Getting over a well-worn stereotype

I used to be pretty good at chess. I never won any significant individual trophies, but I once forced a stalemate against the favorite from a rival magnet elementary school, tipping the scales in our team's favor by one half of a point to win the tournament. My teammates instantly hoisted me onto their shoulders and chanted my name, and at the pep rally in our honor we emptied a keg of ice-cold Gatorade onto our coach.

I'm pretty sure that's how it happened.

In any case, let's fast-forward to last spring, to a day which found me sitting in front of a chessboard for the first time in 14 years. My adversary was a Chinese fourth-grade boy named Barnes. I was hired to tutor him in English, but that day he was schooling me in chess. In the first 10 minutes alone I lost half of my army to sheer carelessness but even when I got serious, reclaiming my territory was a sweaty and mentally taxing slog. Apparently playing chess is not quite like riding a bike; if you don't use it, you lose it.