These kids represent who i was as a child. But he’s always coming back to his family and his students in Brooklyn. Now, for almost 30 years, he’s passed along his passion for the sport to younger generations.įor Ashley, have chessboard, will travel. “By being able to hang around those guys, they were older than me, and they were able to take me under their wing and talk to me about life beyond the chessboard as well.” And they played chess like rabbinical students studying the Torah.” “There was a group of African-American men who called themselves the black bear school. “I never made my high school chess team,” Ashley says. But his chess education extended far beyond school walls. He learned to love the game while at Brooklyn Tech High School and then City College. But within a couple of years, I was lucky enough to find chess.” It made for a very difficult transition from Jamaica to here. The drugs, the violence on the streets, that was just obvious. “We lived in poverty in Jamaica, but it was just different here. And yeah, that illusion got busted pretty quickly,” he says. Then, I ended up in Brownsville, Brooklyn. “When I first came to Brooklyn, I thought I was going to live in a penthouse apartment with a pool on the roof. He was 12 when he and his two siblings joined his mother in New York. “To see a chess board sitting on a table that’s uneven, the pieces are barely standing up as the kids try to play, it’s heartbreaking to see that kind of poverty, but it’s also uplifting to know that chess can be a potential ticket out,” Ashley says.įor 10 years, Ashley was raised primarily by his grandmother on the island of Jamaica while his mother was working here. And that’s normal.”Īshley’s passion has taken him all over the world, last year visiting nine countries, including South Africa, Kenya and Madagascar. There’d either be some hip hop on, some jazz. “Definitely the trash talking is trying to have a good time, but also to get inside your head,” Ashley says. It was included in a show called The Tim Ferriss Experiment and has gotten more than 2 million views on You Tube. So once I got to doing commentary, I just took it over to the same thing.”Īshley’s street cred is clear in a video shot in Washington Square Park – hustling a chess hustler, good-naturedly, of course. “So I knew what it was like for chess to be dynamic, for it to not be quiet, for there to be a whole lot of aggression and braggadocio and fun. There was trash talking all the time,” Ashley says. “I grew up playing chess in the parks in Brooklyn. He channels the chess environments of his youth. I’m in the middle of a match and, ‘Boom, this guy is going to die.'”
“People have to tell me that I make a certain sound. “When I do commentary, I don’t even know what I’m saying,” he says. I first met Maurice Ashley in 1994 while he was doing television commentary for a tournament at the Javits Center. I just put down the chess board and talk to the kids about having a good time, and the kids just eat it up.” “And people tell me, well, what are your major obstacles? There are none. It has this magic that makes it easy to teach,” he says. There is a sense of excitement around Ashley, like at the recent Maurice Ashley Chess Challenge in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. In 1999, Ashley became the first African-American to become an international chess grandmaster, an accomplishment not lost on young chess lovers, especially in New York. There are consequences to every single thing that you do.” “And there are so many life lessons that you take from the game.
#MAURICE ASHLEY VS TRASH TALKER WITH BOARD HOW TO#
“The main reason why I teach chess is to teach kids how to think more effectively,” he says. That’s where you’ll find him most days, introducing chess at the Wynn PAL site in Bedford-Stuyvesant and teaching chess at Automotive High School in Greenpoint. or I’m at a tournament with the best players on the planet doing commentary, or I’m here in Brooklyn in a classroom teaching chess.”Īshley learned the game growing up in Brooklyn. “I’m either organizing a million-dollar tournament, or I’m in Africa meeting with folks there trying to bring chess to an impoverished place in the world. A pied piper who has charted a unique course to chess stardom. The first African-American inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. An entrepreneur who has organized the first million-dollar chess tournament.
Who is this man, outsmarting the chess hustler in Washington Square Park? Budd Mishkin filed the following One on 1 profile. He’s played, coached, taught, created tournaments, done play-by-play for tournaments and traveled the world, preaching the gospel of his beloved game. It’s hard to name something that Maurice Ashley hasn’t done in the world of chess.
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