Dr. Korenman turned dreams into reality for chess

I met Dr. Korenman a few years ago at a National Scholastic event in Nashville, TN. I immediately felt his passion and vision for chess. He was kind enough to share with me some of his ideas and he said that he wants to do it for chess, a game that he dearly loves.

Many people say big things but cannot deliver. Dr. Korenman not only made his vision came true; he exceeded his own expectation as well as everyone else. He turned a town of 3,000 into a chess Mecca in the United States. Countless national and worldwide media flocked to the town of Lindsborg, Kansas for his events.

He got 7-time World Champion Anatoly Karpov to come to this little town and lent his name for an International Chess School. He got the state of Kansas to grant that chess project around a quarter of a million dollars. He got former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev to come and celebrate an internationally known project Chess for Peace, one that he founded. He organized two historic battles of the gender matches between Karpov and me which gathered attention worldwide.

Dr. Korenman also organized some incredible scholastic, college, adult and professional chess events. He did things that no one else could. He is one of the biggest stories of chess success in American chess history. I can continue for pages about Dr. Korenman but the bottom line is he is a man who knows adult, scholastic, college and professional chess and he knows how to get funding for chess. In my opinion, he would be one of the strongest board members ever. He is a uniter and he can get all groups to work together. He is well respected by everyone. I hope you will give him a chance to help our federation. It will be one of the best things that you can do for US chess and the USCF. Here is a major article on National Geographic about Dr. Korenman:

Checkmate On the Prairie
BY CHRIS CARROLL
National Geographic Writer

A Kansas town that has long played up its Swedish heritage is playing a new game.

Not so long ago, only a Swedish heritage festival on a sunny day could have generated this much excitement among the residents of Lindsborg, Kansas. This after all is “Little Sweden, USA,” a town where it’s normal for children, even teenagers, to maintain their own personal folk costumes. But in recent years Lindsborg has witnessed a minor revolution in self-identity, and one man is largely responsible for the shift: Mikhail Korenman has made this town crazy for the game of chess. Just look at the festivities the burly Russian- Jewish immigrant has lined up for the weekend: A chess parade down Main Street! A match between two world champions! And a speech on world peace by Mikhail Gorbachev. All of this with hardly an umlaut in sight. “This is the biggest thing in town since the King of Sweden visited here in ’76,” says Ken Sjogren, a long-time resident who co-founded Hemslojd, a leading Scandinavian craft shop.

The hub of the activity is the Anatoly Karpov International School of Chess on Lindsborg’s well-scrubbed Main Street, named for the Russian player who succeeded Bobby Fisher as world champion in 1975. Don’t expect to see the great player himself manning the phones inside the cramped teaching space. With handset clamped to each ear, Korenman, 43, is juggling the last-minute details for the weekend activities. When the phones go quiet he plops down on a well-worn sofa in a corner of the chess classroom.He lets out an exaggerated sigh, but he’s smiling. This is home: He and his wife recently moved into the upstairs apartment. He’s quit his job as assistant chemistry professor at nearby Bethany College to devote himself fulltime to the game he loves—and to teaching the students who affectionately call him Misha.

“I couldn’t have guessed when I moved to Lindsborg I’d someday see Gorbachev walking down the street,” he says. “Voronezh, my hometown in Russia, has a million people, so it was like coming to a different universe.” Any worries that Lindsborg, a city of 3,300 people, wouldn’t offer enough stimulation vanished when Korenman—an expert player who’d competed in tournaments back home—learned about the local chess club. He began networking with Russian expatriate players at tournaments around the country, inviting them to play in his picturesque little Kansas town. He convinced the local Rotary Club to host a small tournament, and in 2002 Karpov came to train for a match against rival Gary Kasparov, who’d won the world champion title from him in 1985.

Karpov beat Kasparov for the first time in years—and when he returned to lucky Lindsborg, Korenman sprung the question: Would he lend his name to a chess school in the town? “There’s something he likes about Lindsborg,” Korenman says. “He’s from a small town himself. A few years later, several past presidents of the U.S. Chess Federation asked Karpov to sponsor a school. “I already have one in America, in Lindsborg,” he said, “and it’s enough.” Though 20 schools bear Karpov’s name worldwide, Lindsborg’s is the only one in the U.S.

Korenman may have put chess on the map, but there’s one thing he hasn’t been able to do: Turn his students into Russians. Something about American culture, he says, prevents promising young players from taking the next step. Back in Voronezh, his 8-year old nephew attends chess school five days a week, has lessons from a private coach, and plays in a tournament each weekend. That kind of focus seems unimaginable for most American kids—and their parents.

The rest of this fantastic article is available on National Geographic Magazine.