Okay, it’s a little bit off topic, but I have to mention something I saw on TV this weekend. Last weekend, a bowler named Kelly Kulick won the Professional Bowlers’ Association Tournament of Champions, which made her the first woman ever to win a “men’s” professional bowling tournament. She didn’t just win, she dominated. Against a 12-time male champion, Chris Barnes, she won 265-195. (In bowling, 300 is a perfect score. A score of 265 is much closer to perfect than it looks — Kulick threw strikes on 10 out of 12 balls, missing only on the fifth one and the last one.)
I am not a bowling fan at all — I had watched it maybe a couple of times before this, usually for just a few minutes. I understand how the scoring system works, but I know nothing about oil patterns or strategies or anything. One time earlier this fall I had watched two women bowling during the advertisement breaks of a football game on another channel, and I commented to my wife that the women bowlers (well, some of them anyway) had shapely butts. She reminded me of this un-politically correct comment on Sunday, and I replied, “I’d rather watch a woman who kicks butt than a woman with a nice butt!”
Anyway, I was fascinated by this event for several reasons. First, bowling is kind of a niche sport, just like chess. But this turned out to be the second most watched broadcast of a bowling match in the last ten years. Kulick’s triumph put bowling on the radar screen of ESPN and other sports channels. One moral I drew from this was that if a woman won a major U.S. chess tournament, it would be a fantastic thing not just for women, but for chess.
Second, if a woman can win a men’s bowling tournament, then certainly a woman should be able to win a chess tournament. Women have a physical disadvantage in bowling — they don’t roll the ball as hard. However, it seems to be the nature of the sport that they can compensate by rolling more accurately. In chess, there is no physical disadvantage to overcome at all… only a cultural prejudice.
Third, Kelly Kulick’s triumph would not have become a big media story if the event had not been televised on ESPN, the biggest cable sports network. Admittedly it was just a half-hour program, and probably sort of a throw-away for them because football games were going on at the same time, so most sports fans would have been watching other channels. Nevertheless, it was on television.
Who is going to take up the battle to get chess on ESPN? I am convinced that it could be done. Poker is a big hit on ESPN. You just need someone to explain to the audience what is going on. During the poker tournaments they have computer graphics on the TV screen showing the cards each player has and their likelihood of winning. The players themselves don’t know this information, so as a viewer you actually have a sort of god’s eye view of the action. You could do the same thing with a chess game — show the computer evaluation of the position as the game is going on. Computers are kind of like gods, too, these days.
Once we get chess on TV, who is going to complete this picture by becoming the first woman to win a major tournament? Anna Zatonskih? Irina Krush? Abby Marshall? (Maybe you could argue that she already did it, by winning the Denker Tournament of High School Champions.) Someone else we don’t know about yet?
