Dama's Followers

To the average firehouse or parlor player, checkers is one of the simplest of indoor sports. Yet since Pearl Harbor the game has waxed inexplicably in popularity. Fighting men have taken it up. Civilians have too.

Newcomers to serious checkers have found that there is more to the game than meets the dilettante's eye. They have learned to call themselves "checkerists," have taken up the game's esoteric lingo, become used to describing moves and successions of moves by the numbered squares on the boards. They even have their private deity: a goddess named Dama (Italian for checkers).

For centuries experts at checkers had only one series of starting moves, the single-corner opening. Now, thanks to the hatted analysts who have worked at the game in such dedicated spots as Broadway's checker palaces, there are some 49 classified two-man openings, with hundreds of complicated variations. To checkerists, the post mortem of a game is as dear as it is to bridge players.

Some checkers sharks have turned to writing books about the game. Latest guide is The Modern Encyclopedia of Checkers ($5), compiled and published by pompous, publicity-loving, 36-year-old William F. Ryan, a barnstorming champion who advertises himself as the game's No. 1 mastermind.

Unlike Expert Millard F. Hopper's recent bestseller, How to Play Winning Checkers (6,000 copies sold to date), Willie Ryan's book is no primer. It is for the checkerists, new and veteran, who have pored over Dama literature dating back beyond Spain's Torquemada (1547). For the checkerist who can spot a three-for-two shot, Ryan's maze of checker lore is shimmering with clear-cut tactics based on the operations of the best generals in the game.

Prefaced by a characteristic Ryan cliche, "Through the Pages Following Hereafter Pass the Most Beautiful Checker Games in the World," and sprinkled with un-Shakesperian asides, he unfolds 232 pages of diagrams and diagnoses. He also expounds for pages on three of the most treacherous openings ever devised: the Edinburgh Single, a deciding factor in more match and tournament games than any other known opening; the Octopus, whose "manifold tentacles . . . have ensnared many of the game's ablest critics"; and Oliver's Twister, a baffler ever since Manhattan's Oliver J. Mauro laid down its basic "theme" some years ago.

Intrigued by such contrapuntal variations on a simple theme, many a dub of long standing has plucked up interest. Checker sales are ballooning. And the crusty, generally introverted old men of checkers who have long pored over the game that few understood, now have company and competition in the new recruits who talk familiarly of Millard Hopper and bumptious Willie Ryan.

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