Chess Players Destroy Nerd, Black Stereotypes

NEW YORK - Michael Johnson, 14, has no illusions about the roots of his fame. He knows why he and his pals have been greeted by the mayor, pictured on television and quoted in The New York Times.

"Most people just don't expect black kids from Harlem to do as well as we did," the eighth-grader says simply and sagely.

This story of Michael Johnson and his friends is a little bit sad and a whole lot happy - sad insofar as the children of Harlem still grow up believing no one expects much of them; happy in that these particular kids decided to ignore the expectations.

Michael Johnson is a member of the Raging Rooks, national junior-high chess champions. Recently, the Rooks, from Public School No. 43 in the heart of Harlem, tied for first among 60 teams - including the perennial powerhouse, Manhattan's exclusive Dalton School - at the national tournament in Dearborn, Mich.

Are they Harlem's coddled few? Hardly.

Team captain Kasaun Henry spent part of the school year living in a slum hotel after his family's apartment was burned. Jonathan Nock was mugged on the basketball court recently. Charu Robinson lives around the corner from four crack houses. Steven Yow showed up for practice not long ago with nerves jangling; a drug dealer had trailed him down the street, taunting him because he wouldn't buy any dope.

"Around where I live, there's a lot of drugs, a lot of people getting killed. Chess takes my mind away," Johnson says.

Despite it all, these 13- and 14-year-olds are champions. The Raging Rooks are, in the opinion of their coach, Maurice Ashley, a vivid rebuke to all the facile assumptions about chess players and black children and the future of Harlem.

Says Ashley: "They're checkmating stereotypes right and left - the stereotype that chess players are nerds. These kids play basketball and baseball. They're cool with everyone in the school. The stereotype that kids in Harlem can't learn. The stereotype that blacks are just slower than whites."

He speaks with the voice of authority. A native of Jamaica who grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn's Brownsville ghetto, Ashley pulled his way up to the highest levels of the subtle and demanding game of chess. At 25, he is a senior master, still driving toward his goal of becoming history's first black grandmaster.

Ashley began teaching chess at inner-city schools several years ago as part of a program sponsored by the Manhattan Chess Club. In short order, he hooked up with Richard Gudonsky, a science teacher at Public School 43 who has sponsored the chess club for nearly 20 years.

Dignified and intense, Ashley is a demanding tutor who believes competition is good for the soul and chess a worthy passage from childhood to maturity. He preaches mental discipline, self-control and physical fitness. He comes down hard on kids who disappoint him.

The Rooks love him for it. Partly for what Ashley is on the outside - and far more for what he has forged in his insides - the Rooks have made him their friend, counselor, confidant. "We spend a lot of time just rapping," he says. "They're at the girl age now, and they come to me wanting advice on this girl or that girl."

"We can tell him things," says Francis Idehen, 13. "He seems like one of us. He's more than just a chess coach. He's a friend."

The first thing Ashley did for the Rooks was kindle their passion for chess. He didn't do it by appealing to lofty intellectual theorems or flights of poesy about the beauty of the game. He did it by tweaking their competitive drive, their will to win, their adolescent mania to avoid being "dissed" - ridiculed - for losing.

Ask any of the Rooks why they play game after game after game, even on late summer nights, and they'll tell you it's because they know the difference between winning and losing, and winning is much, much better.

"When I started playing, everyone could beat me, and it made me jealous," says Kasaun Henry, who finished ninth in the national rankings. "Now, not many people can beat me."

But beyond simply making them want to win, Ashley has taught the Rooks how to win. And that has been the most important lesson of all. Example:

Going to Dearborn, the Rooks thought they had a shot to finish well. The year before, they finished in the top 10 percent, even though they had only three players on each squad, instead of four. Since the rankings are calculated by adding four individual scores, losing a player is a major handicap.

For the Rooks, the problem was simple - not enough money to field a complete team. "Our parents can't pull out a few thousand to send their kids to a tournament," Ashley says.

This year, a private corporation, the company that publishes Penthouse magazine, of all things, sponsored the Rooks. Playing at full strength, they got off to a good start. Then, in the next-to-last round, disaster struck.

Henry, the star player, got a jump on his opponent, then grew cocky. "I made a bad move. Then I let my emotions take over. I was lucky to get a draw," he says.

Meanwhile, Brian Watson, cruising to victory, had the same problem with overconfidence. Suddenly, his queen was captured. He burst into tears and lost the match.

Ashley took the boys aside.

"I reminded them about discipline, about control," he says. "I told them that success is not a matter of getting to a point and then quitting. You're never finished. Each step you make, you're growing. The achievement is in the growing."

When you come from a place where you're expected to lose, sometimes you need winning explained to you. In the last round, Henry and Watson won their matches, and the Raging Rooks finished first.