Hopefully, Saturday's annual general meeting of the T&T Chess Association will bring to a decisive end the unseemly dispute that has riven the organisation into irreconcilable camps over the last few months. The sport of chess has too many benefits to offer the country, particularly its young people, for its development to be distracted by such an on-going, acrimonious and, indeed, senseless exchange of name-calling and gratuitous insults. Indeed, even Double Rooks, in attempting to inject some sanity into this furious affair, was dubbed "the Chinese vagrant" by a certain party who, while totally disconnected to the drama, apparently could not resist the tremptation of expressing his genuine affection for the Guardian columnist. DR is grateful for his comic relief.
On a more serious note, however, DR must again repeat that he acted purely on principle in supporting the protest launched by a group of leading players against the proposal by Association president Russell Smith to change the long-established Olympiad selection criteria. DR felt the proposed move would have been ethically unfair to those who had already entered the preliminaries and qualified to play in the national finals with the legitimate expectation of representing the country at next year's Norway Olympiad should they gain any of the first three places.
What must now concern the chess community is that the quarrell continues as angrily as ever inspite of the overwhelming vote of the special general meeting two months ago to bury Smith's proposal. So, it now seems, this sorry matter will be left to the good sense of the AGM to put an end to it.
In the meantime, the protesting players have come under an amusingly scurrilous e-mail attack from one Hamza Deane, an ardent supporter of the president, who seems as reckless with his metaphors as he is with his points of logic. On the one hand, Dean describes the protesting players as "alligators" who came at Smith with sharpened teeth when he touched their "beloved Olympiad ride". Then he accuses them of using "big stick diplomacy to terrorise decent executive members." So there you have it, alligators using big stick diplomacy. Deane also has some alarming advice for a former national champion who has declared his intention of challenging Smith for the presidency at the coming AGM.
"Poor Andy, dem alligators will eat up he bones before he knows it."
Deane, in an obvious electioneering gambit, itemises Smith's contributions to the sport but he clearly misses the essential point in this war of words that, whatever their value, they cannot confer on the president the right to run the organisation as he pleases, to alienate the sport's best players and to ignore the overwhelming vote of the organisation's membership.
As DR sees it, the T&TCA can change its executive at any given opportunity, as it has done in the past, but the sport can hardly do without its leading players, its home-grown heroes who have spent years of dedication gaining their skills and positions of eminence and who now set the standards and provide the necessary inspiration for younger players.
To make the point, DR remembers that, as a novice in the game many years ago, his driving ambition was to improve to the level of beating such players as Stanford, Brassington, Brown and Sabga who were then the legendary stalwarts of the game. The busy life of a journalist at a fascinating period in the country's history, however, never afforded DR the time or consistent study opportunity to reach that standard in the sport.
Now, as a commentator, DR himself has had his contretemps with some of our elite players over the years, particularly bewailing their disappointing performances at Olympiads. DR has even gone so far as to recommend the non-selection of a women's team until our female players begin to distinguish themselves in open local and regional tournaments.
In any case, what our record at the Olympiad clearly demonstrates is the need for improvement even at the highest level. So instead of insulting our leading players by referring to them as "nitwits" and "prima donnas" in this unproductive dispute, the T&TCA should have been looking for feasible ways to sharpen the skills of our team members so they would have a stronger chance to win a higher place and greater recognition for our country in this supreme international chess competition.
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