How One Girl Conquered African Chess

Tim Crothers, The Queen of Katwe: One Girl's Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion

Katwe is one of the poorest slums in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, one of the poorest nations in Africa, Earth’s poorest continent. Children born in Katwe have little hope of improving their lives. That includes Phiona Mutesi, whose mother says she was “probably” born in 1996; that’s as specific as she can be. Phiona would’ve spent her life hawking food from roadside stalls, except an accidental encounter helped her discover her hidden talent: chess.

Sportswriter Tim Crothers has crafted an epic of how one teenager, with everything against her, became a national champion and an international competitor, in a game dominated by children of the well-off. Crothers’ book serves as a biography of Mutesi, of the Christian missionary who unlocked her surprising capability, and of the urban squalor pit that brought them together. Crothers’ writing sometimes struggles to incorporate his many themes, but it’s difficult not to feel moved.

In 2002, Robert Katende, a former child soccer phenom, graduated engineering college without direction for his adult life. A Uganda native who grew up poor, he’d found religion during an extended hospital stay, so he accepted a commission from an American missionary program to teach soccer to boys in Katwe. His principal attraction to Katwe’s youth was that he brought actual regulation soccer balls into slums where kids played with balls made from banana leaves.

Despite immediate popularity, some boys couldn’t participate in Katende’s soccer program: they were so poor, even insignificant injuries could bankrupt their families, so soccer, a contact sport, was impossible. So Katende brought an inexpensive chess set into Katwe. The game was so exotic that the local language, Luganda, had no word for “chess,” yet five boyds proved eager students of the primarily intellectual game. One boy’s sister tagged along to practice one day, without warning.

Phiona Mutesi had almost no formal education, because her mother put her to work, aged about three, to protect the family from destitution. It was an intermittently successful effort. She was probably nine years old when she barged into Katende’s all-boys’ chess lessons. Yet Phiona proved so adept at thinking several moves ahead that she quickly outpaced Katende’s ability to coach her. Within two years, she beat every Ugandan chess champion in her age bracket.

Phiona Mutesi

Within six years, Phiona was Uganda’s national champion, and traveled to international tournaments, playing European and American competitors from wealthy backgrounds. Phiona sat opposite children of the white middle and upper classes before, Crothers admits, she knew how to read. Soon her story wasn’t just about chess. She became the only African her competitors’ sponsors ever encountered, possibly their only direct encounter with truly abject poverty. How many Phionas, Crothers wonders, has the world overlooked?

Crothers’ writing requires some effort. He works to maintain focus on his main characters, but real life, as journalists know, is often sloppy, lacking a narrative through-line. Thus, apart from a brief prologue, it takes seventy pages to bring Phiona into her own story. As Crothers’ mixed biography of Phiona, Katende, and Katwe generally moves among several themes, there are visible seams; chapter breaks sometimes feel like fault lines. Crothers clearly isn’t experienced in long-form.

Notwithstanding these form problems, Crothers crafts a complex, multi-pronged narrative that will attract multiple audiences. Readers of nonfiction and biography will enjoy Katende’s and Phiona’s struggles to emerge from poverty and become their own individuals. Fans of history and iinternational policy will find these protagonists’ stories informative to understand a nation that’s still terra incognita to most American and European audiences. And Christian readers will love how the heroes’ faith guided them through trying times.

Originally released in 2012, when Phiona was probably about sixteen, this book has enjoyed a recent push from Sports Outreach, the mission network that sponsored Robert Katende’s original mission. It also received a 2016 Disney film adaptation. Much of this re-release push has come from Christian sponsors, but this book isn’t exclusively Christian; non-religious readers will find plenty to enjoy, too. Crothers’ mix of history, biography, and sports will engage a complex and diverse audience.

This isn’t the kind of book that general readers often seek out. Its two main themes, chess and African poverty, aren’t exactly big audience grabbers. Yet despite Crothers’ occasional difficulty welding his many themes together, he convincingly sells his story. He’s storyteller enough that his journalism feels like a campfire tale. Perhaps this working-class reviewer can offer no better praise than to say, this book made me stay up past my bedtime to keep reading.

