So, for Valentine’s Day my wife got me Game Of Kings, a book by Michael Weinreb wherein he follows America’s top-ranked high school chess team for a year. I was introduced to Weinreb via ESPN.com’s Page 2 site where he contributes from time to time on that staff and, for the most part, his articles have been very, very good and very interesting. Before I started Game Of Kings I did a search on ESPN.com for his other articles because I thought I had remembered that he had written a separate article on this high school chess team. One of the results that came up was his “Lost Kids of Willows” article—something that I had completely forgotten about. When I read it at the time of its initial posting I found it to be extremely moving and extremely sad (this article also came out around the time that the school that my wife works at had suffered through their third death; this time a parent, and this after two kids had suddenly died so the timing was a little weird). The article can be found here.
I don’t know why this article resonates so much with me, maybe it’s simply because his writing and handling of these tragedies lies in that midpoint between journalism and emotional descriptivism. Maybe it’s just that three kids dying in incredibly random ways over the course of a year and a half puts certain things into perspective. In either case, I thought it was an outstanding article but one that is really sad so be forewarned if you decide to read this at work.