in her organization nearly doubled during the Fischer years and has continued to grow. In 1989, the USCF had 2,500 members under 20 years old; today, the figure stands at 43,000.
Regarding his hero’s oddball behavior, Hernandez shrugs his shoulders. “Too much of a good thing is no good for you. . . . This is why I don’t push the kids in my club to play chess 24 hours a day. I don’t want them to end up like that. I don’t want chess to be the only thing in their life.”
While a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hernandez went on to earn two master’s degrees, in library information sciences and in Latin American literature. All the while, he indulged his passion for chess, studying games for an hour a day.
Now Hernandez has suspended his dream of achieving the title of master to share his passion with the kids of Pilsen. At one point, he was 33 points away from reaching the master level, just one solid weekend tournament.
“One day,” he promises, “I will study hard and practice more and I will become a master. But for now, I would rather teach kids how to play the game. That is what is near and dear to my heart.”
Plenty of people will testify that his investment in teaching the game is paying off, not only for prodigies like Jose Rodriguez, but for the community as well. “The chess club,” says Ald. Daniel Solis, whose 25th Ward includes Pilsen, “is a candle that shows that there are so many things that can happen in Pilsen that can be successful for the community. A lot of times when people think of Pilsen, they think the negative things like gangbanging and drug dealing and poverty.
“So (Knight Moves) is nice because it’s a little jewel in the community,” says Solis, who similarly praises programs at the nearby Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and at the El Hogar del Nino day-care facility.
Hernandez has seen some of his pupils grow up and devote themselves to chess. One is Joshua Florez, a chess coach and editor of the bimonthly Illinois Chess Bulletin. Hernandez coached Florez some 22 years ago when he was working at the Back of the Yards branch library on 47th Street.
Another big fan of Hernandez is Tom Larson, chess coordinator for the Board of Education, whose goal is to get competitive chess into every public school in the city. More than 200 schools now offer recreational chess, and 65 high schools and 50 elementary schools have competitive teams. For Larson, having champions like Hernandez exposing kids to the game at such an early age certainly helps his cause.
“Hector deserves lots of credit,” he says. “Chess is very important because of what it teaches.”
And because, every so often, it will uncover an extraordinary talent.
Jose Rodriguez lives just a few blocks west of the Lozano branch library in a single-story home with his father, Jose Sr., his mother, Maria, and his younger sister, Alejandra. Their century-old house is cozy, but Jose Sr., a mechanical engineer for Navistar International, has launched a complete rehab.
The Rodriguez kids do their homework as soon as they come home from school at Lenart Gifted Center on the South Side. They have a strict bedtime of 8 p.m., even on weekends. Jose wages a constant battle with allergies, and air cleaners are scattered throughout the house. One room has a large trophy case against one wall, its shelves crowded with awards and trophies.
“Jose started playing chess when he was 4,” says his mother. “His father showed him how to play.” Six months later, Junior was beating Senior. The parents knew their son had a natural ability and they knew he needed a coach.
Enter Hector Hernandez. For the last six years, Jose has studied under Hernandez, who comes to the Rodriguez house most Monday afternoons for an hourlong lesson. Jose attends the Knight Moves club each Tuesday if his homework is finished. When coach and student get together in private, they study classic games and play one on one, going over common mistakes in strategy and tactics. Over the years, Hernandez has become a sort of surrogate uncle.
“I try to treat all kids the same,” says Hernandez of his relationship with his star student. “It’s just that Tony makes me work harder to provide him new information all the time. He has a quick grasp of concepts. . . . I like to see him sit down and compete. He is a champion to me.”
Though he is still a student–Luke Skywalker to Hernandez’s Obi-Wan Kenobi–Jose has recently begun to defeat his teacher. Hernandez anticipates that when this becomes a regular occurrence, he will have to send Jose to a more skilled coach.
“This makes me sad,” says Hernandez. “But on the other hand I will be happy that he has surpassed what I’ve managed to accomplish.”
Increasingly, Jose has been traveling with his parents to tournaments as far away as Phoenix. Some of these trips have been funded in part by the local Pilsen chapter of the Rotary Club. But even as he starts competing in adult tournaments instead of sitting nose to nose in the Lozano library with kids his own age, even without Hernandez by his side, Jose’s victories belong to Pilsen.
Hernandez is conscious of the fact that, for young players of great promise, chess can become an all-consuming, life-distorting obsession. He ardently insists that he does not want that to happen to Jose and, fortunately, neither does Jose.
The 11-year-old says he never thinks about the game when he climbs into bed at night. “I have too many other important things to think about,” he says, “like school.”
And in a few years, perhaps girls? “Nah,” he says. “I’m not interested in them.”
Jose even took a self-imposed hiatus from the game recently after fearing that it was overwhelming him.
“He actually took 1 1/2 months off from chess,” says his father. “No tournaments, no lessons, no studying and no playing. It was all his idea. He said he needed to clear his head from chess. He wanted things to be fresh again. This was good. We don’t want chess to be the only thing in his life.”
And it won’t be. When Jose “Tony” Rodriguez looks in the mirror at night when it’s time to brush his teeth, the last thing he wants to see looking back at him is Bobby Fischer.