The Last Days of College Sports

Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss, Indentured: the Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA

It’s impossible to read Joe Nocera’s economic history of the NCAA without seeing an implicit metaphor for abusive industrial capitalism. We have a proletariat, valorized for their unceasing hard work. We have a managerial class, who perform intellectual and technological gymnastics to keep the proletariat’s wages artificially low, while acclaiming the market forces that commercialize the game. And there’s the bourgeoisie of Division I coaches and athletic directors, made rich from the other classes’ labors.

Nocera, a veteran business journalist and pro-business moderate who has recently examined sports issues for the New York Times, is joined here by junior Times contributor Ben Strauss. The extra hands probably help unpack a complex issue which affects so many people who possibly don’t realize it. Though dissatisfaction with the NCAA’s business model has become increasingly commonplace, few fans probably understand how we reached this impasse. This historical illiteracy makes fixing the problem difficult.

Anecdotes about NCAA abuses of unpaid “student athletes” (a term coined specifically to avoid calling players “employees”) abound, though it’s difficult to derive meaningful statistics, since the intensely private NCAA keeps its books closed. We know the Association forbids its members to unionize, a position inconsistently supported by the Department of Labor, since the players’ one compensation, academic scholarships, aren’t considered taxable income by the IRS. College players aren’t paid, given workers’ comp, or contracted.

Even without statistics, however, it’s possible to determine patterns. This book runs rather long, and lush in narratives, partly because Nocera needs to establish a pattern of circumstantial evidence. This includes players’ personal experiences, public and private quotes—some quite long— from NCAA officials, and numbers where they exist. The Association’s secretive policies make smoking-gun proof elusive. But recurring narratives, accumulated across decades, makes a persuasive case for the NCAA as profiting off “amateur” athletes.

The NCAA was founded in 1906, basically to standardize rules and safety procedures in college football. Not until 1951 did the Association gain any governing authority over college sports. From this time, the NCAA made the players’ amateur status league dogma, asserting that players’ unpaid positions enhance the game. This dogma has influenced everyone from the league to the Supreme Court. And the Association will undertake massive investigations to ensure its star players remain unpaid.

Joe Nocera

Nocera’s accumulation of anecdotal evidence is both huge, and frequently bizarre. Players get targeted for accepting groceries, car rides, and discounted pants. While denying players enough pocket money to buy toothpaste (Nocera estimates eighty percent of student-athletes live in poverty), the Association basically ends college careers for students accepting dinners from booster organizations. And the Association’s investigators, including former federal agents, are disproportionately likely to target poor black students, whom it expects to remain poor.

Meanwhile, the NCAA’s academic requirements are both onerous and inconsistent. The Association maintains strict academic accomplishment policies, to justify that student-athletes are scholars first. Its standards reach back to 9th Grade for many players. Like amateurism demands, academic requirements are enforced with racial differentiations, though in the opposite direction. Well-off white students are more stringently policed, while poor blacks from struggling, underfunded schools often get waivers. You’d almost think the Association supported racial divisions. Hmmm...

Nocera is quick to assert that, in writing all this, he doesn’t describe every sport. Collegiate water polo and tennis, though prestigious in their circles, aren’t money makers, and thus not particularly abusive. His criticisms specifically describe what he terms “the revenue sports,” football and men’s basketball. These two sports employ over 15,000 uncompensated players, mostly poor, netting revenues measured in the billions. Though again, monetary numbers remain vague with the NCAA’s notoriously closed books.

Nevertheless, the accumulation of evidence is overwhelming. The NCAA makes literally billions off laborers whose work remains perennially unpaid, and takes remarkable steps to ensure market forces never influence the bottom. It demands off-the-books overtime from workers too poor and disorganized to oppose management. While some revenue subsidizes less-prestigious sports, top Division I coaches make more than some NFL coaches. And almost no revenue reaches academics. The consequences are almost Marxian in their pervasive devastation.

Nocera is an excellent storyteller. He weaves players’ personal anecdotes, some of which are almost Stephen King-ish in their bleak tone, with journalistic passages of statistics and quotes. His investigative prowess doesn’t overwhelm the human costs of the Association’s practices. As he notes, recent history has the patterns getting worse rather than better. This mix of history and current events will make a brutal wake-up call, for sports fans and believers in economic justice alike.

