Resurrected D.C. checkers club thrives, with trash talk and gratitude

August 10, 2024

It was a foregone conclusion that Robert “Z Man” Mackey would trounce Bryant “Buster” McClain in checkers on a recent Thursday night. The fundamental uncertainty at the Capital Pool Checkers club in Northwest Washington would instead concern matters of honor and psychology: Who would win the game of trash talk?

“I’ll take it, you give it," said McClain, sitting about one-and-a-half feet across from Mackey with the board in between. “You give it, I’ll take it. You give it, I’ll take it. Man, there’s something here.”

“Yeah, something’s here," Mackey said, rather sinisterly. "But ain’t nothing there for you. It’s going to hit your head, that’s right. Hit your bald head. You ain’t got no hair up there up to cushion the lick.”

McClain, 58, a photographer from Capitol Heights, Md., was unfazed.

“Come on. You got any more moves? Let me know,” McClain retorted. “Because I’ll be here waiting for you. You got any more? I’ll be wait-ing. I’m wait-ing.”

Mackey, 77, a retired home improvement worker from Southeast Washington, stabbed one of his pieces forward. A minute later, he crowned one of his pieces a king. Another minute passed, then Mackey crowned a second king. McClain sighed and looked confused. By now, he had two pieces left, compared to Mackey’s two kings and two other pieces. What went wrong? Something was there, McClain had thought. He rubbed his pate and promptly gave up.

For more than 40 years, the Capital Pool Checkers club has operated like a quasi-fraternity whose members are mostly Black men and all longtime Washingtonians. The club has survived not only old age — and incessant taunting — but the perils of the city’s gentrifying real estate market. As its 20 or so members celebrate Thanksgiving, they look back on the last two years with gratitude that they could keep their club alive — a club that they say keeps them alive.

“Checkers keeps your brain working and on track for other parts of life,” Mackey said in an interview. “As you get older, your brain gets lazier, but checkers won’t allow your brain to get lazy. Playing checkers makes your brain work like it was when you were 20. It helps you to remember what you can remember. It keeps you solving new problems."

In March 2021, a year into the pandemic, the club was on the brink of dissolution. The landlord that owned the space in Shaw that the group had inhabited for decades wanted them out. The real estate market was hot, and their spot at 813 S St. NW was worth far more than the club’s $700 monthly rent.

‘We’re losing a piece of our history’: The checkers club is closing after nearly 40 years

Once the Capital Pool Checkers club vacated the premises, they carried on at a member’s home for several months. Everyone would have preferred a genuine game space where they could gab, rib each other and stay up until midnight or later. But the only properties they could find came with monthly rents of several thousand dollars.

When The Washington Post published a story about the club’s plight in March 2021, the education nonprofit Higher Achievement reached out. The organization owns a four-story building in the heart of Adams Morgan, on Columbia Road NW. The group occupies the top three floors, but it had resisted renting out the ground-floor space for years. The only interested tenants were vape shops and other businesses that Higher Achievement didn’t feel matched its public service mission.

But when Higher Achievement read about the checkers players, their club seemed like a historical asset worth preserving. So the nonprofit made an offer: The checkers club could rent Higher Achievement’s street-level space for $700 a month, renewable every year.

Yes, the checkers club said. We’ll take it. By the summer of 2021, the club had moved in.

“The club feels like an institution," said Lynsey Wood Jeffries, Higher Achievement’s chief executive.

For the checkers club, the Columbia Road address — near a slew of coffee shops, across from a Safeway, and up the street from the high-end Line hotel — offered foot traffic they never had before and a chance to lure walk-ins and new members. To woo more visitors, the club started offering chess.

“We’ve been absolutely grateful. We could have been out in the street,” said Talmadge “The Razor” Roberts, 92, a retired stockbroker who lives in Northwest and was the group’s president for decades, until 2021. “But we hit the lottery.”

It is easy for anyone who steps inside their space to see why the club was worth fighting for.

Old photos on the wall show members of yore at the club’s checkers boards. One man has a towel over his shoulder, deep in concentration. Another rubs his chin. A third wears a newsboy cap and smokes a cigarette. One photo on the wall is from the cover of a funeral program for Oliver Griffin. A mathematician who joined the Army and worked as a research analyst in weapons systems, Griffin was a checkers fiend. Fifth place at a tournament in Memphis in 2007. Third place in Columbus in 2006. Winner of a championship in Washington in 2003.

On the other side of the club’s room, at a table full of trophies, sits a book, “Crown Me!” published in 2010 by the District-based photographer Peggy Fleming, that profiled its members. The book’s close-up portraits and biographies constitute a chronicle of Black Washington.

George Glenn, an Army veteran, drove a taxi and remembered working on 14th Street NW on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The street, he said in the book, was “bubbling up fire.” Donald “Pressure Man” Cunningham, who supervised “ex-offenders from Lorton prison,” boasted that he “used to travel with Marion Barry, the mayor, back in 1967, ’68 to ’69, before he was mayor.”

