Game Over 
Check Mates
Following in the footsteps of sports greatest rivals, two world-class chess players from Brownsville have been battling each other since kindergarten. They’ve both won state and national championships. They’re both ranked in the top five in the country. And they’re both in the fourth grade.
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Paredes Elementary was an appropriate venue for the esteemed gathering, having become a chess powerhouse since the school opened in 2001, with four top-five national titles and four top-ten state titles under its belt—one reason why Spada transferred there last fall. Ten percent of the student body is involved in chess in some way, as can be noted when cruising the halls. Below one self-portrait, a boy named Andrew had written that he fears bees and wasps, never gives up, does well at chess, and wants to be a tornado chaser. The handmade poster for a girl named Samanta, who is eight years old, states that she was born in Querétaro, Mexico; she loves God, her family, and her teacher; she likes to dance, decorate, and play chess. The library looks like a prize factory, with four-foot-tall trophies creating a blinding golden sheen across the tops of the bookshelves.
The principal, Jay Harris, towered over the children and tousled their hair as they scurried past. “Welcome to chaos!” he said. Harris seemed at a loss to explain the kids’ success. “None of us adults can play,” he said with a shrug. “These kids are self-taught, or their brothers and sisters teach them.” Certainly, expensive private tutors weren’t the explanation. “Our school here includes one of the poorest barrios, Cameron Park,” he said. “Some families belong to the Brownsville Country Club, but in general, over ninety percent of our kids are poor.” Because of the level of poverty, only 60 percent of the Brownsville kids who were participating at this event will travel to the state tournament in Dallas March 17 and 18, considered more prestigious for its broader categories of play, despite the tough competition left behind in the Valley.
At the end of the day on Saturday, both boys had beaten their opponents in four rounds of matches, a fact that didn’t calm the nerves of Spada Senior. “The trouble here is getting cocky,” he told his son. “Don’t play the rating. Play the game.”
“Mendez isn’t doing so well,” his son said with a Cheshire grin. “He’s winning, but just barely.”
“Oh, ya!” Spada Senior said, poking his son in the stomach with a tickling finger. “I’m sure.”
Fernandito had a tendency to “blank out” when he got nervous, but a mantra fed his sense of self-assurance, shoring up his reserves before going to battle: “I beat Mendez before, and I can beat him again.”
ON SUNDAY, just before the decisive match between the Fernandos, Mendez was in a small classroom visiting with chess mates from his team. Like the other kids from his school, he wore a mandarin-orange T-shirt emblazoned with the name of his elementary school, Garden Park, in dark capital letters. To set himself apart from the pack, however, he wore a burnt-orange long-sleeved Longhorns shirt underneath, a sporty look punctuated by a dark-green baseball cap. He was intense, as usual, sucking down the nectar from a bottle of  Mountain Dew. Whatever longings or misgivings he had were guarded safely somewhere down deep. “I’m nervous” was all he said before darting down the hall to the cafeteria-turned-tournament-room.
At ten o’clock, the director and a handful of staffers in red T-shirts who had been milling around shooed all the parents out of the cafeteria, and the games began, leaving the room of more than three hundred pairs of players totally silent save for the chinking of plastic pieces and the occasional squeal of folding chairs against the white tile floor. At the far end of the room, fluorescent lights illuminated the gold-and-blue trophies of varying heights arranged on the stage, reflecting a gilded brilliance that shimmered like coins in the pot at the end of a rainbow. Stage left, a painted portrait of Brownsville’s native son Américo Paredes, sporting a black beret, looked on.
Whatever trepidation Mendez felt manifested itself in his blue-and-silver Sketchers, jiggling out of control as he sat down at the game board opposite Spada. Spada’s freshly washed hair was still wet, and he glanced up only once in a while to see if Mendez was looking at him. He wasn’t.
Mendez had first move over Spada, and play commenced under vigilant time supervision provided by special digital chess clocks that counted down the remaining seconds. Not that all children felt under the gun. Though the students were allowed an hour of play each, kids who had finished their games began leaving the room within the first twenty minutes. As tiny kings began tumbling left and right, the winners raised their hands, and tournament staffers confirmed the results, then wrote the scores on a small piece of paper to be given to the record keeper. Whenever the doors to the hallway opened, a crowd of parents would crane their necks to see inside.
