Stefanos Rex – Steve Coronella on how a chess grandmaster turned him on to Latin

It’s funny how things work sometimes. For instance, if Bobby Fischer hadn’t travelled to Reykjavik, Iceland to take on Boris Spassky in what remains the most celebrated series of chess matches ever played, I never would have got the chance to learn Latin at my rough-and-tumble junior high school just outside Boston.

Sounds like a real non sequitur, I know, but hear me out.

For starters, you don’t have to be a chess geek to remember the American grandmaster Bobby Fischer. In his time he elevated the game to unprecedented levels of popularity, thanks to his spectacularly bold play and dazzlingly eccentric behaviour. (He died in 2007, aged 64, back in Iceland, a broken and embittered man.)

After a lot of pre-match wrangling, mainly over prize money, Fischer agreed to meet Spassky for the World Chess Championship in the remote venue of Reykjavik. The first game took place on July 11th, 1972.

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For reasons best left unexamined, I spent countless hours of my school summer holidays back then watching “World Chess Championship” on Channel 2, Boston’s public television affiliate.

Incredibly, the show – which featured grandmaster Shelby Lyman analysing each move of the Fischer-Spassky contest – was at the time the highest-rated PBS programme ever and yet had an endearing slapdash feel to it. The studio contained little more than a giant wall-mounted chess board, reconfigured by Lyman after each new move would arrive from Iceland via teletext. Joining him, seated on the flimsiest of chairs, were two or three fellow chess pundits.

Despite the cheesy production values, the show was an inspiration, and the following September I entered the eighth grade at Lincoln Junior High School in Medford, Massachusetts convinced that I possessed the mental muscle to become the next great American chess champion. To condition myself, I stayed after school a couple of days each week to engage my English teacher in a series of friendly matches.

Mr Kelley had a similar enthusiasm for the game but didn’t appear to have benefited from the helpful advice offered by Shelby Lyman and company on PBS. He took forever to make a move, and when he finally did commit one of his pieces, it pushed him invariably closer to checkmate.

Between moves, I often got up and wandered around. One afternoon, I found myself examining the contents of the glass-paned inset bookcase at the rear of Mr Kelley’s classroom. An old Latin textbook caught my eye. I took out the dusty tome, which probably hadn’t been handled for decades, read a few simple phrases, and committed them to memory.

The next time I met Mr Antico, one of two guidance counsellors at the Lincoln and a notorious lover of languages, I blurted out a line I could recall: Britannia insula est. (Or thereabouts. An agricola of unknown origin might have figured in there as well.)

It was an utterance that would change my life.

Mr Antico was a big man, unafraid of showing his emotions, especially when someone demonstrated even a rudimentary grasp of a language he adored. Acknowledging my simple Latin phrase, he threw his right arm over my shoulders and pulled me toward him. “Ah, well done, Stefanos Rex!” he said.

I should have known better.

For the next nine months, that was to be my calling card as Mr Antico took me under his wing and tutored me in the quirky details of Latin grammar. After lunch each day, as the rest of my classmates were settling into some free time, Mr Antico summoned me over the school intercom.

First came the unmistakable crackle of the mic being switched on in the main office. Then, with a theatricality worthy of Zero Mostel: “Stefanos Rex to my office, immediately!”

After a moment’s hesitation, I’d look in the direction of our homeroom teacher, get her tacit approval to leave, and rise from my desk at the front of the room. Then I’d walk the longest walk of my life, past the smirks and giggles of my uncomprehending contemporaries.

With Mr Antico as my guide, I spent countless hours declining nouns and conjugating verbs of the Latinate variety, with a bit of rough translation work thrown in. Without doubt my vocabulary and general understanding of English improved as a result.

Later that school year, with Bobby Fischer’s Icelandic triumph a fading memory, I gave up my dreams of world chess domination, but the Latin remains with me to this day.

You could call it a classic case of quid pro quo.