Between 1990 and 1996, I played chess with my father over 300 times. As I recall, I beat him about 13 times and we had about 9 stalemates. (Yes, that means he defeated me more than 278 times – no need to rub it in!)
Around 7.30hrs this morning, as I was prepping for church, I turned 31. Now, a couple of years ago, I heard Gordon Robertson from the Christian Broadcasting Network say on his birthday, “the older you get, the wiser your dad gets”. So I said to myself, how about I challenge Alvin Zulu I (hereinafter called The Dadster) to a chess match.
Though not necessarily a measure of wisdom, I figure a chess match with the one-and-only wise and mighty Dadster, who himself turned 72 on August 6 this year, would be an awesome way to catch up on the good old times. There’s only one problem: he’s in Chingola and I’m in Lusaka – roughly 420km apart.
The easiest solution to this problem is online chess. But the problem with that is that The Dadster isn’t that big on Internet things and computer things in general. Now even if he were big on Internet things, I can’t begin to imagine how much Internet bandwidth we’d need for us to complete a single chess match. In a typical chess match between Dr. Wong (aka Me) and The Dadster, it would take the latter about one hour to make the killshot. Now, over the years, Dr. Wong has grown smarter and a little geekier (and no, it has nothing to do with the specs), so it’s likely that the match will take more than an hour.
So the question is, do we have the money to invest in more than an hour of Internet data usage with the slow, expensive connections we have in Zambia? I ask this because I’ll be blogging about Internet cost and speed soon. The obvious answer is “No way, Jose!”
So what will we do instead? Well my solution probably costs more than what we would collectively spend on Internet: I intend to take a trip all the way to Chingola and meet The Dadster head-on on a granite chessboard with marble finish, which I will buy specifically for this match. (Hey come on, a grand chess match deserves a grand chessboard, and yes, marble and granite are different, in case you thought otherwise.) Anyway, The Dadster will have the support of the home fans (except that of his namesake, Alvin Zulu II, who will be rooting for Dr. Wong), so I’ll have to go with my own board, to retain a bit of the advantage.
<a href=”http://wongzulu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/the_older_you_get.jpg”><img class=”size-medium wp-image-75 alignright” src=”http://wongzulu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/the_older_you_get-298×300.jpg” alt=”the_older_you_get” width=”298″ height=”300″ /></a>It’s 17.30hrs now. My people have spoken with his people, and the Zulu Family Chess Federation (ZFCF) has set Saturday October 3, 2015 as matchday. I’ll blog about that when I return. (If I don’t, then you can guess what the result will have been.) Lots of intimidatory words are being used already. For instance, a source close to The Dadster cited him as saying “<em>I may not remember how to derive the quadratic formula, but I know for a fact, I’m not about to lose a chess match to Dr. Wong, the only non-medical doctor without a PhD.</em>” He tried to say it sarcastically, but that’s not his strong suit… He’s an overly pleasant man.
On a serious note, though, the Chingola trip will be an opportunity to pay tribute to The Dadster for all the input he’s made in the making of Dr. Wong, the Last Man in the Zulu Line of Defence. He’s stood out for me through thick and thin, and made sure I got the best education I could get, even (and especially) when things were at their hardest.
God knows there’s no way I could have made it this far if it weren’t for Alvin Zulu I, The Dadster. I appreciate God everyday that this man is alive and that I can draw loads of wisdom from him. And by the way, not only does he still remember how to derive the quadratic formula, he remembers how to express figures as partial fractions with complex linear denominators… True story! Long live The Dadster and Happy 31st World Wong Day!
