Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 3, March 2003

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Local chess tourneys help to bridge generational gap

By MATTHEW PREUSCH

When Wayne Metsker sits down to a game of chess, the differences in people age, sex and race fall away. He sees just one thing: the competition.

It's that collision of intellects that brings the 78-year-old Ballard resident back to the chess board again and again, and makes him such an eager promoter of the game.

"I like the people, first of all. I think chess players are special people; they've got a certain amount of caustic personality," Metsker said, "They're usually above the board."

Metsker is the driving force behind the Seattle Parks Department's annual intergenerational chess tournament, held recently at Crown Hill's Loyal Heights Community Center. For more than 20 years, the competition has brought out 20 to 40 chess players, young and old.

But Metsker's relationship began long before that. As boy in the tiny rural town of Milton-Freewater, at the base of the Blue Mountains in Oregon, he remembers coming in from a day working the "weevil crew" on a local pea farm to find his dad hunched over a checker board. The younger Metsker never took to checkers, but chess he dove into.

As a social studies teacher in Long Beach, Calif., in the 1950s, he founded a chess club that is still active today.

"The chess club it was such a marvelous thing. It was open about 10 o'clock in the morning to 9 at night every day," said Metsker, speaking from the Olympic Manor retirement home in Ballard, where he now lives with his wife.

"I noticed when people had problems, one thing or another, they would come and play chess and it would be OK," he said.

Metsker's current chess itinerary is limited to two annual tournaments, both of which, he said, he likes to call the "United Nations Open." If there is one thing Metsker enjoys as much as chess, it is probably expounding on the virtues of the U.N.

He also joins "a group of old-timers" for afternoon chess every on Friday at the Green Lake Community Center.

"I just enjoy playing. It's something you can do and forget about the problems in this tired old world," said Metsker.

Stacie Sheridan, a program director for the Parks Department, said that despite Metsker's "group of old-timers," most of the participants in the tournament are younger children, along with handful of young adults.

Players are divided up into brackets by age, and games are generally friendly, Sheridan said. After checkmate, there is usually plenty of mingling and discussion.

"The goal is they don't necessarily compete, but when they aren't playing in their bracket, and they get together that's where you see some of the cool magic happening," said Sheridan. Sheridan's own daughter is 15, and has been competing in the tournament since age seven. She is a regular face now and many of the department's senior events.

"She is not a shy child," Sheridan said.