“A good checker player learns the game. The entire game. The rules,” Spencer Taylor, a prominent gospel singer, said in the book. “Some people seem that they are slower, but that’s not true. They analyze very deep. They look at everything. I might look at it too quick. Like life.”

Pool checkers is similar to straight checkers, but with key differences. In straight checkers, pieces move forward diagonally one square at a time, capturing opponents along the way. If your piece makes it to the other side of the board, that piece becomes a king, which can move backwards. But in pool checkers, all the pieces, even if they’re not kings, can capture other pieces forwards and backwards. And the kings in pool checkers have far superior powers: They can, for instance, zoom across multiple spaces like chess bishops.

Kim Crystal, 52, who lives a few blocks away from the checkers club, joined more than a year ago and counts herself as its first new member since the relocation. She’s one of the club’s two White members and its only female player, but those categories aren’t anywhere near the top of her mind when she plays chess and checkers. She loves the camaraderie and her role as the club’s Instagram account point person.

Most of the group’s members pay their monthly dues of $50 on time. When people can’t pay, the club taps a reservoir of donations it received in the aftermath of The Post article about its real estate struggles, according to the club’s treasurer, Jonah Gold, the club’s other White member, who works as a director for the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.

Since its Adams Morgan move, the group — and specifically Mackey (“Z Man”) — have achieved minor fame. In November 2021, Lester Holt of NBC News broadcast a segment about the club as “the heart and soul of Washington, a brotherhood, a bond over checkers.”

Mackey — who played Holt during the segment and couldn’t resist taunting the journalist — was decked out in a gray suit, sunglasses and a gray top hat for the occasion. He later got a call to star in an advertising campaign for the Woolrich clothing company.

“For the shoot, Woolrich spotlights Robert Mackey, the renowned Z Man,” one fashion website wrote.

For his recent match with McClain, Mackey was dressed in corduroy overalls, a blue plaid shirt and snakeskin cowboy boots. But he would be the first to tell anyone that he is hardly “renowned” in the sport of checkers. He is not among the highest-ranked in the club. But he does derive deep satisfaction from beating McClain.

McClain, too, would concede that Mackey is a superior sparring partner, as well as a good friend. Whenever they duel, they make a wager tilted in McClain’s favor. On that particular night, Mackey had to pay McClain $5 for every game Mackey lost, while McClain paid just $3 when he lost.

The two men found their way to the checkers club from different starting points.

Mackey was born in 1946 in Durham, N.C., then moved to South Carolina, where he graduated from high school. He moved to the District for a construction job, then bounced up and down the East Coast before settling in Washington. He’s worked as an assistant chef at Clyde’s in Georgetown, a bartender at the Mayflower hotel and a home repair and improvement contractor. He was once shot in Maryland by an acquaintance in the left hand, so two of his fingers are missing their top thirds.

McClain was born in Washington nearly 20 years after his rival. After he graduated from high school, he worked a cafeteria job at the University of Maryland and then for two decades managed the seafood department at several Safeway grocery stores in the region.

When they squared off on a recent night, the two men embarked on an epic night of checkers. Three sets total. The first two sets stopped after 14 games that resulted in a winner or loser — draws didn’t count toward this total — and the third halted after 20.

At first, everything seemed friendly. The television was playing an NFL game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Cincinnati Bengals. People were laughing. McClain was drinking a large pink concoction from Starbucks.

Then the men started slamming their checkers pieces hard onto the squares after each move. Suddenly, a battle was on. McClain had been losing most of the night’s matches, but now he was on the verge of taking a second consecutive game. This, to Mackey, was inconceivable. McClain, according to Mackey’s personal bylaws, is a “ham” — someone who loses a lot. How was the club ham prevailing against the debonair checkers star of NBC News fame?

McClain had two kings and two other pieces. Mackey just had a king. McClain was chasing Mackey’s king all over the board, taunting him relentlessly, urging him to wave the white flag.

“Still want it? You going to give up, man?” McClain said.

Mackey said nothing. He clenched some of McClain’s vanquished pieces in his left hand, the one that had been shot all those years ago. With his right hand, he outran McClain’s other pieces. Still, it was only a matter of time.

“You just wasting time," McClain told Mackey. “Wasting time!”

Finally, Mackey gave up. But McClain was still fuming about all the time he believed Mackey had wasted trying to eke out a win in a game he was clearly going to lose. He rested his elbows on the table and gave Mackey a death stare. Mackey, meanwhile, was quickly resetting his pieces for the next match, ignoring McClain until he couldn’t.

“You gonna set the board up or what?” Mackey asked. “I ain’t got all day to be fooling with you.”

When they started their next game, McClain tilted his head down. But he smiled ever so slightly and then licked his lips and shook his thighs back and forth. For the next several hours, the men would spar round after round, landing at a score that no amount of trash talk could drown out: Mackey, 35 wins; McClain, 13.

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