YouSaid · the spoken record

Maurice Ashley

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119
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2020-07-29
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2020-07-29
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1
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  1. “When a friend of mine who I was beating told me that he knew a group that could beat me. And I was a big trash talker. So when he said that, I was like, please, bring it. And he told me about the Black Bear School and he took me to one of their homes.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Google Translate, right? You don't speak the language, you're literally trying to figure out word by word what the explanation is. Of course, the piece names were different, but they were consistent. So for example, in Russian, a bishop is a slon, and it would look like a capital letter C. So whenever you saw that, you knew that was the name of the piece that was moving. And then you know what square it was moving to. So at least the games they could go over very easily. But the explanations they had to look up and do it very slowly. So you can imagine the seriousness they took chess with. And I got to meet them.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “That is indeed the next chapter. The group itself, Black Bear School, was a group of largely African American males, one Latino brother in there, as well. They were a group who play chess together either in the parks or at each other's homes. They took chess deathly seriously. They studied books. They studied encyclopedias. They studied chess material, magazines in other languages, even if they didn't speak them. They would get out a dictionary from a magazine. I remember you have a German magazine or a Russian magazine, Chakmotney Bulletin, and they would take a dictionary and go over each word translating word by word to find out what was in the material, which, you know, you think about.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And then I, so when I was done, I went back to play him. And the first game I played him, he crushed me again. And it turns out that he had read that book and many other books. He had game, and I was stupid thinking that I was going to get him. But then that really stoked the fire. And from then on, we played chess every single day after school, like every single day. It was basically school, homework chess. And that was my life in high school.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Wasn't Bipaul Morphy? It included Paul Morphy as one of the greatest chess players of all time. And I don't know if it was solely the book or the fact that I wanted to kick my friend's ass. I think this indicates like, wait a minute, there's a book. Oh, I'm going to take this out. His name was Cloter Colis. His family is from Haiti, another immigrant family. But everybody called him Chico. And Chico just had mauled me and it's like this. And then there was a book. Wait a minute. I'm taking out this book. I'm going to study the book. And then I got something for Chico. And I read it. I was fascinated. Wow, there's strategies you're supposed to do certain specific openings and these ideas. I didn't know any of it existed.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “passionate love of games and it was a lot of board games whether it was checkers which we call drafts whether it was card games and chess was one of those games that my brother and his friends got hooked into and i kind of played around with it for a bit my brother said i used to be in the backyard just moving the pieces around by myself i don't even recall doing that but later i came when i came to the u.s in high school i saw a friend playing and that's when i got involved i started playing this guy i thought i could beat and it just crushed me and i couldn't understand and you know again competitive side it's like what's going on and it just so happened i was in the in the library that i saw a book on chess and that's where the love affair began”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “This was hardcore. This was drug dealers shooting every single night, not necessarily at anyone, but just to remind the neighborhood who was in charge. There were prostitutes in the corners. You had car thieves. I mean, it was a hot mess. It was Brooklyn Urban Blight at its worst. New York has changed a lot since Brooklyn especially has changed a lot since then. But back then, it was really tough. And so the second part of your question, sorry. And chess came into my life when I went to Brooklyn Technical High School. Now, I knew the rules of chess, actually. I knew the rules of chess from Jamaica because we played a lot of games in Jamaica. We didn't have television. TV came on at six o'clock at night. And the first thing that came on was the news. And it was two channels. So you didn't want to watch that as a kid. So you learned to play games. And I had a very”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “We ended up in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Brownsville is the same neighborhood that Mike Tyson grew up in. And I often make the joke that Brownsville was so rough that Mike had to get out of Brownsville. And it was that tough. I mean, my mother was able to get us this apartment that she could afford, which was a two-bedroom apartment. There were four of us. So my brother, sister, and I were in the one room, one bedroom, bunk bed, or the rollout bed, actually. And my mother had the other bedroom. And my brother at the time was 20 years old. So you can imagine a 20-year-old having to sleep in the same room as his younger brother and sister. you know, he got his life together pretty quickly, went to school, and got work and then moved out. But that's what she could afford. And it was just, you know, what it was. And Brownsville in the late 70s, early 80s was what you can imagine what Brooklyn was, not today's Brooklyn. You know, you've got Starbucks and lattes and Park Slow moms. Forget it. This was Beak.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Quite an extraordinary thing to do to be able to go back and see myself as a six-year-old, seven-year-old, eight-year-old, as my thoughts evolved and my intellect grew as I wrote her letters. So it was. Really was an extraordinary thing, very strange to finally meet this mythical figure who would sacrifice so much for us to have a better life.