Don't Judge a Rook by It's Lover

From BClocalnews.com Don’t judge a rook by its lover Published: September 04, 2008 1:00 PM Updated: September 04, 2008 4:27 PM When I Google ‘homeless people’ in my brain, my memory bank serves up two indelible hits. One of them is an incident that happened to me in 1983 in downtown New York. Coming out of the Iroquois Hotel I asked the doorman for the nearest subway stop. He raised an elegant, white-gloved hand to point me in the right direction. I remember that immaculate white glove, index finger extended, because right behind it, just ever-so-slightly out of focus, was a street hobo hunched over a heat grate. He was living in a cardboard refrigerator carton. Twenty-five years ago, and homeless people were already unremarkable – at least in New York. My second ‘homeless moment’ happened yesterday in downtown Vancouver while I was stopped at a crosswalk waiting for pedestrians to cross. I must have been engrossed in some dreary mental daydreaming because one of the pedestrians – a street person by his grubby garb – stopped right in front of my car and stared at me. When he got my attention he put his right thumb and index finger to the corners of his lips and pushed his face into a grin. “Smile,” he was telling me. Somebody without a home and probably no idea where he would eat that night – somebody I’d been too self-obsessed to even notice – was urging me to ‘cheer up.’ Yet another timely reminder of how easy it is to ‘disappear’ the homeless – and also how dangerous it is to judge anybody just by the way they look. Suppose, for instance, I could whisk you to Dupont Circle, a rather grungy urban park in downtown Washington, D.C. Chances are that sooner rather than later we’d run into Tom Murphy. Tom’s a regular in the park and not, frankly, much to look at. He’s 49 but appears older. He usually wears a grubby sweater, a pair of Nike sweatpants that are out at the knee and running shoes well past their best-before date. Oh, Tom is also black, unshaven and hirsutely disorganized under his ratty St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. Chances are even better that when we meet him, Tom will be more than somewhat thick of tongue and/or bloodshot of eye because, to quote from the Mr. Bo-jangles song, he ‘drinks a bit.’ It would be childishly easy to dismiss Tom Murphy as just another urban bum waiting for his welfare cheque. And it would be wrong. You may have noticed that Tom likes to sit by one of the many stone chessboards that adorn Dupont Circle … Perhaps you think it would be generous of you to offer to play a few easy moves with him. Don’t get comfortable. Tom Murphy will whip your butt before you’ve warmed the chair. Tom Murphy will not only beat you at chess, he will do it in ten minutes or less. He is not just a chess genius, he is a wizard at a hyper-fast form of the game called ‘Blitz’. In Blitz, each player has a maximum of five minutes to make all his moves. At the end of ten minutes a buzzer goes and the game is over. David Mehler, who runs Washington’s Chess Center, has been watching Tom Murphy for years. “He has a very fast mind,” Mehler told a Washington Post reporter, “and he sees combinations quickly. He calculates very quickly.” Just how good is Tom Murphy? Good enough to rate the title of ‘expert,’ which is the second-highest ranking in North America. In 2005 he entered a Blitz Championship and came in 15th. In the world. If he bought himself a suit and tie, a shave and a haircut, Tom Murphy could probably earn a decent living as a chess professional – certainly as an instructor. But he prefers life in Dupont Circle among the pigeons and the other indigents. There, he plays for booze money, charging anywhere from two to five dollars a game against all comers. Maybe Tom Murphy’s presence in the park serves another purpose too. Maybe, like the homeless guy in front of my car, teaching me to Get Over Myself – maybe he serves to remind us not to judge a book by its cover. Or a rook by its lover. After all, if a scruffy vagrant with holes in his socks can clean your clock at one of the most difficult games in the world, what else don’t you know about him? Arthur Black is a syndicated columnist.