At 4 years old, Susan Polgar was already playing chess — and winning. At 15, in the mid-1980s, her victories made her the top-ranked woman in the world. By 1991, she’d become a grandmaster.
It’s a picture of Polgar as a 4-year-old girl sitting behind a chessboard that graces the cover of her new memoir, “Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny, and the Making of a Grandmaster.” The former Webster University chess coach is back in St. Louis for an author event Thursday evening at St. Louis County Library’s Clark Family Branch.
“I kind of made a big splash by becoming the elementary school girl champion for Budapest, my hometown, and not only winning it, but winning it with a perfect score,” Polgar told St. Louis on the Air about her early start in chess.
At the time, Polgar’s opponents were two to three times her age — and size. “I still needed the phonebooks or pillows to sit up to even see across the board and reach across the board. So it was a huge sensation.”
In “Rebel Queen,” Polgar details how she confronted sexism and battled communist control in her native Hungary.
“The government] used my gender against me, but the sexism came just as strong within the chess community,” Polgar said. “My parents were told: ‘Oh, you're destroying your daughter. You know, she should be playing with dolls. She should learn to dance. Chess is not something for girls.’ So I kept hearing that over and over and over as a little girl, and of course, later came specific discriminatory decisions, of not wanting to let me play in open competition against men.”
Polgar credits her parents for standing up for their beliefs, even as her government threatened to place her in foster care — simply because she was a girl playing chess.
“My parents were very brave, and it was very risky,” she said.
In the book, Polgar also describes what she was feeling the moment she earned the title of grandmaster, in 1991, at a tournament in Spain.
“This was something I had wanted more than anything. It's what got me up in the morning and kept me at the chessboard for hours a day. I had built my entire life around this goal for years, and now I had it,” Polgar writes. “My immediate response was more physical than emotional. My legs went numb, and I felt a buzzing in my ears as if my entire body was recalibrating to this new reality. Once that subsided, I was left with this warm glow of contentment that seemed to emanate from every part of me. A need that had become a deep part of my psyche was now at long last fulfilled.”
To hear more about Susan Polgar’s journey and how she battled back against misogyny and survived an assault, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or click the play button below.
Related Event
What: St. Louis County Library Foundation Presents Chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar
When: 7 p.m. March 13
Where: Clark Family Branch, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63131
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Jada Jones is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
