Success Through Chess
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel my student churches were two adjacent wooden churches in the inner suburbs of Newmarket in Melbourne. For seven years, during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the people in the slum areas were the people of my parish. I was a very junior minister, a student minister continuing after I was ordained. Those people in the narrow, dingy, dark and damp little wooden slum houses were the people who taught me how to be a minister.
One of the people who taught me was a young lad, Tim Maitre De. Young Tim was an awkward customer and his background story is of great interest. What happened since has been a matter of great encouragement for me.
His mother and father did not really belong in our area. His father was a manager and managers did not live in our area. But they had lived there for years. He had received promotion over the years and the first thing that people did when they received promotion was to move out of our area. But Ruth and Alan belonged to our area and they stayed with us in Newmarket. It was their intention some time to upgrade, to move out to one of the outer suburbs, to buy a nicer home, a brick house with a garage and all those other things that people there had, but right now they just lived here; a happily married couple with their two children, Helen, a very attractive and vivacious young girl, and the youngest, Tim, who was everything his sister was not.
Helen was attractive, outgoing and extrovert. A delightful young girl. Young Tim, introverted, quiet, withdrawn. He related badly with other children in the area and seemed not to be interested in relating with anybody, good or bad. He was just a loner.
We got young Tim to come to our Sunday School. His attendance was always regular and he was always polite, but he would not give an extra word. He would not give an extra moment of his time to anybody else. He did not relate with other young children in the area and seemed to live in a world inside himself. His father was a fairly decent sort of fellow but rather retiring, rather quiet. Yet by dint of hard work he had received a number of promotions and so was now in a position of management.
At the very time when the family began to have some status in the community because of Dad’s upward mobility and some income coming to them because of his higher pay, he suddenly died. The impact of that father’s death was rather traumatic. Of course, death always comes quickly but it seemed that death had come to a man full of health, vitality and vigour. It just seemed impossible that Alan should be dead. But there he was when Ruth awoke one morning, in bed, dead.
The impact of that swept through the little church. I remember going to visit them. The children were terribly upset. Helen was full of tears, sobbing out loud, absolutely inconsolable. Ruth herself just did not know where to turn. And young Timmy? Timmy just stared into space in silence. I knew inside he was hurting terribly. The young lad who was a loner was more alone now than ever.
The impact of the father’s death over the next few weeks affected us all. I buried him, and then called back to the family regularly over the next few weeks to see if I could help them adjust to grief. Ruth, as a new widow, was struggling, coming to grips with her situation, not knowing what to do about money or the house. Eventually she began to adapt and became quite mature in the way she handled the situation.
Young Helen? She became very close to her mother.
But Timmy? He was close to no one. He missed his father dreadfully, and now he was unable to relate either with his sister or his mother or anybody else. He was just a boy withdrawn even more so into himself.
As I used to drive around the area on my motor bike I would often see him walking along the street. He walked with his head held unusually high for a boy. But even though his head was held high he never saw people. He never spoke to people. I used to give him a ‘toot’ from the motor bike and a wave and he would not see me. I would pull the motor bike up quite close to him. He would jump as if I had startled him. When I spoke to him he would actually speak, then pass by.
I determined I had to find some way of getting through this lad’s shell if we were to help him. One day watching him walk down the street I walked directly in line so that he would have to bump into me. He did not see me until the last moment. He was withdrawn and silent. I stopped. I held his arm so that he could not keep walking. I asked him about school, about hobbies, about interests. He answered me in a surly fashion, only one word at a time. He gave polite but very distant comments.
I asked him about hobbies. He did not have any. I asked him about sport. He did not have any interest. I asked him about how he was getting on at home. He had no comment to make. I asked him about friends. He had none.
I eventually had to let him go. He walked by, and up the street. I turned and looked at him, the unusual young fellow living in a world of his own. All I knew was that he was heading into some kind of trouble, the sort of trouble that these loners get into, and I wondered if I could head it off before it actually happened.
Most of the kids that got into trouble in our area were very open about their trouble. There were some who were charged by the police for arson. There were some who had stolen cars. There were some who had broken into factories and houses. Eventually they all came to me on probation. I knew all of the kids in the area who were in trouble. But here was a boy who was getting into trouble through doing nothing – just being an isolated, lone person. I wondered how I could get through to young Tim.
At that time there was a growing interest around the world in world championship chess. It was at the time of the Cold War between Russia and the United States of America. Some Grand Chess Champion from the Soviet Union with the unlikely name of Boris Karloff, or something like that, was playing an American champion. This was just before the time of Bobby Fischer, but the atmosphere was quite electric. It made me think about chess. It made me think if I could teach myself chess. That in turn made me think of the brooding young Timmy.
