Journey to the National Master Title, Part 3

The March 12, 2023 East Market Swiss will always be one of the most special tournaments of my chess career. That is not because I shared first place, but rather because it was my eight year old daughter Rachel Sophia's first rated tournament. I taught Rachel how to set up the pieces when she was two years old, and she learned the basic rules well enough to play a chess game before she was three years old, but up until this point she had been more interested in playing casual games than in playing tournament games. A while ago, I explained to her the differences between tournament chess and casual chess, and I left it up to her to decide if/when she would like to play in a rated tournament.

I showed the East Market to Rachel during FaceTime, and perhaps seeing the playing site in advance helped her decide to take the plunge. I told Rachel that I lost all five games in my first rated tournament, so the goal at the beginning is to have fun and learn as opposed to focusing on the final result. Rachel is probably better at enjoying a game without focusing on the final result than I am anyway, so she may not have even needed that message!

Rachel's only concern about playing rated chess is that it is difficult for her to both record the moves and use the clock (she is fully capable of doing both, but prefers not to do both during the same game). I understand that there are two valid perspectives about this: one perspective is that a child should wait to play tournament chess until the child is able to follow all of the tournament rules, while the other perspective is that the value of early immersion in the tournament environment is more important than writing down the moves. I have been both a player and a coach, and my perspective is that this should be dealt with on a case by case basis with young children. The reality is that most young children who keep score produce scoresheets that are riddled with inaccuracies and missing moves, so unless a child is already proficient at keeping score I think it is more beneficial to practice that skill in between tournaments, and to use tournaments as an opportunity to practice playing skills and clock management "under fire." Rachel is eight years old and the East Market Swiss is not a national championship or a FIDE rated event, so from my perspective Rachel is sufficiently prepared because she knows the rules of tournament chess and can play a game with a clock without any assistance. However, I checked with East Market tournament director Lou Friscoe before the event to make sure that he would be OK with Rachel not keeping notation, and he said that would be fine. 

Rachel lost her first two rated games, but her round three game was a long battle in which both sides had winning chances. Rachel won after noticing that her opponent had run out of time. She politely pointed this out to tournament director Lou Friscoe, who declared Rachel the winner because she still had sufficient checkmating material left on the board. Rachel lost her fourth round game, but overall we both enjoyed the whole day's experience, from listening to music during the car ride to East Market to having pizza for lunch at East Market to playing video games between rounds to going to Book Loft after the tournament ended. All of Rachel's opponents were gracious, and each provided me with a copy of his scoresheet (which matters more to me than Rachel now, but may be significant to Rachel later if she becomes interested in going over her games or just looking back on how she played during her first rated games). Rachel's four game provisional rating is 685.

             Rachel and I enjoyed the 3/12/23 East Market Swiss

 

Playing tournament games while also wondering how Rachel is doing is a new experience for me. The end result--three straight wins followed by a last round draw with the second seeded player--was good, but I had some concentration lapses at times. I was the top seeded player, so even a 4-0 performance would not have netted a large rating point gain, but winning the tournament and gaining three points while Rachel also won a game is about the best that I could have expected.

I played in two other over the board chess tournaments since I wrote Journey to the National Master Title, Part 2, scoring 3/4 in the February 26, 2023 East Market Swiss to tie for third place while losing three rating points, and scoring 3/4 in the February 18, 2023 G/45 Open (in Columbus) to tie for second place while gaining five rating points. Overall, I scored eight wins, one loss, and three draws in those three tournaments, with one first place finish. With a rating of 2013 after these three events, I need to gain 187 points to reach my goal.  

In 2023, I have scored 22 wins, seven draws, and four losses in regular rated tournament games with four first place finishes in nine events--but two losses to players rated below 1700 were costly, and as a result my net rating gain for 2023 is just one point so far. The good news is that my official rating supplement rating has been above 2000 each month since April 2022, my longest such streak since 2017; I have established a beachhead above 2000, and the next step is to surpass the 2100 level.

Jim Boeheim's 47 Season Syracuse Coaching Career Ends Unceremoniously

Jim Boeheim's Syracuse coaching career is over. The circumstances surrounding his departure are bizarre and murky, but it is clear that he will not be returning because the university issued a statement noting that Associate Head Coach Adrian Autry will be Syracuse's coach next season without indicating if Boeheim retired, if the parties mutually decided that Boeheim would not return, or if Syracuse fired Boeheim without wanting to say so explicitly (it is also not clear why the statement capitalized "Associate Head Coach" but did not capitalize coach).

At a press conference after Wake Forest beat Syracuse 77-74 in the ACC Tournament, Boeheim stubbornly refused to answer a simple question: Is he retiring or not? Boeheim said that whether or not he retires "is up to the university." That is not how retirement works; that is how firing works: the employee decides whether or not to retire, while the employer decides whether or not to fire the employee. Boeheim also said, "I gave my retirement speech last week and nobody picked up on it." 

