Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
in their respective sports. Ryan details how more and more families pushed their daughters into elite competition, often moving across the country to work with particular coaches. She describes one father, Bill Bragg, who actually gave up custody of his daughter to her figure skating coach, hoping that would help young Hollie become an Olympic ice princess. Ryan explains his motivation:
Bragg himself had been a swimming coach, but swimming held no magic. It couldn’t turn milkmaids into princesses. To him, skating was more than a sport. To succeed in skating was to succeed in life. It was a road to riches and recognition, and perhaps more important, it was a road to respectability. Skating offered a life of restaurants with cloth napkins, hotels with marble lobbies, a life where a girl from the wrong side of the tracks could be somebody.53
Other competitive sports and activities also come with promises of riches and recognition, particularly in the form of endorsements. This is another reason hypercompetition has started to permeate children’s activities and promoted competition for younger and younger children. A 2003 New York Times Magazine piece focused on four-year-old champion skateboarder Dylan, who already was being touted as the “next big little thing” by promoters, merchandisers, and his parents.54
Even in historically established sports, such as golf, young children who succeed competitively garner publicity, attention, and hence money. Twelve-year-old Alexis “Lexi” Thompson made headlines in the summer of 2007 when she became the youngest qualifier ever for the U.S. Women’s Open in golf. Touted as the next “pre-teen prodigy,” Alexis began fielding endorsement deals. At age sixteen, in December 2011, she became the youngest ever winner of an LPGA tournament—while wearing sponsor attire.
This proclivity for naming children prodigies, another element of hypercompetition, happens even more often in music. In a 2000 book that highlights the young string students who attend Julliard’s Saturday pre-college program, music writer Barbara Sand explains that parents and students are so anxious to get and keep a “prodigy” label that they will often lie about a child’s age.55 Being named a prodigy (defined as a child who displays “talents that are only supposed to be the province of gifted and highly trained adults”) confers status, but also money and attention.56
With so many competitive circuits available, high performers almost expect to be declared prodigies. By the 1980s, middle-class parents presumed their children to be above average,57 and expectations have only increased since then. Indeed since the 1980s we have seen the development of complex, competitive circuits in a variety of activities that previously had a much smaller competitive element.
Cheerleading is a good example of the growth of complex, competitive circuits. Cheerleading has a long history in this country, starting with men as the first participants in the late nineteenth century. Women became cheerleaders in the 1920s and have dominated the activity since then, with a few exceptions (for example, yell leaders at Texas A&M are still all male). Cheerleading has often been associated with small-town local pride, national patriotism, and school promotion.58 A few scholastic-based competitions were held for older cheerleading squads—at the high school and collegiate level—in the growth-of-competition period. In 1981 a national organization, the United Cheer Association, organized its own private cheerleading competition.59 But in the 1990s private, competition-only squads, tied to neither scholastic nor civic identities, began to emerge as a variety of private cheer competitions started. Now such teams as “The Hotties, The Firecrackers and The Flames . . . [compete] at [events like] the American Showdown, a giant, ‘Bring It On’–style tournament where more than 60 of the top cheerleading teams from Kindergarten–12th grade vie for cash and prizes.”60
Competitive cheer is but one example of the hypercompetition that began in the 1980s and 1990s and characterizes competitive kids’ activities today, along with many other activities, such as skateboarding, golf, figure skating, and gymnastics. But what about the three case study activities of chess, soccer, and dance?
Chess
Chess prodigies have emerged fairly often over time, which is not surprising given the game’s long history. Chess has been part of the Western repertoire of games since the eighth century, when Arabs brought it to southern Europe.61 In the United States it’s been played since Colonial times. The first American chess prodigy was Paul Morphy, who is said to have beaten General Winfield Scott twice as a nine-year-old. Morphy famously went crazy and died in a bathtub at age forty-seven in 1884—not exactly an auspicious precedent for American chess prodigies.
Despite Morphy’s success as the unofficial World Champion, there was not much youth chess development in the United States in the early twentieth century. Instead growth in chess for children occurred in other parts of the world. The USSR, which focused on developing children’s chess after the 1917 Revolution, was the real center of chess excellence. There chess became as popular as soccer and ice hockey. Clubs were formed and children as young as four were tutored in strategy.62
The United States Chess Federation (USCF) was not even founded until 1939, the same time as Little League (though the USCF was not limited to children). The organization soon began to sponsor tournaments and clubs, and in less than two decades it helped develop the best American chess player and the most famous chess prodigy: Bobby Fischer. Fischer taught himself how to play at age six and achieved the status of National Master at twelve. He won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship in 1956. A year later, at age fourteen, he became the youngest-ever U.S. champion (a record that still stands). Before Fischer, the USSR had been certain of its global dominance in chess, especially because it had started teaching chess in school classrooms in the 1950s.63
The idea of teaching children scholastic chess finally began to take hold in the United States in the 1960s, as Fischer’s star rose. But it was not until the Fischer-Spassky match of 1972 that American scholastic chess really took off. The phenomenal success of Fischer during the World Championship inspired moms to pull their sons out of Little League that summer and enroll them in chess lessons.64 After 1972 it became possible for some chess players to make a career out of teaching chess in the United States as parents eagerly signed their young children up for lessons.65
As with other competitive children’s activities, chess grew steadily over the course of the twentieth century and then exploded in the 1970s. Over the next three decades scholastic chess became more organized and competitive. The first national chess championship run by the USCF specifically for young children, also known as the Elementary Championships, was held in 1976.
In the early 1990s, the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, about another young chess prodigy, Josh Waitzkin (the book was written by his father, Fred), helped scholastic chess reach a bigger audience. Chess journalist Dan Heisman wrote that the movie “was a phenomenal success, and served as a catalyst for the growth of scholastic chess in North America. In 1990, only about 10 percent of tournament chess players in the U.S. were under 19; today [in 2002], over half are.”66 The depth of this chess mania is reflected in the fact that parents were banned from tournament rooms in the 1980s, as they were all too willing to help their kids cheat.
Along with Searching for Bobby Fischer another type of chess story garnered media attention in the late 1980s and 1990s. This narrative focused on the success of chess teams from poor, mostly African American urban communities like Harlem and the Bronx. In 1991, a school from an impoverished section of the Bronx won the national championships, showing that kids from all class backgrounds could compete in chess.67
Children from poor urban areas could not afford the private coaches used by children from private schools, like Waitzkin, but they did have nonprofits in their corner. The most prominent of these programs is Chess in the Schools, based in New York City. Founded in 1986 as the American Chess Foundation, Chess in the Schools provides chess teachers for schools in impoverished areas all around New York City. Another organization, The Right Move, sponsors free tournaments where children can play without paying a fee—and these are some of the most competitive events for children in New York City.
Competitive chess is unusual in that it has refocused itself on helping children from less-advantaged backgrounds, in much the same way