By Anthony Schick
Contributing Writer
Resting against a cane nestled between bricks in Pioneer Courthouse Square, Jerome Russel peers through tortoise shell sunglasses and reaches forward to slide an ivory pawn one space forward. Beneath a tan golfer’s hat, Russel, a 61-year-old Palm Beach native, looks at his opponent, 64 squares and six and a half brick lengths away, and back at the board. Over his shoulder, the shades on Bill Peel’s prescription aviators are flipped up and he stands, surveying the board, guessing the victor he’ll challenge next. All three men seem fixated on the game, yet they move in and out in an instant. Russel looks up at the spectators. No, he doesn’t mind if we watch.
“We just havin’ fun!” he says, widening a smile that shines with more than just pearly whites. Russel has been playing chess for 25 years, and has been playing in the square since he moved into a nearby apartment nearly a year ago.
Pioneer Courthouse Square has becoming a thriving place for chess play in the summers, and for decades the chess tables tucked in the corner of Portland’s living room have been fostering an eclectic, tight-knit community.
“Everyone, from the people on the streets to the people in the thousand-dollar apartments,” Peel says. “And they all come down and we’re even on the chessboard. It’s all even.”
Russel learned the game in prison, back in Florida, he says, to help pass the time and occupy his mind. He and Peel now play nearly every day; either in the square or at his apartment, Russel devotes time each day to the game that’s guided him through darker days of prison, homelessness and now into a calmer life and his own apartment. On one of the first sun-drenched afternoons of the summer, Russel — at the square since mid-morning — points to the crowds gathered around other games, referencing a hierarchy among regulars of the square.
“If you start coming here enough, you know,” he says, revealing the row of gold teeth once more. “You know who’s good, who’s here …”
A few feet to the left, a barefoot man with windswept white hair sits cross-legged on sunned bricks opposite his adversary. As passers through the square stop to speak or shout into the echo chamber just steps below, the two men are locked in the silence of their game, hearing only the shuffling of their pieces, each click that starts and stops the game clock. Suddenly the white-haired man’s arms go up at his sides, and he shakes his head. Still silent, they begin restacking their pieces for another.
To the rear, crowds gather around the fallen columns of the Morrison Street side of the square, watching games atop the bronzed chessboards added in 2003 to commemorate the very practices taking place upon them.
“We’ve watched chess being played at the Square for over 10 years, by a variety of people, and yes, it’s been good for the Square,” says Mahlin Shisler, Director of Facility Operations and Productions for Pioneer Courthouse Square.
“The chess culture in Portland is actually quite rich, more than you’d expect from a city of its size,” says Pete Prochaska, master chess player and president and founder of Chess Odyssey. “It has a concentration of players and player strength. Portland has historically been very active in youth scholastic chess, so that’s one reason for that. On the adult level, there’s a high number of high-tech and intellectual jobs, and some of those people are chess players.”
A loosely shaped line has formed around the only permanent board in the square, atop the column beside the bronze replicas. Banter about everything and nothing — often but not always the games — surrounds it. As the Max dumps hoard after hoard to scatter past the square, the regulars soon begin to pull friends from its midst. For every one hundred glances past the tables, one is familiar, and every hour or so from lunch till dark it becomes clear that the chess mates are more numerous than thought before.
Before long, a nearby shouting match between a man watching chess and a street preacher ensues, spurring first laughter and then deeper discussion of the Bible, of God, and of life — one filled with as many off-color jokes as philosophical breakthroughs.
Nate Khingratsaphone, fresh off a game, holds court with his elders on the subject, dissecting the arguments in the most un-Biblical of manners.
“You get to know everyone you play with, and you start bonding beyond the chess board,” the 22-year-old Portland native says the next day, in a Square now desolated by July’s first drizzle. “But the game is what started it — it’s an international game anyone can relate to.”
As if to prove his statement, Khingratsaphone, still holding the skateboard he glided in on, points to an elderly Russian man, one of only two players in the square packing up the last game of early afternoon.
“I know Viktor,” he said, with a telling smile. “I beat him more than I don’t. No, he’s good. And he’s been playing this game a long time.”
Khingratsaphone has been playing chess since he was 15, learning the game from his uncle. He became fascinated with it – with the competition, he says, knowing your opponent, knowing the game. He says he’s learned a lot about life from chess. And Pioneer Courthouse Square is more than a small reason for that.
