Lucas Contract debate at the USCF Executive Board meetings

http://boomp3.com/m/3ab271e995de

Jerry Hanken Owes Sam Sloan $100

This is an audio tape of the meeting of the USCF Executive Board held
on November 17, 2006 in Stamford, Connecticut. This is the portion of
the debate in which the board debated whether to extend the contract
of Chess Life Editor Dan Lucas.

This is the only part of the highly contentious meeting that took
place in November 17-18, 2006 that has been made available. I
especially wanted the tape of this meeting made public because a lot
happened at this know-down-drag-out meeting, especially when Joel
Channing started yelling at Sam Sloan and when the notorious hand
under the table incident occurred. However, Bill Hall refused to make
this tape available, in violation of the by-laws.

However, Bill Hall was finally forced to make this ;portion of the
tape available, basically saying that he was only doing it this once,
because of the controversy that arose over the Dan Lucas Contract. At
the subsequent meeting held February 2-3, 2007 in Monrovia California,
Bill Hall casually mentioned that he had extended the contract of Dan
Lucas for one year. This raised a lot of questions because the Chess
Life editor is appointed by the board, not by the Executive Director,
and the board had never approved the extension of the contract.

This caused Bill Goichberg to claim that the board has agreed to
extend the Lucas contract at the August 14, 2006 meeting in Chicago.
However, this was disputed. Finally, Bill Hall was ORDERED to produce
the tape of the board debate on this issue.

This led to a wager between Jerry Hanken and Sam Sloan. Jerry bet $100
that the tape would show that the board agreed to extend the Lucas
Contract. Jerry Hanken had not been at the meeting in Stamford but
Bill Goichberg claimed that the tape would showed this and Jerry
believed him.

Sam Sloan bet that the tape would show no such thing.

The tape clearly shows near the end that the board decided to postpone
all discussion of this issue until the subsequent May meeting. That
subsequent discussion never took place because by then the board had
learned that Bill Hall had extended the Dan Lucas contract without
board authorization.

The debate on this audio file will be interesting to many members.
First, Don Schultz left the room. At board meetings, Don Schultz often
leaves the room when finances or other subjects are discussed in which
he is not interested. In this instance, Schultz left the room because
Lucas is his boy. Schultz had originally introduced Lucas to the board
and had recommended that he be hired.

Also, Lucas was not there either as he had left the meeting early.
Lucas had been flown up from Georgia for this meeting and he was
supposed to be there to answer questions when these issues were
discussed, but when the time came to discuss this subject it was
learned that Lucas had already left. Lucas has since explained that he
left early because he had an appointment for another meeting in
Manhattan. One wonders why the USCF paid for his airplane flight from
Georgia to Connecticut if he was going to use that trip for some other
purpose.

Among the issues discussed at this meeting was the fact that Lucas had
fired popular Chess Life columnist Larry Evans, plus several other
columnists. Also, the fact was discussed that he had changed the
colors and eliminated the borders of the chess diagrams and had made a
number of other changes which had resulted in numerous complaints.

At the just concluded board meeting on November 4, 2007 in Crossville,
Tennessee, some of these subjects still came up. Bill Goicberg pointed
out that the diagrams are still blue, lack distinctive borders and are
not centered. Many members complain, saying that they have difficulty
reading these diagrams.

I think that anyone playing this tape will agree that the board never
agreed to extend the contract of Dan Lucas at the November, 2006
meeting. Therefore Jerry Hanken owes me $100.

Sam Sloan