One gets the impression that Boeheim did not want to leave and Syracuse did not want to admit to firing him, so the parties are just acknowledging the breakup without applying a label to it. I cannot recall another coach of Boeheim's prominence whose coaching career ended in such a disjointed fashion; there have been successful coaches who received a farewell tour and there have been successful coaches who were fired after sticking around too long, but it is unusual for a successful coach to just abruptly disappear while hinting that he is not ready to go.

Before Boeheim became a coach, he played for Syracuse alongside future Hall of Famer Dave Bing, who told me, "Jimmy was one of those players who was just totally underrated. He came to Syracuse as a non-scholarship player and he did not get a scholarship until his sophomore year. We roomed together as sophomores and juniors and became very good friends and talked basketball quite a bit. It was evident to me way back then that Jimmy would become a good coach. He was a steady player. He was smart in that he knew how to get open and he was a good shooter. Whenever I drove to the basket he was smart enough to get to the open spot and he could put it down. He had a very good senior year."

Boeheim was inducted in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach in 2005, two years after he won his first and only national championship with a squad headlined by Carmelo Anthony. Boeheim led Syracuse to the Final Four five times in four different decades (1987, 1996, 2003, 2013, 2016). He posted a 1015-441 record, ranking second all-time on the Division I wins list behind Mike Krzyzewski. Boeheim played a significant role in the Big East's emergence as a dominant college basketball conference in the 1980s, and he later served as an assistant coach for Team USA's Olympic gold medal winning teams in 2008, 2012, and 2016. 

However, there is a less glamorous side to sustained high level success in college sports. Danny Tarkanian, an attorney and the son of Hall of Fame coach Jerry Tarkanian, insists that it is not possible to have great success at the top level of college basketball while running a clean program, as I discussed in my review of his book Rebel With a Cause: The True Story of Jerry Tarkanian:

He asserts that no current big-time collegiate sports program can survive without violating the NCAA's rules, quoting former American University Coach Ed Tapscott (p. 112): "The crime in the NCAA is not in breaking the rules. It's in getting caught. We have our own MAD--Mutually Assured Destruction. There's a threshold of dirty linen we can all build up, and know that all of us agree tacitly not to disclose it. Because none of us could succeed without breaking the rules."

Sam Gilbert, a so-called "booster," provided a host of improper/illegal benefits to UCLA's basketball players from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, during which time Coach John Wooden led UCLA to an unprecedented run of 10 championships in a 12 year span, including seven in a row (1967-73). The NCAA did not take any action against UCLA during Wooden's run of championships, but in 1981--long after Wooden had retired, and after the Los Angeles Times conducted an in depth investigation--the NCAA determined that UCLA had committed over a decade's worth of violations. The NCAA did not vacate any of Wooden's championships, but only vacated UCLA's 1980 Final Four run, while also placing the basketball team on probation for two years. Coach Wooden denied having knowledge of Gilbert's activities, and it was never proven that Coach Wooden knew, but Coach Wooden also admitted that during that time he had "tunnel vision" and "trusted too much."

In 2015, Boeheim joined the long list of coaches punished by the NCAA for violating NCCA rules. The NCAA suspended Boeheim for nine games, and vacated 101 of his wins from 2004-2012. That is the third most wins ever vacated for a single school.

An even more disturbing scandal involving the Syracuse basketball program became public knowledge in 2011. Bernie Fine, Boeheim's right hand man for 36 years, was not criminally charged, but credible allegations of child abuse cost him his job at Syracuse. In a recorded conversation with former Syracuse ball boy (and Bernie Fine accuser) Bobby Davis, Fine's wife Laurie indicated that she knew that her husband's behavior with minors had been inappropriate. Boeheim publicly defended and excused Fine well past the point that it was acceptable or reasonable to do so, to the extent that two of Fine's accusers sued Boeheim and Syracuse for slander. Before the case proceeded to trial, Boeheim and Syracuse paid an undisclosed settlement to resolve the matter, with the university issuing this statement: "Coach Boeheim regrets that he made those statements and that he questioned the integrity of Bobby Davis and Michael Lang. Since then, he has publicly committed to focus his charitable efforts on providing assistance to victims of sexual abuse, which he continues to do. We are glad to announce that we have resolved the defamation case that Mr. Davis and Mr. Lang brought, and look forward to putting this behind us."

On February 20, 2019, Boeheim drove a car that struck and killed Jorge Jimenez, who had been standing at the side of the road next to a disabled car. Boeheim had been speeding on an icy road prior to the fatal accident, but after a police investigation the authorities declined to press charges against Boeheim. In 2020, the Jimenez estate filed a civil suit against Boeheim and Syracuse, alleging that Boeheim's negligent driving caused Jimenez' death. I found no public record of that case being resolved yet.

Boeheim's fans will understandably focus on Syracuse's 2003 NCAA title and nearly five decades of sustained on court success, but there are other aspects of Boeheim's career and life story that do not get nearly as much attention as the shortcomings exhibited by other similarly prominent figures who are regularly excoriated by media members who specialize in practicing selective outrage.