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And she took out this pile of letters. These are the letters. Actually, it was my daughter who went down to interview her. My daughter's a budding filmmaker to interview her. My daughter said, do you know that grandma has letters that you wrote her from 40 years ago? It's like, what are you talking about? She says, yeah, she's been saving. that kept that connection. And you imagine it's not email. This is letters, handwritten letters being sent and waiting an expectation for letters to come back for our mother to tell us about how life was, where she was, and for her to hear from us. And I was a pretty poetic kid. I told her, you know, wrote poems to her, how much I loved her and how I missed her and all that.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Oh, absolutely bizarre. I mean, for us, our grandmother was really our mother, especially for me and my sister, right? Because we were. So young, I was two, my sister was less than a year old. And so we didn't have intimate knowledge of this woman. She would visit us when she could every year if she could, but sometimes it took longer. And we would write her letters. It's funny. She showed us the letter. She saved the letters we wrote her from over 40 years ago. And I didn't know she had them until last summer.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “The whole time. At first, she was a nanny, then she got an office job and saved up her money and got herself ready because her three children were going to be with her and she wanted to be able to afford that and take care of us. And so in 1978, we finally were able to come up and it was just like her dream basically come true. A dream come true for us as well because we had been living without our mother for 10 years. And you can imagine when that finally came to pass, it was just it was just like a fairy tale.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Again, my mother, she wanted to bring us up, but she couldn't by the rules at the time just bring her family with her. So she was allowed in the 60s, there was a mass immigration of Caribbean folks. But you had to come by yourself in the main. And then after you had proven yourself, gotten your own citizenship paper, et cetera, you were able to bring your family up. And so a lot of children, they were called barrel children, which meant that parents would come usually by themselves to the country and then they would send down supplies in a barrel. So he'd wait for that barrel to be shipped so that you could open it up and get all the goodies from your parent. And that barrel was an indicator of how much my mother was working in order to supply materials for us to be able to survive in Jamaica. And it took her 10 years. And that's what happened. It just took her 10 years. She was in New York.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “We knew we wanted to be something special, but you just wanted to have the resources to be able to do that. And I think it was really fortunate that we finally got that opportunity in my mother's diligence. And eventually my father re-entered our lives as well. And he's a dancer. He's a dance teacher. He was a professional dancer, danced with Martha Graham and was very accomplished at his own dance company as well. So, you know, the family was just a pretty driven bunch.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I think it started very young. I mean, my mother, despite not being a competitor herself, had a tremendous drive. Our family had a drive to succeed. Our circumstances were extremely modest. Jamaica wasn't what people think of it as at least the northwest side of Jamaica is Monteco Bay and Ocho Rios and Negrill and Party and all that reggae sunsflash, but we lived in Kingston. And Kingston was people packed on top of each other in not great conditions. And so”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Well, yes, we are a competitive family. My older brother, Devon, is a kickboxer, a boxing trainer now, but he was a three-time world champion kickboxer. And my sister, the baby, Alicia, was a six-time world champion boxer. And so we always joke about who's better and who's got more accolades. And we always try to one up each other. One gets into the Hall of Fame, the others are upset, and the other one gets into the Hall of Fame. And like my sister's not in the boxing Hall of Fame yet. So she's like, oh man, you guys got that on me. So yeah, we definitely are very competitive family. It started.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “It got pretty worn down pretty quickly. It really turned into a softball very quickly after that. But just being raised by my grandmother, she was a teacher by training. And so she would teach us so much as young people. So we were really well prepared educationally because of my grandmother. And she was 64 years old at the time when my mother left. So you can imagine a 64-year-old having had seven children of her own now suddenly taking on the care of her daughter's children at that age, you know, when you might be thinking about maybe slowing down or retiring, enjoying herself. But for the next 10 years, she took care of us. And that was really a hugely significant part of growing up, living there until finally my mother got the resources and the paperwork through to get us green cards and finally bring us to the United States.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And my mother would send down stuff, supplies to Jamaica, whether it be food stuffs, flour and rice. She sent him in a barrel and she sent books. She'd send notebooks. And I remember her sending a softball and a glove. And of course, in Jamaica, nobody played softball, baseball, nothing. So I threw the glove to the side, not knowing what to do with it. And we used the softball as a soccer ball”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Well, yes, I was born in Jamaica, the island, not the area of Queens. And I grew up there, I was there until I was 12 years old before I came to this country. But probably the most significant thing that happened for me in Jamaica was the fact that my mother left Jamaica to come to the United States when I was two years old. My brother was 10. My sister was seven months old. And she had this opportunity to come to the US, but she couldn't bring all of us at the same time. She could only bring herself. And her leaving was really quite an event in our lives. My father wasn't with us, living with us at the time. So we grew up with our grandmother.”

    2020-07-29 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #449: Grandmaster Maurice Ashley — The Path and Strategies of World-Class Mastery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT