Military Chess / 2015 Armed Forces Championship
“Unmatched Perspicacity”
IM Emory Tate, 1958-2015
Self-taught and utterly self-confident, IM Emory Tate was equal parts brilliance and braggadocio. With brash h-pawn thrusts and confound ing sacrifices, he was a knockout-puncher capable of flooring any opponent with a sudden, incisive blow, a trait that made him the bane of grandmaster opponents. The five-time Armed Forces champion was also a pioneering black chess master who inspired a generation. A warrior in chess and in life, he sought and gave no quarter. His legendary career came to an end on October 17, as he collapsed in the middle of a tourna ment game.
Tate was playing his third-round game at the GM Sam Shankland Champi- onship chess tournament in San Jose, California. “Emory had one and a half points and seemed normal. He was being himself,” Abel Talamantez, Director of Enrichment for Bay Area Chess, said. Tate was returning from a break. “I heard him mumble, ‘Call 911,’ Then I heard a thud.” Tate had fallen to the floor. Despite immediate aid from a spectator and the quick arrival of paramedics, Tate was unresponsive.
Born in Chicago in 1958, young Tate learned how the pieces moved from his father. After that, Emory was charac- teristically his own mentor. “I never saw him study chess books, ever,” his oldest son Andrew said. “He also hated chess computers and never used them. He just sat down and played.” Emory joined the Air Force, and excelled as a linguist. “The military taught him Russian. He picked up Spanish and German by accident,” Andrew said.
Tate rose through the enlisted ranks from airman to staff sergeant as he won the Armed Forces Championship in back-to-back victories in 1983 and 1984 and then won three in a row, 1987- 1989—an unequaled record. In 1985 he married Englishwoman Eileen Ashleigh and soon started a loving family, who inherited his film-star good looks. After the Air Force, he traveled the U.S. from
The 1987Armed Forces Championship Air Force team, left to right: Brian Lankey, Bobby Moore, Greg Vitko, Martin Dean, Emory Tate, and Leroy Hill
coast-to-coast playing in tournaments and spent months abroad competing. While he collected an estimated 100 grandmaster scalps, his hammer-and- tongs attacking style prevented the consistent results necessary to reach the very top. But he finally clinched the international master title shortly before his 50th birthday. He played in one U.S. Championship, in 2006, scoring a respectable middle-of-the-pack out - come, but with the rare distinction of finishing without a draw.
Fellow Air Force veteran and 2003 Armed Forces Champion Leroy Hill bunked with Tate during a number of annual military chess championships at Fort Meade in the 1980s and hung out with him at the nearby chess haunts of Baltimore and the boards on D.C.’s Dupont Circle. “I never saw him study a chess book,” he agreed. “On the streets, there was always lots of trash talk and slamming pieces,” Hill said. “Tate destroyed strong players with sacs, taking our money, giving our top master 5-2 time odds. We’d never seen anything like him. We thought him unbeatable, a semi-god.” All the players had street names. “Emory’s was ‘Extraterrestrial,’ because we thought his play was out of this world.”
Whether in a tournament skittles room or on the street, spectators would crowd around Tate, often standing on chairs or tables, craning their necks to watch one of his legendary post- mortems. “Emory was not merely a chess player, but a chess performer,” Daaim Shabazz of The Chess Drum said. “The way he ex pressed chess over the board stretched artistic boundaries, but his post-mortems were melodra - matic. They were per formances as if
one would watch a play in a theater.”
Tate’s son Andrew is a four-time kickboxing world champion who now lives in Bucharest with his younger brother Tristan, himself a former British kickboxing champ. “Dad trained me. And commanded me to fight without a defense, hands down, as he did,” Andrew said. “I remember when he bench-pressed 160 kilos (353 pounds), the same as me. I was a 22-year old kick boxer. He was a 51-year-old. I said, ‘You’re more than just a chess player!’ He said, ‘My unmatched perspicacity, coupled with my sheer indefatigability, make me a feared opponent in any realm of human endeavor.’ That was a favorite saying.”
“I last saw my dad two months before he died. He was struggling to breathe. I told him I was worried, and he told me that he refused to let some doctor control his life. He started buying bottles of oxygen from Walgreens and walked around holding them. He was afraid of nothing, even death. He was an alpha male in all respects.”
Tate is survived by two sons, Andrew, 28, and Tristan, 27, a daughter Janine, 25, his former wife, Eileen, and his mother Emma Cox Tate, eight siblings and a large extended family.
TOP TATE TACTICS IM Emory Tate played for the spec - tacular against any and all opponents. Following is a sampling of his brilliant blows. Many of us would be thrilled to find one such move in a lifetime against our club champ. But all these bamboozled opponents are top grandmasters!
(see next page)
www.uschess.org 41
PHOTO CREDIT: ARCHIVAL
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