The Sydney Morning Herald Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Wednesday, February 10, 1971 - Page 7
King of the Board
Walter Browne, aged 22, Australia's first chess grandmaster and one of the top players in the international chess set, thinks he established a world record yesterday by demolishing 29 players in one-and-a-quarter hours.
As the young champ said after the final checkmate, “I played brilliantly.” He has the modesty of Cassius Clay and is reported to have the temperament of Nureyev (described at a recent chess tournament in Adelaide as “the Nureyev of chess” he wanted to know, “Who's Nureyev?”). He certainly looks more like a pop star than an international chess champion.
At yesterday's exhibition he wore a skinny brown shirt, rust-colored corduroys, chunky boots. With chin jutting forward he swaggers rather than walk, occasionally pushing the long dark hair out of his eyes as he makes his lightning moves on the board.
In the course of a game he will pull faces, poke his tongue out, yell for silence. Yesterday's exhibition, at which he took on his 29 challengers simultaneously, was held beside the fountain at Roselands — with loud recorded music and a fashion parade going on next door. Browne fairly described the conditions as “impossible”.
The day before at a similar exhibition in Sydney two of the 30 players managed to beat him. “They didn't outplay me,” said Browne. “I made a couple of completely idiotic moves.” He collects $100 for such an exhibition but says these are very uninteresting because there is no competition.
Browne was born in Sydney and lived here until he was four. His mother is Australian and his father American. He went to high school in New York, the same school as Barbra Streisand and another chess champion, Bobby Fischer, but quit at 16 “because my objectives in life weren't to be obtained in school.”
Browne came to Adelaide last month with four other grandmasters for Australia's first international chess tournament. He came a joint second (“I was not playing well”) with two other grandmasters, collecting $1,084 in prize money.
He says he earns between $5,000 and $10,000 a year playing chess. Most of his expenses are paid. He has been a professional player since he was 16 and a grandmaster since he was 21. (You become a grandmaster by beating sufficient other grandmasters in international tournaments.) There is only one younger grandmasters in the world, a Russian.
He hopes to become the next world champion. “If I don't make it next time I probably won't make it at all,” he said, tucking into a 3 pm steak, gulping down milk and orange juice, then whistling the waitress for coffee. “If I don't make it I may go into another field—acting, business, stock market commodities. I'm the kind of person who is very talented and I can do many things. If I take something up I completely overwhelm it.”
His interests apart from chess are bridge and poker. “I play cards and just as well as I play chess,” he said. He was looking for a poker game last night, today he plays exhibition chess in Newcastle, tomorrow he flies to New Zealand and next week he heads for a tournament in Reno.
Australia's first-ever grandmaster admitted having no idea who the Prime Minister of Australia might be. Ah well, as my old grandmaster used to say to me, “What you don't know won't hurt you.”.
