In college, two kings

CATONSVILLE, Md. — At this Final Four, there is no raucous crowd, national TV audience or blaring bands — only silence.

The chess match that is college basketball’s Final Four concluded last night at the Alamodome in San Antonio; the real chess Final Four wrapped up the day before on an otherwise abandoned campus in a second-floor game room at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

Sergey Erenburg is a grandmaster, an honor bestowed on only the world’s highest-rated players. He is the highest-rated player in college chess and the No. 1 player for UMBC.

Erenburg, a floppy-haired Israeli, paced but showed no emotion while his opponent contemplated moves. The 23-year-old prodigy was locked in an exhausting battle with the University of Texas at Dallas’ Alejandro Ramirez, a curly haired, bespectacled 19-year-old grandmaster from Costa Rica.

The match, played mainly before friends, coaches and school administrators, was pivotal in determining which team would become king of college chess.

UMBC and UT Dallas, the dominant powers in the college game largely because they give full chess scholarships and recruit worldwide, had easily handled Miami Dade College and New York University in the preliminary rounds to set up the showdown.

“It is a lie to say nobody cares about this tournament,” said Ramirez, who left a professional chess career to accept a full scholarship at UT Dallas. “It is just very, very stressful. We feel it.”

The game lasted five-plus hours and ended in a draw — good news for Dallas. The Comets held a slim half-point lead (based on total previous wins over Miami Dade and NYU) going into the final team match, which featured four players on each side. UMBC needed to win both on-going matches after UT Dallas’ Marko Zivanic of Serbia defeated Ukrainian women’s grandmaster Katerina Rohonyan on the fourth and lowest board.

UMBC only could split, and Dallas captured its second consecutive President’s Cup with a 2½-1½ match win over its archrival.

The Retrievers’ Pawel Blehm, also a grandmaster, was forced to change gears after Erenburg’s draw and take extra risks while going for a win. It backfired, and Croatian Davorin Kuljasevic seized the opportunity for the championship-clinching victory.

“Second place really feels like last. At UMBC, we only play to win the tournament,” said Blehm, a 28-year-old graduate student from Poland. “Actually, [Kuljasevic] studied one of my games that I played 11 years ago. I saw 15 of his games [on a computer database], and he used three different continuations but not this one. He surprised me.”

Blehm, depending on the source, is what is right or wrong with the college game. He soon will finish his master’s degree in information systems and just completed his sixth and final season on the team.

The U.S. Chess Federation — the national association that also serves as the NCAA for college chess — tightened rules in 2002 by requiring undergraduate players to be 26 or under and graduate players to be 30 or under. Players must be enrolled in a certain number of classes to be eligible and can play up to six seasons.

The UMBC team, under the guidance of founder Alan Sherman, transformed from a modest club sport in the early 1990s into a fully funded activity. The Retrievers have a $250,000 budget and give out four full scholarships (five next year), including a $15,000 annual stipend a year mainly for housing.

UT Dallas is the only other school with that kind of support, though Texas Tech and Texas at Brownsville are upgrading their programs.

“What else could you give scholarships for that could be more intellectually sound than for great thinking?” UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski said. “It says a lot about the fact that we are encouraging American children to take chess seriously. If you look at Ph.D. candidates and doctorate programs, you will see exactly the same thing. They are people from other countries.

“It is shining a light on the fact that we are not doing enough to teach our children to think critically and engage in these types of activities.”

Still, given the predominance of foreign players on chess scholarships, there’s some question about the direction of the college game. Miami Dade has no recruiting budget, though it does offer small scholarships. The school relies heavily on Cuban immigrants — coach Renier Gonzalez, a former Cuban national team member, says the school’s first team was made up of “six raftees,” a reference to people who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba on small boats.

Miami Dade finished a distant third at the event, just ahead of NYU, which, like Ivy League programs and most of the other 30 or so college squads, offers no financial incentives to attract players.

NYU is the only program dominated by Americans, and it has no grandmasters on its roster. In fact, there are only 34 American grandmasters total, according to the national federation.

“We always say we are the only real college team because we have no recruiting or anything,” said NYU’s Jake Vogel, a former high school lacrosse player from Connecticut. “We are just college kids. And also you have so many grad students playing. I don’t know. Legitimate college kids don’t actually have a chance.”

The game’s overall popularity at American colleges is down considerably from the glory days when Bobby Fischer, a world champion from Brooklyn, sparked immense interest in the 1970s.

UMBC and UT Dallas hope to renew interest at all levels and promote the college game.

“At UMBC, it is a major intellectual sport,” said Sherman, a computer science professor. “Chess provides the type of skills we need in the modern information age: the ability to think logically, to think ahead and solve problems. … You will know we have made a major step when ESPN covers chess on a regular basis. I think they will do that as soon as the sponsorship is there.”

Until then, the President’s Cup returns to Dallas after the Comets checkmated UMBC in college chess’ biggest — and perhaps only — rivalry.

“We are a Division III program, which means we don’t give athletic scholarships,” UT Dallas president David E. Daniel said. “Our chess program is what we are known for at UT Dallas instead of athletics. This may be the biggest thing on our campus. It just symbolizes a great competitive spirit and focus on intellectual and academic endeavors. It is up to everybody else to catch up.”