Changing the game: The Royal Oak Initiative promotes wellness, wisdom through chess
The reggae beats of Bob Marley's "Could You Be Loved" are punctuated by the sound of rain each time someone opens the door to the Cooperative Chess Cultural Center in Columbus' Olde Towne East.
It's a muggy Sunday afternoon in July, but the downpour isn't deterring anyone from The Royal Oak Initiative's biweekly chess meetup at the center ( better known as The 4C and pronounced "The Fork") on Parsons Avenue.
Even after a full day of events the day before celebrating International Chess Day, folks still wanted to get together and play.
The crowd is a mix of old and new faces. Chess pros. Newbies. A dad teaching his two young daughters. A whole family facing off across their chessboards in pairs.
Making his way around the room is the man responsible for it all: Ernest Levert, Jr.
Levert, founder of The Royal Oak Initiative, takes a seat across the chessboard from 13-year-old Brandon Keeton. It's Keeton's first time, so Levert runs him through the rules of the room.
First, you have to know the name of your partner. They introduce themselves and fist bump.
Second, you can't leave until you take an L. It's up to Keeton to view it as a loss or a lesson.
And third, share your wisdom and have fun.
"If you're in a position where you're working with someone new, teach them what you know, so that they get up to speed," Levert said.
The last rule is the whole point of The Royal Oak Initiative, a local mentoring nonprofit that uses the wisdom of chess to promote wellness and cultivate community.
"Our motto here is, 'Chess for wisdom and wellness.' Our focus here is really trying to transform the community," Levert said. "The African proverb that governs this is, 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,' and we're not leaving anybody behind."
Humble beginnings at Upper Cup Coffee
It all got started across the street.
Levert, who founded The Royal Oak Initiative in 2014, started regularly visiting Upper Cup Coffee at 79 Parsons Avenue around that same time. Partly for the caffeine, but also for the chess.
Old timers would start impromptu chess matches outside the coffee shop at a table inlaid with a chess board, a sight too inviting for Levert — who had been playing chess since the fourth grade — to pass up.
Levert started hosting regular open play chess meetups at Upper Cup soon after. Every other Sunday, dozens of folks from around the city would gather at the coffee shop and play for hours. In 2021, Levert saw that the old tattoo shop across the street from Upper Cup was vacant. He saw a vision for space for more people to gather, for events, a future chess training center.
By November 2021, The 4C was open for business, now home to The Royal Oak Initiative's biweekly open play meetups, which are held on the second and fourth Sunday of the month from 4 to 8 p.m. The center's green and white walls are decorated with Africentric artwork and posters of prominent Black leaders. Hip hop pipes through the speakers.
"There's a lot of melanin on the walls," Levert said. "Everything here is about creating a safe space for folks who don't traditionally feel safe. In the world, but also specifically in chess spaces."
An open door
Chess hasn't always been the most representative or welcoming place. Out of more than 1,700 chess grandmasters, only a handful are Black. A woman has never won the World Chess Championship.
"There are certain elements of the (chess) culture that make it harder for certain identities to really rise up," Levert said.
That hasn't been a challenge at The 4C so far, he said.
An open door and welcoming environment is crucial to Levert's vision of The Royal Oak Initiative. So often when he tells people about his mentoring and chess center, the first thing he hears almost immediately is, "I'm not good."
"There's a defensiveness, like a qualifier. Like everyone was immediately prepared to be attacked, which is our society. They expect to hear: That was a dumb move. You're stupid. My IQ is higher," Levert said. "Everything is so toxically competitive and comparative."
That freedom to learn, fail and grow is partly what drew Lee Wooding to The 4C. She had known Levert for awhile and had heard plenty about his chess meetup, but it wasn't until March that she finally decided to give it a shot.
Wooding didn't know anyone growing up who played chess, and it was always a space that intimidated her. But playing with folks at Upper Cup and The 4C broke that tension. Now, she tells everyone to play. She even invited two of her friends to join her at a recent Sunday meetup.
"Even if you're not that into chess, you can come to this space," Wooding, 28, of the Northwest Side, said. "It's for everyone."
Honey Willoughby rediscovered her love of chess through The Royal Oak Initiative.
As a child, Willoughby, now 30, of Columbus' Milo Grogan neighborhood, described herself as "everyone's favorite rowdy scalawag."
She picked up chess in middle school and loved it, but that rowdiness got her kicked out of her school's chess club. It wasn't something she picked up again until Levert, a longtime friend, convinced her to become a chess coach as part of The Royal Oak Initiative's mentoring program.
Now, Willoughby loves getting to be the adult in the room she needed as a child. Someone to teach her about self-control but also to give her a safe place to be herself.
"I tell these kids all the time, 'If you make a wrong move, that's OK. There are more moves to make,'" she said, tearing up. "It's purposeful. Your piece is purposeful."
The Royal Oak Initiative has come a long way from those pickup games across the street, and Levert has big plans for the chess community in Columbus and beyond. His vision is that everybody in central Ohio knows how to play chess and can teach it to somebody else.
But to Willoughby, Wooding, Levert and everyone at The 4C, chess is more than just a game. The parallels to life, Levert said, are endless.
"If y'all think this is about chess, it's not," Levert said. "It's life lessons."
Sheridan Hendrix is a higher education reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. Sign up for Extra Credit, her education newsletter, here.
@sheridan120
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: The Royal Oak Initiative promotes wellness, wisdom through chess
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