(This satire won the Chess Journalists of America award as best humorous article for 2006-07.) 

Complete exhaustion was setting in. After days of back-and-forth e-mails and then a two-hour conference call, the Executive Board had approved the U.S. Championship bid from Stillwater, Oklahoma. Such formulations as “Only show in town” and “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” though trite, were quite apropos in this case.

Yet I kept thinking of the one Board member who, after wasting an inordinate amount of our time on certain retired players and asking us to use USCF money to track down someone who was impersonating him on the Internet, had found no less than ten reasons to object to this Championship bid – without having an alternative of his own.

But as my head dipped over the keyboard and the arms of Morpheus slowly enveloped me, I suddenly found myself in…

New York City, where the U.S. Championship was being held. And not at the Marshall Club or some such pedestrian venue, but at Carnegie Hall!

Of course, Kamsky, Onischuk, Nakamura, and Shabalov were there. But there was more, much more! Bobby Fischer, his rights restored after a certain Executive Board member led a Million Man March on the State Department, proudly sporting a tattoo of his newly-issued USCF ID number!! Ray Weinstein, deinstitutionalized through the efforts of that same EB member, playing as strongly as ever!!! The shades of Fine, Reshevsky, Marshall, Pillsbury, and Morphy, summoned forth by the powerful incantations “Everybody knows that…” and “It is perfectly obvious that…” !!!!

And as Polgar, Truong, Goichberg, Hough, and the myriad other previous skeptics fell to their knees in gratitude, the organizer manifested himself in the spot once graced by the likes of Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Stravinsky, Toscanini, and Bernstein. Yes, it was The Real Sam Sloan Himself, and he bestrode the hall like a colossus, bellowing, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

I woke up in a cold sweat.