Mendez and Spada kept their eyes on the board. After 25 minutes Mendez advanced his queen, a move that caused Spada to appear ill. He hesitated to write down the move on his chess notepad before advancing a pawn. Mendez began blinking quickly, as if spurring himself on to think about the pawn approaching, but when Spada looked up at his opponent, he could see little underneath the brim of Mendez’s cap.
Forty minutes into the game, half of the participants had cleared out. Mendez made a move called “castling” early, and it was serving him well to protect his king, but Spada hadn’t been so lucky. His king was standing all alone, helpless as it surveyed the oncoming onslaught. Fifteen minutes later, after the queens had been exterminated, Mendez moved his knight within trampling distance of Spada’s king and said quietly, “Check.”
Spada didn’t flinch as he pulled back his king. Even as Mendez’s aggressive moves quickened the pace of the game, Spada remained composed to the final decisive stroke, when Mendez slid his rook across the board to checkmate Spada’s lonely king. Afterward, conceding defeat immediately, Spada knocked over his own king without saying a word.
As Spada began to pack the board, Mendez, slinking away, looked at him for the first time. “Good game,” Mendez whispered as he left the table. When Spada opened the tournament room doors and spotted Claudia front and center, ready to hug her son, he was able to hold it together only till the moment she cooed, “Don’t cry.”
Back in Mendez’s group room, the small participants in their orange shirts gathered around Mendez to hear him recount the game. He suddenly seemed as comfortable as an NFL player on Monday Night Football. “I made a mistake right away in the second move: knight f3,” he said. “I was supposed to move it to c3. That’s my opening. But I moved to f3 by accident. That made me nervous because it begins an open Sicilian game, and I have been playing closed Sicilian since second or third grade. I think it caught him off guard. He made a little bit of a mistake, and I got a free pawn. He couldn’t take the pawn back because he was being attacked by another piece, and somewhere around the end he made another mistake and I got a free piece. The piece and the pawn were too much to recover. My rook came over to his territory—he had a wide-open file—so I checked him and came back with my rook and pinned him.”
Spada didn’t take long to gain his composure. In the hallway a few hours later, he slapped himself on the forehead as he laughed and explained, “I blanked out! That’s always what happens when I play against him. The last time I played him in state he played knight c3, and I know what to do against that. But knight f3? I know how to play it, but I had prepared for knight c3! All that practice for nothing!”
WHEN THE WINNERS’ names were announced that afternoon in the crowded cafeteria, the students roared and pounded their fists on the table. Mendez raced up to the stage to accept a trophy that was almost as tall as he was, holding it by both bottom rungs while the camera flashes sparked, the slightest trace of a pursed-lipped smile on his face. Though the match he played after his victory over Spada had ended in a draw, he finished half a point ahead of the others—enough for victory. This was, most likely, the last chess tournament he’d play for a while. He’d participate in major tournaments, but his dad said he wanted Fernandito to become more well-rounded. “I don’t see chess as a career,” he said. “It’s too time-consuming. I’ll always have him play, but more limited.”
Spada had caught wind of this rumor and seemed torn at the prospect of losing his rival. Spada may not have wanted to pursue a career in chess either, but he did want to become a master in the next few years, and no other children in his area propelled him to study like Mendez. “Only adults like Daniel,” he said, sadly. “That’s bad for me. He’s not going to play chess; he’s going to play football?” Without all the practice and tournaments, the Fernandos might not be on equal footing for long, and as Spada considered a world without a nemesis, he grew wistful.
Finally, he perked up. “I suppose it’s okay,” he said with a sigh. “There’s a kid my age from Plano—Darwin Yang is his name.” Yang had played Spada in the past, but that was before his rating had skyrocketed to 1981, giving him a solid chance to beat either Fernando. After reflecting on his new rival’s standing, Spada straightened up. With a smile on his face, he looked coyly out of the corners of his eyes, and his confidence bubbled inside of him. “I hear he’s afraid of me,” he said.
My Library