“I came down here about three years ago,” he says. “A whole group of men hanging around outside a chessboard on a rainy day kind of intrigued me, because they were playing a game I love to play. “
And what he found kept him coming back: “I love downtown. There’s a lot of people, especially a lot of girls around … not around the chess scene so much, but around the area.”
Claiming he’ll play chess till the day he dies, Khingratsaphone hopes to earn a rating before long, something a few of the Pioneer players have achieved. He hopes his math studies will aid him in that, as well as his practice in the square. But he owes the square for more than chess knowledge.
“I’ve picked up a lot of street wise, things that school can’t teach me. Just the whole environment, it’s cool,” he says, adding that he’s soaked up all he can from the older players, about chess and about life. “They talk about their mistakes and about their lives. It’s like a second family down here.”
Bill Peel found that second family as he moved into retirement and into a new neighborhood nearly a year ago, finding companionship in his daily games at the square with Russel and the others.
“All through chess,” he says. “And I wouldn’t have known them otherwise. We’d have just passed each other in the street. All of a sudden, all barricades are down, it’s the game.”
But that isn’t the first time chess has helped him out.
Dressed in white high tops, jeans and a gray cutoff T-shirt, the 56-year old Peel hunches forward on the bricks and adjusts his chess set, explaining that he’s been playing since 2nd grade.
“I was first board at Burgess High School in El Paso, but you might not know what that means,” he says, boasting that Burgess was one of the top-ranked chess teams in the country. “Do you play?”
He offers rook odds as I sit down, knowing by my ambiguous answer that I don’t play. Setting up the pieces one by one – save one of his rooks – he begins to reveal why he’s so dedicated to the game of chess.
“When I was young, I had a lot of frustration. I was destructive, I was violent. It was just natural frustrations of growing up, being a kid, but I didn’t have an outlet for them,” he says. “So they suggested chess to my parents as an outlet. I began playing chess, and everything changed.”
Chess straightened Peel out. He became calmer, progressed in school and enrolled in ROTC at University of Texas-El Paso to secure a lengthy military career as what he simply calls a “jack of all trades.”
Peel moved to Portland to help care for his ill sister’s children, who are now adults, he says with a touch of pride and nostalgia. Retired, Peel moved from Gresham to downtown roughly eight months ago, knowing no one in the area. Playing chess gave him the opportunity to keep his mind sharp and gain companionship.
“I owe a lot to chess,” he says, examining my first move and countering. I then slide a pawn one space further.
A boy appears on the steps to our right. “I wouldn’t have done that,” he says. Josh Webb, who goes by Sid, is one of the many frequenters of the square familiar with Peel’s skill. Dressed in a black trench coat, heavy boots and an array of necklaces, the 17-year-old drops his bags and two-liter of root beer to watch the game. They begin discussing the difference between a chess tactician and strategist. After several more moves, he turns to me: “You don’t play chess, do you?”
He lights up when he learns of the article, pulling out a vendor badge. Recently, however, Webb hasn’t had as much time for selling or for playing chess.
“I’m busy just surviving,” he says, spitting after every sentence. “Making sure I’m safe, making sure my girlfriend is safe, even if I’m not.”
Webb says he’s battled homelessness in downtown Portland for the past four years, exceling at times as a wandering vendor, surviving with the wiles of one much older. Webb is matter-of-fact when discussing how he became homeless: “My mom was a crystal meth addict and my dad is somewhere in North Dakota.”
And Pioneer Courthouse Square, for now, is his community.
“It’s the only place that will let me play,” he says. “There’s nowhere else like it in the city.”
With his feet in the air and his belly against the bricks, Webb cracks jokes with Peel that only an avid chess player could appreciate. And as he does so, he for once looks more 17-year-old wiz kid than a boy without a home.
“In my mind, I’ve already won,” he says of the game I’ve all but lost. Bill has beaten Webb with Queen odds, meaning my Rook odds never stood a chance. At a time, Peel leaned in after one of my moves and returned it to its previous state.
“You didn’t want to do that. Trust me.”
Soon after, he shakes his head and mutters, “This just isn’t fair.” I look down and notice a white king and pawn, cowering in the corner of the board against an army of black pieces. Peel bursts into contagious laughter, and the flick of a finger topples the king and resigns the game prematurely.
“That’s OK. That’s OK,” he says. “If you want to learn chess, you came to the right place.”