Why the NFL Problem Is Worse Than You Think

Ray Rice

Diverse interest groups have rushed to judgment about the recent NFL domestic abuse scandal. Besides directing personal harangues at Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, advocates have called for Commissioner Roger Goodell’s ouster, major shakeups in team ownership, and ending the NFL’s federal anti-trust exemption. But all these solutions are strictly organizational. The violence suddenly dominating sports headlines has deeper, more intractable origins, demanding bold interventionist solutions.

Football has a relatively violent history. Keeping relatively recent and high-profile, Michael Vick’s dogfighting, Plaxico Burress’ weapons possession in a nightclub, and OJ Simpson’s… ahem… charges recount a pattern of violent behavior. And while the overwhelming majority of football players are hardworking, law-abiding professionals, football’s macho berserker culture offers poorly adjusted personalities freedom to enact undesirable tendencies. Then, somehow, we expect them to compartmentalize. Cuz that works so well for soldiers.

I’ll concede personal bias here. Back in middle grades Phys-Ed, football—frequently an unregulated environment—provided certain elements an opportunity to exercise their frustration with the skinny, defenseless book nerd who frequently wrecked the grade curve. Especially after classmates discovered I could catch and run, but not throw, I became a common sacking target. Funny how often touch football progressed from “unintentional” tackles to bruise-inducing melees.

However, my issues notwithstanding, football often permits combative youths to enact violent whims with relative impunity. Considering that concussions, a common football injury, often damage the prefrontal cortex, the brain region that governs impulse control, it’s hard to specify cause and effect. However, whether football attracts violent people, or football creates violent people, it certainly rewards them. Extreme chest-thumping football rhetoric is so common, it’s become a hoary media stereotype:

Though Ray Rice’s mean left hook to his wife’s face precipitated the current debate, and his Players’ Union appeal keeps his story active, Adrian Peterson has become this controversy’s public image. Having been benched until his team, the Minnesota Vikings, got creamed last weekend, Peterson’s now nominally still active, despite having lashed his four-year-old son bloody. His head coach called Peterson’s team standing “fluid,” so who knows? Everything remains frenetic.

Peterson justifies physically disciplining his son, even whipping him until his genitals bleed, by asserting that his mother whipped him too. He insists that having been beaten in his youth offered him the personal discipline necessary for NFL success. This calculus overlooks the fact that Peterson’s father did a ten-year prison hitch for drug and financial crimes. Peterson’s half-brother was murdered in 2007. And a son he never met was beaten death by the mother’s boyfriend.

A friend of mine claimed physical discipline is okay, boasting: “My parents spanked me, and I suffer from a condition known as respect.” Okay, so she’s quoting a greying old Internet meme so what. But we’re not talking about spanking here. My father spanked me; he never beat me bloody. Such savage punishment doesn’t cause people to feel respect, or institute an awareness of consequences; it teaches children only to fear authority.

Adrian Peterson

Adrian Peterson arose from a culture of violence, a culture so pervasive that he doesn’t recognize how it still influences him. He’s passing that culture to his children. And the NFL, which demands its players “fight” an “enemy”, while engaging in blitz attacks, quarterback sneaks, and power runs, rewards violent thinking, provided it wins. Don’t pretend football isn’t violent. Players wear helmets, pads, and mouth guards because they risk severe injury.

However, our responses vary starkly. Ray Rice, whose statistics peaked in 2011 and whose last season was notably sluggish, was punished severely—after public outrage, not before. His career, Players’ Union actions notwithstanding, was already on the wane, and now is probably over. Adrian Peterson beat his son, too young to read, until his scrotum bled, because he hogged a video game, but he’s still winning. The NFL isn’t a moral institution; it’s a profit-generating enterprise. Cutting Rice likely won’t hurt football’s bottom line. Cutting Peterson would.

So long as audiences continue watching Sunday football, the NFL will provide financial motivations for violent players not to change. Two years ago, Americans worried themselves sick over concussions leaving players essentially brain-damaged, until we didn’t. One year ago, the 24-hour news cycle wet itself over a hazing process so extreme, it drove one player to the brink of suicide. Now it’s domestic abuse. The problems persist after news cameras go away.

