SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I began the new year with the intent of chronicling every men tion of chess in popular culture. I expected to come across one or two mentions per month, mostly from sports analysts feebly rehashing that any modicum of coaching strategy is somehow a “chess match.” Choosing to keep track via a running document on my laptop, I found myself rushing back to the computer several times per day. It turned out, once I started paying closer attention, passive references to chess abounded in the media. After two weeks, I gave up. While surely an anachro nism for days without smartphones, which would have made the effort much easier, it also showed how prevalent our game is beyond sports programs. Maga zines, commercials, movies, music and television news shows have all at times been fascinated by the game’s intricacies, subtleties and personalities. Formerly, chess players were seen large ly by
outsiders as hermetic quasi- intel lectuals who chose to manifest their genius in a somewhat questionable way—away from society and without a general benefit to it. Recently, all of that has changed. Chess is now accepted in many jurisdictions as a pedagog- ically-sound educational institution, alongside art and music education. The game is also produc ing cool adherents, whose pursuits off the board have made them known to a much wider circle. Where does chess fit into this upward trend in popular culture—is this recent activity a passing fad or something more? The secondary question is whether an increase in
prevalence necessarily makes a game or item more “cool.” Does chess even want another “Fischer boom” when our modern tergiversator culture hastily adopts, blankets and then jettisons the next greatest fad? Take another item whose popularity came out of nowhere to appeal to everyone from children to adults, from stay-at-home parents to working professionals. In 2006, Crocs had the highest initial public offering ever for a shoe company, then in 2007 the company sold nearly a billion dollars of foam sandals. The following year, they lost almost $200 million as their stock price lost three-fourths of its value. While no one thinks chess will burn as bright or
fade as spectacularly as Crocs, a parallel can be drawn. According to leading brand strategy consultant Laura Ries, “A hot brand ends up in one of two different ways. It burns bright too fast and fizzles. Brands like this are known as fads. Or a brand burns hot then continues at a steady simmer. Brands like this are known as iconic.” According to this logic, chess fits perfectly into the “iconic” realm—a great percentage of the country can play a legal game, which is just enough to allow chess idiom, anecdotes, feature articles and movies to break through the porous wall between the insular chess community and the mainstream pop culture. A parallel may be Monopoly. Most everyone in the U.S. has played, and although its heyday has come and gone, the game resurfaces from time to time. Nearly every major media outlet reported in February that the game was modernizing by adding a cat piece and removing the iron. Everyone could picture the pieces and had an interest in the story. As the view of chess is modernizing, so too is its coverage.
FACING PAGE: The Simpsons Chess Set, TM & © 1997 20th Century Fox Film Corp. THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM: New York Chess, ©2001 Big League Promotions, LEGO® Chess, Super Mario™ Chess: Collector’s Edition, TM & © 2009 Nintendo Created and distributed by USAOPOLY, Inc.
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