n027  0943  01 Jun 85
BC-CHECKERS(COX):
Plumbing the Depths of the Checkers Masters
By RAAD CAWTHON
c. 1985 Cox News Service
    PETAL, Miss. - Dr. Marion Tinsley puts his hands out and seems to
mold an imaginary object out of the air in front of him.
    ''You have to look down into the game,'' he says. ''You have to
plumb the depths and see deep into the game.''
    As he talks Tinsley, whose scholarly face bears horn-rimmed glasses,
seems to peer through the floor in front of him into some vast
distance. When he speaks of ''plumbing the depths'' his hands move as
if he is swimming underwater.
    ''I feel a desire to share this beautiful game with other people and
there are not that many people I can share it with,'' Tinsley says
sadly.
    What game is it this man, a respected, 58-year-old mathematics
professor from Florida A&M University, talking about? Some quantum
elaboration of obscure numerical theory? Four-dimensional chess?
    No. What Tinsley is talking about, in terms of great intellectual
force tinged with passion, is checkers.
    Checkers. The game you once played with your grandfather. The
entertainment mainstay of the overalls-and-snuff-dipping set.
    But Tinsley, who was here this past week to defend his World
Checkers Champion title, and those in his league are not playing the
same game you remember. The pieces are the same and so is the board.
The moves, leapfrogging over one another to capture and having your
man ''kinged,'' are the same. But when you begin to speak of stategy,
everything changes.
    ''Checkers is a game of very intelligent people,'' says Howard Owen,
a player from St. Petersburg, Fla. who came to referee this
championship. ''There are 142 openings and you can get into millions
and millions of variations on a particular opening. The literature is
extensive. I have about 700 books in my library on checkers and mine
is considered a small library.''
    The World Checkers Championship is taking place at the International
Checkers Hall of Fame here. The hall of fame is in a wing of the
massive, 35-room home of Charles Walker, insurance company owner and
Mississippi State Checkers Champion.
    Walker, an avid checkers player, has built a large room crowned by a
balcony around the four walls for the hall of fame. On the floor of
the room is a checker board 16 feet square. The board, which has
large pillows for pieces, made it into ''Ripley's Believe or Not.''
    In this room for a week, in morning and afternoon sessions, Tinsley
and Asa Long, the 80-year-old U.S. champion, have sat across a
smaller board from one another and, ever so deftly, moved their
checkers.
    Students of the game watch in rapt admiration, jotting down every
move in notebooks. Some of the games, most of which end in draws, are
over in an hour or two. But the difficult games can last five or six
hours.
    The games are videotaped and fans watch them over and over again
while taking each move and dissecting, discussing and diagramming it.
    Long, nicknamed ''Iron Man'' because of his steel nerves and steady
play, has won the U.S. title five times and held the world title from
1934 to 1948. He won his first U.S. Tournament title at 18 and his
most recent last year at 79.
    ''Asa is a great end-game player,'' says Owen, his voice edged with
the tone of a military historian speaking of Hannibal or Patton.
''There are many who say he was the greatest in the world at seeing
into the future of a game.''
    Long, who looks 20 years younger than his age and speaks in a soft,
midwestern voice that has a quiet chuckle at the end of each
sentence, is a retired factory worker from Toledo.
    ''The general public doesn't think very highly of checkers,'' he
says. ''In my opinion it ranks with contract bridge or chess in its
complexities. I have had a lifelong fascination with the game. I have
retired from tournament play at different times but the fascination,
the beauty of the game always brought me back.''
    Does it bother him that checkers is considered a game any child can
master?
    ''Worry me? No. Why worry about it when there is nothing I can do
about it,'' he says.
    And what of Tinsley, his opponent and a man he tutored in checkers
in the early 1940s?
    ''Dr. Tinsley is without doubt the world's greatest player,'' Long
says matter-of-factly.
    Indeed, Tinsley is a player with Ruthian credentials. For example,
until this week no one had beaten him in a match since 1955 - 30
years of undefeated play.
    And Tinsley played in the longest checker game in history. The match
with Derek Oldbury of Great Britain lasted seven and a half hours and
ended in a draw.
    The Encyclopedia of Checkers, the bible of the sport, says: ''Marion
Tinsley is to checkers what Leonardo da Vinci was to science, what
Michelangelo was to art, and what Beethoven was to music.''
    ''Tinsley's style is invincible,'' says Burke Grandjean, secretary
of the American Checker Federation and sure Hall of Famer.
    But this past week, on the opening day of the World Championships,
the unthinkable happened. Tinsley lost.
    ''He was very upset. It really shook him up,'' a spectator remembers.
    Tinsley, whose record thus dropped to umpteen-thousand-and-one, was
able to smile about the defeat later. ''I found out that I don't like
to lose,'' he said, the tone of his voice indicating that the subject
was closed.
    Long, who may be remembered as the last man to ever beat Tinsley,
said nothing - almost as if the victory embarrassed him. But Tinsley,
perhaps spurred on by the shock, came back and by week's end was once
again crowned World Checkers Champion.
    
    
nyt-06-01-85 1236edt
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