If we’re truly horrified by the NFL’s domestic abuse scandal, we fans have the ability to make it stop. If it persists, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

A Flying Demon With a Billboard Heart

Larry "Link" Linkogle, Mind of the Demon: A Memoir of Motocross, Madness, and the Metal Mulisha

A motocross prodigy, Larry Linkogle went pro at 15, stealing prestigious trophies from senior riders. He never loved competitive motocross, though, preferring trick riding and audience-pleasing theatrics. At one high-profile event, he poked the establishment in the eye with a high-profile, rebellious ride, and freestyle motocross was born. But when his sport got co-opted by the money mavens he despised, he began a defiant descent into brutal self-destruction.

Link’s narrative of a life in motorcycles seems both familiar and strange. Familiar, because we recognize his rapid rise and violent collapse from a million rock star biographies. Strange because sportsmen usually suffer this massive crack-up only after their careers end, not at their athletic peak. Link’s ability to balance an apparent death wish against record-setting accomplishments and remarkable business feats makes a harsh study in contrasts.

Pushed into competitive riding early, by a father whose own demons cast a long shadow, Link always balked at racing, speed trials, and other statistics that attracted big-money sponsors. He felt most comfortable performing the tricks and stunts that motocrossers shared when audiences weren’t looking. He sought ways to bring such showmanship onto the track, an effort that alienated sponsors but made him an anti-hero to audiences.

Time after time, Link snagged some sponsor that loved his muscular theatricality. But as his sponsors became more established, gambling ever-greater sums on his track prowess, they inevitably demanded Link tone it down. He lost representation by biting the hand that fed him, though such oppositional defiance repeatedly snagged him some new, aspiring sponsor. Then his new Daddy Warbucks got rich and conservative; the cycle never ends.

Finally, in 1996, Link and another rider snapped. They turned their sponsor-labeled shirts inside out, wrote “Metal Mulisha” on their chests, and flubbed a major race in the most histrionic way possible. Audiences, largely numbed on lap counts, ate it wholesale. In Link’s telling, freestyle motocross (FMX) was born on that day, as was Metal Mulisha, perhaps the most lucrative team and cross-marketing brand ever to emerge from sport motorcycling.

Readers familiar with FMX will recognize that Link somewhat oversells his influence. Long before he snubbed his sponsors, riders like Bob Kohl and Travis Pastrana were performing trick rides on dirt tracks. Many riders pilfered BMX stunts, though they reserved their theatrics for warm-ups and victory laps. Link didn’t so much invent FMX as demonstrate that freestyling, essentially motorcycle ballet, could revitalize jaded audiences and draw sponsors.

But this isn’t unvarnished history or the Encyclopedia Britannica. This is Link’s subjective story of how one of FMX’s most talented stars nearly destroyed himself. If Link looms large in his own legend, so what? It means he acknowledges how far he fell, and how much he needed to recover. Though I doubt he’d phrase it thus, in his telling, Link’s FMX career resembles the dramatic swings of Greek tragedy.

Link created (or helped create) FMX to escape the tyrannical influence of scorekeepers and sponsors. But inside three years, those same influences overtook FMX. He’d long used self-destruction to rebel against constraining authorities, like his father and his sponsors, but when those rebellious displays became part of a family-friendly commodity, Link could only amplify his high-profile seppuku, devolving into prescription drug abuse and naked thuggery.

Through it all, Link remains blind to the ways he creates the situation he deplores. By undermining himself, while vigorously courting audience approval, he unconsciously channels other infamous kamikaze celebrities, like GG Allin and John Belushi, who commodified their own death spirals. His implosion morphs into a billboard. Link’s prose suggests he still doesn’t realize the role he played. One wonders if his ghost writer, Joe Layden, perhaps enhances the dramatic irony behind Link’s back.

Yet even as he excoriates the money and stardom that warped his sport, and justified his implosion, Link demonstrates a remarkable natural talent for business. He and his partners parley their antics into free publicity for the Metal Mulisha, making themselves stars and their brand a mark of militant authenticity. One wonders whether Link realizes, behind the haze of Vicodin and guns, that he’s covertly become the thing he despises.

