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Saturday, October 11, 2008
What does Chess Represent for you?
The Chesshere.com Team just made me an offer I cannot refuse. Imagine, ‘tell us a story and if we like it, I just might get a free premium membership, free’ and mention in - chessheres blog. Well like most other folk who play chess, I guess, the problem will never be telling a story but, rather which story to tell now, where to begin and how long it should be. Well this story is going to be short and about the first and only time I beat England’s first Chess Grandmaster, Tony Miles. Please, don’t rush off to Wikipedia, you won’t see mention of this contest there or in Geoff Lawton’s publication, ‘It’s Only Me’ (an anagram on the name Tony Miles) or any other publication for that matter. This is a historical first mention.
Tony Miles came to affirm in me certain qualities, about chess and life and it is these shared best qualities that have come to represent what chess means to me, a player from Galway on the west coast of Ireland.
Some of those qualities include, the natural highs offered by competing, the generosity of spirit gained from participating in the process of playing, the epiphany that in life, loosing is no disaster; the possibility of seeing beauty in patterns and the twin other possibilities of seeing ever so briefly the soul, represented only by events on a chess board; seeing as it were the interiority of I, the one making the moves. All of these qualities, feelings and insights were affirmed in me by spending less than one day in the company of Tony Miles.
The occasion was an invitation I had extended to Tony to visit Galway and play a simultaneous exhibition match with locals. Fresh from winning the World Chess Championship, 1974, and much more recently a prize winner at the Dundrum International Chess Congress the week he agreed to come to Galway. That day was March, 21 - 1975. News paper reports (Irish Times) of the event stated ‘Tony Miles… concluded his visit to Ireland with a visit to Galway where he played an exhibition against 44 local players. After 4 hours play Mr Miles had defeated all of his opponents (including myself), but he sportingly accepted additional challenges from local schoolboys who were unable to obtain a board in the main exhibition. The event was attended by a large number of onlookers’. So that is all the press had to say about the event. As news goes of course that is all that there was to it, he came he played and when the exhibition was over he left. But as in so many cases in life the real event, the game and analysis went on until the early hours of the morning and unrecorded by the press. After the exhibition he came back to my house with a number of other friends ‘for one last game’ and a drink. There the exchanges, the stories about his competing in Manilla and the awe inspiring lessons were so absorbing and generous that it would be impossible to pen them all here.
The one that has to be penned here is the final game of the evening, the early hours of the morning really, the game that I won. No it wasn’t the drink, or the fact that he was totally exhausted, or the fact that I had the analytical support of a number of others, nor was it that he wanted to call it a day. No it was simply that he coached me to a victory against himself by contributing to the analysis. I am all the richer as are my colleagues for having met Tony Miles and I have his soul shard with me still. It will never fade – the memory of a generous fellow a unique personality indeed, who lived the reality of what a learning life means. What the matter if I don’t make it to the final selection, what does matter is that the story gets told.
Comments: 2
1.
ANZARBOND says:
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Good story.
2.
Deer_18 says:
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
NICE STORY
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