Whatever happened to the game of chess? I can remember when chess was a big sport for kids as well as adults. The newspapers and television reported the matches and everyone knew who the best player was.

That’s the way it was when I was a kid. If we won, we’d say, “That proves boys are smarter than girls, country kids are better than town kids and I’m a lot smarter than you.”

If we lost, we said, “Chess is such a stupid game. Let’s go play some basketball.”

My little brother, Merlin, was the chess expert in our family. He was about eight years old when we got the chess set – and  wasted no time proving this was something he could do.

Merlin was the youngest and smallest in the family, and he learned early on that getting your brains beat out in a sport like basketball is no way to spend a childhood. He was good at reading and thinking, and was the fiercest chess competitor I ever saw. Merlin would have beaten a chess-playing computer and ripped out its motherboard as a souvenir.

My little brother was so good at chess that the rest of us never even bothered to read the rules. We just counted on him to tell us how the game was played. I lost several matches before I realized he wasn’t telling us everything.

Merlin never explained you are supposed to say “checkmate” when your opponent’s king is in jeopardy. He just took your king out – like jumping a piece in checkers! One moment you had a king, and the next you didn’t.

I tried to learn what was going on, but it wasn’t easy. “Can I move my horse over there?” I would ask.

“Nope,” he’d say. “That piece can only move to its left when the queen is in her castle. Besides, they call it a knight.”

“How about these peons? How far can they move?” I would ask.
“Those are pawns, and I’ll tell you when to move them,” he said.
It took awhile, but I finally learned enough to beat him fair and square. Then, I rubbed it in really good. Maybe I was a little rough, considering he’s so much younger, but he’d been beating me for a long time.

At any rate, Merlin decided he would tell Dad how nasty I had been to him. Many years later, I learned he told Dad I was always pushing him around, and somebody needed to do something about it.

Dad played along, thinking the 8-year-old would cool over time. “What can I do?” Dad asked. “I can’t spank him. He’s too big for that: Roger’s almost as big as I am.”

My little brother had thought about that for a second, and said, “Well, you should have beat him up when he was a baby!”

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.