A Blast From The Past

THE US ARMED FORCES OPEN: A Blast From The Past
By Zachary Z. Kinney, Major, USAF, JAG Ret., US Military Chess Historian

The great African American Historian, John Hope Franklin, once said, that” those who refuse to heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its failures…” So it is written, so let it be done. As we approach the 50th Anniversary of the US Armed Forces Open Chess Championship on 9-11 October 2010 at Andrews AFB, Maryland, let us learn from the rich history of this event and use it to make US Armed Forces Chess a past,present and future success story.

When Colonel John D. Mathas and Thomas Emory, the co-founding fathers of the US Armed Forces Chess Championship joined forces in 1958-1959 to create what would later become the US Armed Forces Chess Championship (USAFCC) in 1960, they realized from the beginning that getting a USAFCC was going to be an uphill battle and an eternal struggle. The Pentagon leadership and the US Department of Defense (DoD) from the word go dealt with the USAFCC at arms length. First the DoD would provide luke warm support for the USAFCC and then it would retreat and go back and forth. Eventually, Thomas Emory passed away leaving Colonel Mathias with the sole task of selling the USAFCC to the DoD and cementing it for the future. Ultimately, Mathas succeeded in getting the USAFCC institutionalized and DoD endorsement from 1961-1967 but then the DoD backed away from supporting the USAFCC. Mathas fought so hard to get the DoD on board and then had to fight again to bring the DoD back into the fold that it gave him a stomach ulcer and he would later stop fighting because of failing health.

Eventually, the DoD came back into the fold in 1969 and continued to support the USAFCC until 1990. And then, once again, the DoD backed away from supporting the USAFCC. The DoD would later return its support in 2002. Now rumors in 2009 and in 2010 indicate that the DoD and the service branches are again backing away from and are at best extending luke warm support to the USAFCC which was renamed the Inter Service Chess Championship (ISCC) in 2002. Mathas and Emory if they were here today would rally the troops and push them to keep the pressure on the DoD and the service branches to continue its support for the USAFCC. The USAFCC can never be allowed to die. The USAFCC and the ISCC are legitimate military institutions. After all, chess belongs to the military. The military is its birth right and birth mark. When it was invented by the Indians in 600 A.D. in India and called Chataranga (Chess or the Army Game) it was cr eated in the spirit of and in the image of being a war game. When chess found its way to Europe and was changed to where it is today it was always fundamentally a war game. When the founding fathers and the settlers brought chess to the New World it maintained its war game status. It has been said that Chess is the mother of all modern war games and that it is also the mother of all board games.

When General George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin picked up this noble game of Kings, it was played in the spirit of a war game. While it is regrettable that we must constantly fight to save US Armed Forces Chess, if we fail to do so it will disappear. We are the heirs of Mathas and Emory’s struggle and the benefactors of the USAFCC that they were able to create. Moreover, US Armed Forces Chess deserves a perpetual existence and more and more military men and women are enjoying playing chess in the military. The history of what has happened to the USAFCC, and what is still happening to it is a blast from the past.