The next time I saw him in the street I stopped him and said, “Tim. Have you ever learnt to play chess?” It was like striking a match in a dark room. “Yes” he said. I saw some light in his eyes for the first time. “I taught myself to play chess and I often play chess with myself.” I said to him with a smile “Who wins?” and he said “Oh sometimes I let myself win, sometimes I let my other self win.” I said to him “Timmy, I would love to play chess. Could you teach me to play chess?” “Oh it is quite simple”, he said. I suddenly realised I was having the longest conversation I had ever had with him. I had found the magic key which opened the door into his inner life.
I bought myself a yellow backed book entitled “Teach Yourself Chess”. I began to swot up on it. I bought a chess set and then asked Tim if he would come up to my study and teach me how to play. I suddenly realised that this quiet, withdrawn young fellow was able to move chess pieces around the board with great rapidity. While I was stumbling through thinking what my next moves were, he had the five, six, moves ahead of me all worked out in his head. I invited him to show me some more advanced moves. I very quickly began to pick up the intricacies of that delightful game.
I then asked if he would come in after school each night and give me a lesson. To be perfectly frank I had much more to do with my time, but I had suddenly discovered a key which would open a young man’s hurting inner life. He came in, silent and brooding, each night. But he quickly moved some pieces on a chess board, told me why my moves were inadequate, showed me how to make better moves, and then walked out in silence. There were no other words spoken. I could not get him to communicate on anything else. But every night for a short fifteen minutes, or perhaps twenty minutes, he would teach me some other moves.
I then got the idea of having a competition with him. Of course I could not play at his rapidity so we made it a rule that I would leave the chess board set up in my home just inside the door and I would make one move. The next night after school he would walk in, see the move, look at it and make his countering move. I had another 24 hours in which to consider what move to make. Then I would move it some time during the day or night. The following day he would come in, see what I had done, then make another move.
You might think that this chess game would go on for months. You would be quite correct. It did. But can you see the object was not even to finish the game as far as I was concerned, much less trying to defeat him. The object was to try to reach a lone boy inside himself.
Gradually I began to get through to him. I asked him why it was that I had made such a stupid move and he would explain to me the inadequacy of my thinking. I would then ask him a better way to make the move and he would show me how to think ahead. Gradually I began to ask other questions: Would he like a dog? Would he be interested in pets? Who was going to teach him to drive in a year or two? What did he do with his life when he was not at home and was not at school? Did he have any future plans about how to spend his life?
After a period of months we moved into a relationship where I was able to counsel the lad. That lad had psychological problems and he had not yet learnt to grieve. He told me one day that he had not shed a tear over his father’s death, either at the time or ever since. I began to relate with that lad closer and closer. On one occasion I deliberately put my hand around his shoulder. He shrank from me. He did not want to be touched. He could not stand to be touched. I began to realize that this lad needed people.
The breakthrough came after a delightful game when he won the chess competition. It had gone on for weeks and now, triumphant, he was smirking to himself. My improved game was still not good enough. At that time I rejoiced at his victory. I shook his hand. I slapped him on the back and in so doing, quite instinctively put my arm around his shoulder and hugged him, saying what a great player he was. What a fine mind he had. How he was the best chess player …
All of a sudden he burst into tears. He sobbed and sobbed. I began to talk about his father, about his inability to grieve over his father, about his mother, about his sister, about his future. In tears he began to talk to me in a torrent of words. That session lasted a long time. At the end of that time he had talked himself out and I felt I had got down to a new level. I told him about Jesus Christ who was a friend who would be with him through his life and make all the difference. For the first time he said he really understood Jesus and he understood God’s love for him as a person.
It was not long after that in a Sunday evening service while I was preaching, calling people to make commitments to Jesus, that young Timmy Maitre De came forward and made a commitment to Jesus Christ. I went through some simple Christian discipleship training programmes. He knew now what it was to be a Christian. He knew what it was to be a follower of Jesus Christ. He became a convicted Christian. I baptised him, and welcomed him into the membership of the church. Over the next few years I saw him grow as a Christian and become an outgoing, warm, friendly personality.
I then left the district. His mother shifted and Tim and Helen shifted with her and I lost contact with him. Years went by. I saw him no more until one day at Wesley Mission Sydney, I received an invitation. Would I care to go to the University of Sydney? A new chaplain was being inducted into ministry. It was my old friend Tim, now a graduate minister and a chaplain to students. He wrote with it a beautiful letter in which he looked back to those days of playing chess together and acknowledged how, in his rather strung up and very difficult life, I had broken through with him using a rook, a pawn and a bishop.
I never thought that would be the end of the story when the night came after my first meeting following his father’s death and I put on my motor bike leathers, helmet and gloves and got onto the big, black BSA 500 and headed back to the College of the Bible to train as a young minister thinking of my meeting with some of God’s children in Newmarket.
GORDON MOYES
