Carl Ja­cobs

DOU­BLE ROOKS can on­ly hope that the lessons to be learned from the spe­cial gen­er­al meet­ing of the T&T Chess As­so­ci­a­tion (T&TCA) held last Sun­day will be fruit­ful­ly di­gest­ed both by mem­bers of its ex­ec­u­tive and club of­fi­cials who at­tend­ed. The two main is­sues that were aired dur­ing more than three hours of in­tense dis­cus­sion were al­ready well known as they arose from press­ing cir­cum­stances and ap­proach­es with­in the or­gan­i­sa­tion that need­ed to be re­solved.

As far as the res­ig­na­tion of PRO Al­pa­ci­no Smith is con­cerned, it seemed to DR that as an ac­tive uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent, at­tract­ed by the com­pet­ing in­ter­ests of his age, he may not have had the ma­tu­ri­ty or com­mit­ment need­ed to un­der­take the some­what hum­drum du­ties re­quired of the T&TCA's pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer.

Young Smith's dif­fi­cul­ties, it seems, arose large­ly from the de­mands of his youth and they pro­vide a les­son for the As­so­ci­a­tion as a whole to be more dis­cern­ing in the elec­tion of of­fi­cers to un­der­take the many func­tions of the ad­min­is­tra­tion.

On the oth­er hand, club mem­bers would be wise not to ac­cept nom­i­na­tion to of­fice in the As­so­ci­a­tion if they are not pre­pared to make a gen­uine con­tri­bu­tion to the progress of the na­tion­al body and the sport.

As for the oth­er main prob­lem re­spect­ing is­sue of MYSA grants to as­sist the na­tion's young and tal­ent­ed play­ers ob­tain ad­vanced train­ing and com­pete in tour­na­ments abroad, there is cer­tain­ly the need for stream­lin­ing the process with the Min­istry.

In ret­ro­spect, it seems gross­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry for MYSA to have in place a work­ing sys­tem for as­sist­ing play­ers from "un­der­priv­i­leged" ar­eas to par­tic­i­pate in over­seas tour­na­ments, even those with­out any con­sis­tent achieve­ments in the sport, while proven cham­pi­ons with mul­ti­ple ti­tles have to be sub­ject­ed to a le­gal­is­tic, time-con­sum­ing process be­fore they can ben­e­fit from min­istry as­sis­tance to ad­vance their ca­reers and bring glo­ry to our coun­try in the in­ter­na­tion­al chess are­na.

The fu­tile four-month rig­ma­role that Vish­nu Singh, T&T's first In­ter­na­tion­al Mas­ter, and Ja­van­na Smith, both mul­ti­ple chess cham­pi­ons, were sub­ject­ed to in seek­ing trav­el grants from the Min­istry is, in DR's view, was quite scan­dalous. Com­par­isons may be odi­ous but some­times quite chas­ten­ing; a vir­tu­al novice from an "un­der­priv­i­leged" area read­i­ly ob­tains a grant to trav­el and play abroad, but two of the coun­try's chess stars with im­pres­sive vic­to­ries to their names get a frus­trat­ing runaround.

Sud­den­ly, the Min­istry de­mand­ed "cri­te­ria" for the two well-known cham­pi­ons. But why? What dif­fer­ence would this sud­den re­quire­ment make par­tic­u­lar­ly in a sit­u­a­tion where time was of the essence? Could the Min­istry not have fa­cil­i­tat­ed the two play­ers and in­sti­tut­ed the "cri­te­ria" pro­vi­sion any­time af­ter­wards? Al­so, DR is not im­pressed with the co­op­er­a­tion that par­ents of the play­ers re­ceived from the T&TCA ex­ec­u­tive in their anx­ious pur­suit of the grants. There was no in­di­ca­tion at Sun­day's meet­ing that the As­so­ci­a­tion had made any ef­fort what­ev­er to con­vince the Min­istry of the need to as­sist the young chess cham­pi­ons in their quest for greater achieve­ments abroad.

In the heat of the dis­cus­sion, in fact, Rus­sell Smith, fa­ther of Ja­van­na and Sec­re­tary of FIDE Amer­i­c­as, re­marked that the sto­ry would have been a dif­fer­ent one had the young­sters in­volved been the chil­dren ex­ec­u­tive mem­bers.

As DR ob­served at the be­gin­ning, these two un­for­tu­nate episodes have im­por­tant lessons to be learned by all the par­ties in­volved.