Link’s memoir brashly refuses to be touching, uplifting, or any other adjective reviewers indiscriminately apply to self-immolation accounts. Yet his macho posturing often cracks, revealing surprising corners even he probably hasn’t noticed. Link exists on two planes: the recovering abuser who reclaims his peak achievements, and an anti-hero blind to his own destructive wake. This makes his slow decay strangely appealing, if not sympathetic.

Resisting the Nazis From a Bicycle Saddle

Aili and Andres McConnon, Road to Valor: A True Story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation

At his prime, Italian cyclist Gino Bartali was most famous for winning the Tour de France in 1938 and 1948, the longest gap ever between Tour wins. In the struggle to rebuild democratic Italy after World War II, his victory helped unify the country when struggles between centrist Catholics and the Communist Party almost caused a civil war. Though unknown globally, he remains one of his nation’s icons of sportsmanship.

Only decades later did the world discover how Bartali used his fame and athletics to aid Italian Jews facing systematic persecution during the German occupation. Who better than a renowned cyclist, wanting to keep in shape, to convey sensitive documents and fake ID long distances? And when you want to distract the SS and Polizia from a train smuggling Jews across enemy lines, a sports celebrity can keep all eyes away from the refugees.

Siblings Aili and Andres McConnon reconstruct Bartali’s rise and heyday, from poor roots in an mountain village. At a time when most sports were the exclusive domain of rich sybarites, cycling was refreshingly egalitarian. With only a sixth grade education, Bartali worked for a local bike repairman, learning make-do maintenance skills that would serve him on the professional circuit, saving to buy the secondhand bike that changed his life.

But riding wasn’t a value neutral activity in Bartali’s youth. With the country under the heel of Benito Mussolini, the Fascists used athletes as propaganda instruments. They wanted to reawaken a perceived warrior spirit they believed Italy had lost. The rising star’s every victory got turned into a poster. Bartali, raised by a strict Catholic father to distrust Fascist power, found himself trapped in a monster he couldn’t resist.

So Bartali offered a perfect response: he ignored the machine he was forbidden to criticize. After his first Tour victory, he thanked everybody except Mussolini and the Fascist regime. You can imagine how Il Duce took that slight. But as the “poor boy made good” narrative took Italian fanatics by storm, the state found itself with only one way to silence Bartali: it drafted him, cancelled Italian races, and stopped international sports.

Like that would stop a True Believer. Bartali became Italy’s most famous (or infamous) deserter. And he came under the increasing influence of Cardinal Elia Della Costa, archbishop of Florence. Della Costa taught Bartali how to dance the fine line between law and conscience, and brought him into the conspiracy to rescue Jews from the encroaching machine. To this day we don’t know Bartali’s true contribution to this act of far-reaching heroism.

The McConnons go beyond retelling the story. They are no mere journalists, content to recount the facts of the case. They delve into the emotions behind the circumstances; the history behind seemingly unrelated events; the risk that these heroes took resisting a powerful, intolerant state. Many people involved in Bartali’s story, including his wife and several former teammates, are still alive, and the McConnons interviewed them, conveying their first-hand urgency.

The war put Bartali through serious turmoil. With all the races, and their attendant prize money, on hiatus for several years, he struggled to feed his growing family. His resistance activities nearly cost him his life, including one occasion when his sports heroism couldn’t even save him. Only brief twists of fate kept him off the train bound for Auschwitz. Yet he kept up the fight, because his Catholic faith told him it was right.

He also kept his secrets. Even his wife didn’t know about his heroic interventions until well after the war. Nazi resisters like Bartali often had to work in the dark, and few records were ever kept; even fewer survive. Therefore, we only know as much as survivors tell us, and Bartali said little. In a turn of humility that would seem alien to today’s glory-hungry athletes, he refused to let his sports celebrity take anything from the people he considered the real heroes.

Bartali could have traded on his war heroism. Catholic centrists tried to make him their poster boy after the war, but he refused. Instead, he electrified Italy, and the world, with a come-from-behind Tour victory. This man, prematurely aged by the war, older than nearly any other Tour winner ever, overcame a crushing handicap to win by one of the largest leads ever. Sort of a symbol for postwar Italy, really.

The McConnons brew an exciting stew of sports, history, conspiracy politics, and the war that redefined the modern world. Their narrative holds on tight and brings readers on an emotional ride you won’t forget soon.