I've been seeing ads for an upcoming TV Movie on A&E called Knights of the South Bronx, starring Ted Danson. It's about a guy named David MacEnulty who was the coach of my junior high school chess team for a time. The movie is about how a business man was inspired to teach chess to 'inner city kids' in the titular neighborhood and give them a chance at some sort of greater success. Our school was on 107th Street in Manhattan, and while there were underprivileged kids there, none of them were on the chess team. We were in a gifted and talented program that was essentially its own school within the larger one. So I doubt the movie is about us.

The thing I remember most about MacEnulty was a day when, to make some point, he sat us all down around one side of a chess board with him on the other side. He asked us all to "suggest a move" for our side. Quickly seeing the absurdity of playing chess by committee, we started making the wackiest first moves imaginable, none of which are all that wacky--I'm sure some Grand Master has played each of them at least once for the hell of it. He asked us to stop being silly and I guess we pushed it too far and he just walked out of the room and didn't come back that day. When our parents found out they made us apologize to him, and he returned to being our coach, but I don't think he taught us for any more than a year, if that long.

Our team was a scrappy bunch. We were proud of holding our own in state and national tournaments against schools like Hunter and Dalton, about which we heard tales of recruiting programs, as if elementary school chess were college football. In retrospect I don't know if the results we got justified our attitude, but we certainly had some triumphs.

When we started we were at P.S. 9, and our team name was the Knights of Nine. When most of us went on to I.S. 54, we often joked that we'd have to become the Knights of Nine Times Six. I don't know if anyone outside the team ever would've gotten that, but surely it was better than what we ended up with: "Equites," Latin for 'knights.' When we printed our team T-shirts the name was in a Roman-style font like the one used on the Museum of Natural History facade, meaning that "EQUITES" looked a lot like "EQVITES." Whenever we had those shirts on at tournaments we had to endure the question "What's ekveits?"