On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:37:04 GMT, "Chess One"
wrote:

In the good old days of high-Fide, at a World Championship event in
Kalmykia, Sri Krishna Kirsan, the Buddhist dictator of that country and of
Fide, decided that Fide owned the game scores. This was news to the legal
world, the delegates, and the players, and since Ronald Reagan wasn't
President at the time the US couldn't send the gunboats since that would
require porting them overland some considerable distance - and there weren't
enough gunboats anyway, all the money having been spent on a missile defence
system...

So my Russian friend /bought/ the game scores, and sent them to me. I
forwarded them to Tom Dorsch with a note which donated them to USCF to use
freely.

This effectively brought Kirsan's caper to an end.

At that time Tom [who frequently wrote in this forum] wore a camel-coloured
coat jacket, and refused to notice my
jokes about it for the next 3 years.

What is missing from Sam's bio-blog is the essential set of circumstances
that USCF would have been dead as a doornail 7 years ago if Tom Dorsch had
not been obnoxious!

He, more than somewhat acerbically, insisted that the institution was
financially bleeding to death. Even his political opponents agreed that he
would have been the next USCF president if he had not campaigned on the very
strange finances at that time [just as strange, dear viewer, as the current
finances], and his actions forced the attention of the board and delegates
on the imminent collapse of the whole shebang.

He was a USCF politician who was at the same time a strong fiscal
conservative, and also someone who thought the institution needed a radical
overall before it 'went south' and was reduced to some mumchance shadow of
itself, useless to one and all.

In other words, he was a heretic and a successful prophet of Doom.

His buddy Eade was a political ally on the board, but philosophically not on
the same page. Dorsch for example was all for conferencing with top players
on 'what furthers us' but Eade, charged with a Fide role, fought the
players, to the extent of telling Seirawan to '**** off' over the issue of
drug testing. He also ignored the East coast by 'answering' GM Benjamin's
concerns in CL with a 'Leave it to Beaver, you really don't know what you're
talking about' printed piece.

This situation brought about the remarkable situation of the
'representative' of USCF at Fide being at odds with the delegates [who had
clearly said 'no' to drug testing] /and/ with the players, who, as above,
were not encouraged to air their 'silly' views either. This situation was
perhaps the last straw which broke the trust of any top players wishing to
be 'represented' by USCF. After this, USCF politics became increasingly
estranged from any constituency's representation.

Dorsch did not support any of these actions by Eade, and instead blew the
whistle on very strange financial goings on, old-boyism, and a form of
pork-barrel politics. Dorsch and I didn't agree on everything, but he had a
fine analytical mind and despised political cronyism.

Phil Innes
20th December, 2005

This is a very good article. Excellent. One of the best I have ever
seen.

I especially liked the part about how Ronald Reagan did not have a
enough gunboats to get those game scored from Kalmykia, so you had to
call in Tom Dorsch instead.

You would perform a great service if you would drop your entire
article into the Tom Dorsch Wikipedia page.

Just go to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Dorsch

Then click on "edit this page" at the top.

Then just paste this article in somewhere and save.

I cannot do this myself, so I would be most thankful if you would do
it.

Sam Sloan