A friend of the station brings us the fun, weird tale of a game of chess he played against the hip-hop legend GZA before his performance this week in Nashville. WPLN reporter emeritus Daniel Potter takes it from here:
Last week, my friend sent me a cryptic message: “Your time has come. Remember your training.” I soon learned GZA would be playing chess in a bar near downtown before his show and — for a fee — I could challenge him to a quick game.
For the unfamiliar, GZA’s name is pronounced “JIH-zuh,” and according to legend it derives from the sound of scratching the word “genius” on a record. His decades-long career traces back to such landmark albums as 1993’s “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” which features the iconic banger “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’.”
The group’s penchant for chess is no secret; a chessboard figures into the artwork for GZA’s platinum-selling 1995 album “Liquid Swords,” and he can be seen playing chess against fellow Wu-Tang member Masta Killa in a 2019 documentary. In 2007, GZA’s cousin RZA even won a Hip Hop Chess Federation belt.
And me? I’m aggressively OK at chess. Like millions of other people, I streamed the series “The Queen’s Gambit” in 2020 and, as a side effect, got into playing online and dabbling in theory and tactics.
So, I made an impulse purchase and signed up to play. And then spent hours over the next few days practicing on my phone. I didn’t want to fall into some early trap like a chump. Ultimately, I settled on an opening called the Scandinavian, which I picked up from YouTube.
With the bar playing loud beats, GZA and I both nodded along. And we found our way into a middle game that was tense, if imperfect. This was blitz chess — just 3 minutes on the clock per player. After trading off several pieces, I was up two pawns and had a decent chance of winning.
But that’s when I got in my head. I burned precious seconds and made panicky moves. GZA kept battling even after my time ran out. But, by then, I’d blundered a knight. When he promoted one of his own pawns to a new queen, I resigned, shook his hand and got him to sign my board.
He didn’t go undefeated, by the way.
He and I each lost two games to another trained chess assassin — one who was unassumingly disguised as local fourth-grader Kyan Washington. It turns out the kid is legit questing for Grand Master status. He might just pull it off, right around the time he’s old enough to listen to GZA’s music.
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