Cover Story / GM Walter Browne
Remembering GM Walter Browne
Six-time U.S. Champion Walter Shawn Browne, 1949-2015 By AL LAWRENCE
“D
ear Family, I can beat everyone in my cabin at chess,” wrote 12-year-old Shawn, as he was called to avoid confusion with his father Walter, in a letter from summer camp in 1961. “You get a gallon of root beer if you win the tournament.” The churning cauldron of competitive genius that was
International Grandmaster Walter Shawn Browne simmered to champi- onship wins at every stage of his 50-year career. Browne won the U.S. Junior Championship in 1966, the U.S. Championship six times in the 1970s and 1980s, and the U.S. Senior Championship in 2014—an unmatched life cycle of achievement. On June 24, he died at the home of his longtime Las Vegas friend, chess master Ron Gross, while taking an after noon nap before leaving to catch a plane for his home in Berkeley, California. Browne had recently finished the National Open Championship, which he had won 11 times, this time a single point behind the leaders. While at the event, he had given a 25-board simultaneous exhibition, taught a chess camp, delivered a lecture series, and taken byes during the final weekend to compete in a championship poker tournament. He was 66. Browne was born in Sydney, Australia, to an Australian mother and a
father who was a native New Yorker. The family moved to New York when Shawn was five, and he learned to play chess at seven. Until he was 12, he enjoyed an idyllic life of a child athlete in a Long Island suburb. His favorite game was dodge ball. “He was also very proud of being a baseball pitcher,” his sister Susan Browne said. “Then our father tired of the commute and we moved to Brooklyn. There were no fields in Flatbush.” But from there his father introduced him to Manhattan’s great chess clubs. History is made from such stops and starts. Browne’s dominance of American chess is put into perspective when we
realize that he won the not-always-annual U.S. championship six times in a row, dis counting the 1978 event from which he withdrew without playing,
32 October 2015 | Chess Life
in a dispute over conditions. He won his first U.S. Championship in 1974, the year he permanently transferred his flag to the U.S., by outdistancing the field of 14, surging ahead of international stars Pal Benko, Art Bisguier, and even Samuel Reshevsky. Browne won again in 1975, 1977, 1980, 1981, and 1983. All of his wins in the 1970s were clear firsts. Besides the inevitable nickname “Six Time,” the colorful and dashingly
hand some Browne was for good reason also known as “King of the Swisses,” winning more of these tournaments than any other American in history. His creative opening preparation and go-for-broke style seemed the perfect formula to sear through five or six rounds of open play with the highest score. In addition to his 11 National Open wins, he topped the American Open seven times, the World Open three times, the U.S. Open in back-to- back victories in 1971 and 1972, and the New York Open in 1983. Browne also commanded respect abroad, notching up his grandmaster
norms in 1969, when grandmasters were truly the world’s elite few. The next year, FIDE formally awarded its highest title to just two: “Me and another guy, a Soviet,” Browne said. At the time, “We weren’t sure he deserved it.” That other, Soviet “guy” was Anatoly Karpov, who went on to reign as undisputed world champion from 1975 to 1985. “He showed he deserved it,” Browne later admitted, an impish twinkle in his ever-restless eyes. Browne had an impressive record against world champions, from Tigran
Petrosian to Garry Kasparov. (Even tactical wizard Mikhail Tal called Browne “danger ous.”) Browne’s 1970 game against Petrosian, known as “Iron Tigran” for being nearly unbeatable, revealed Browne’s approach to the game against everyone and anyone. The Armenian offered Browne a draw in three languages. “He said ‘Nichja’ and I didn’t say anything. Then he said ‘Remi’. I said nothing. Then he said ‘Draw!’ and I said ‘No!’ ” Browne ultimately blundered, but although such games caused him “a thousand sleepless nights,”
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