Published: Sunday, March 25,
2012 6:00AM Updated: Sunday, March 25, 2012, 9:02AM
By Joanna
Connors, The Plain Dealer
Like most Americans, Geoff Yaw thought checkers -- on the rare occasion he thought about the game at all -- was a simple board game meant for children. He learned how wrong he was 3˝ years ago, when he was invited to lunch by the president of the American Checker Federation.
Alan Millhone had driven up to Cleveland from Belpre, Ohio, to meet with Yaw and Brian Glazen of Think Media Studios, a production company in Mayfield Heights that is perhaps best known for making the game-opening videos for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Millhone had connected with them through Joe A. LoConti, a Cleveland businessman and longtime checkers player who has offices in the same building as Think Media. Millhone wanted their help: He hoped to take checkers to the level of poker, with games broadcast on ESPN.
Midway through the meal, Yaw was sure of two things: First, he couldn't help Millhone with his dreams of ESPN glory. Second, what Millhone was telling him about the complexity of the game and the world of international competitive players could make a great documentary, maybe even another "Spellbound" or "King of Kong."
He was right. "King Me," written and directed by Yaw and produced by him, Glazen and Keith Potoczak of Think Media, is a great documentary. But it also has a gentle comic element that puts it just this side of a Christopher Guest mockumentary. Filled with endearing characters who are deadly serious about their fringe pursuit, it is the "Best in Show" of checkers. Except it's all real.
One of the surprise highlights of the Cleveland International Film Festival, it plays at 12:10 p.m. Tuesday, 5:10 p.m. Wednesday and 9:45 p.m. Thursday at Tower City Cinemas.
Two weeks after the lunch, Yaw and a Think Media colleague
took cameras to a Rodeway Inn in Medina, the unlikely site of an
international checkers tournament -- which are also held in
places like Las Ve
gas.
In the main event, a brilliant young upstart was challenging the long-reigning world champion in the form of checkers known as Go-As-You-Please -- the form most Americans know and play.
Yaw, who was making his first feature-length movie, knew right away that he had found a documentary director's dream: Two vivid, larger-than-life characters were facing off in a classic David-and-Goliath story.
The champ for 19 years, Ronald "Suki" King, was a tireless self-promoter and a well-funded local celebrity in Barbados. The young challenger, Lubabalo Kondlo, came from a poverty-stricken black township in South Africa and was almost unknown in the checkers world.
"I saw it as this great underdog story set in what I thought was a very strange world," Yaw said.
The first time he met King, for instance, the champ was counting out a stack of $20 bills, which he then wired to a store in Las Vegas to have a week and a half's worth of clothes delivered back to Ohio. King, it turned out, was habitually late and had come from Barbados without luggage.
Kondlo arrived with both luggage and some pretty heavy-duty baggage, in the form of a powerful nemesis back home in South Africa who was trying to block his participation in international tournaments.
When he heard about that, Yaw couldn't believe his luck. Now he had a villain for his story, too, a villain Kondlo had to overcome in order to let his talent shine in the world of checkers.
"There really is something at stake here for Lubabalo," Yaw said. "This guy has a fairly gut-wrenching life back home, and his fate is being decided in this Rodeway Inn in Medina."
After the Medina tournament, Yaw came back to Cleveland, where he and Glazen spent six months in pre-production -- making travel arrangements, figuring out the budget and getting the money together.
Glazen, who returned to Cleveland from Los Angeles to start Think Media Studios in 2003, has always wanted to add original content to the company's slate of client-based commercial productions.
"I think it's really helpful for this team," he said. "It's like the reward for all the hard work we do."
"King Me" was the first of what Glazen hopes will be a new original movie every two years. He and his team already have three offers from distributors for "King Me," and the next project, a feature film, is in development. Glazen will decide next week whether to proceed with it.
After the six months of pre-production on "King Me," the first place Yaw and Potoczak went was South Africa.
"The opportunity to drop in on post-apartheid South Africa was the real hook for me," Yaw said. "I knew that would make this project something different."
Yaw and Potoczak spent 20 days in Africa, the first part of it pursuing Kondlo's nemesis, Colin Webster, the head of Mind Sport South Africa and a skilled practitioner of mind games.
"We flew to South Africa not knowing if he would participate," Yaw said. "He was being cagey. He felt he was being unfairly portrayed in the United States to the checker community."
When Webster does talk, the complicated story that emerges -- of Kondlo's alleged failure to fill in forms properly, give Webster his passport and follow other rules -- of course includes Webster declaring that this has nothing to do with race.
A local journalist who wrote about the rift disagrees. "Part of the Lubabalo story also reflects very, very deep suspicion and deep mistrust between black and white South Africans," he tells the filmmakers.
The film follows Webster to his verdant country club for lawn bowling and then takes the audience on a tour of the cramped cement-block homes where Kondlo and his relatives live, in a crowded, poverty-stricken township where unemployment is 40 percent to 60 percent.
Kondlo, as Yaw said, has a big stake in the game: He has been unemployed for many years and hopes to make a living with checkers.
In Barbados, "Suki" King has done just that, basking in his local fame, government support and lucrative sponsorships. His skills at checkers are matched by his skills in public relations.
When Yaw and Potoczak arrived in Barbados, King said, "You're just in time. I have a press conference scheduled to announce something. Would you like to come?"
The filmmakers followed him to the press conference, where it quickly became clear that King's big announcement involved them: They were in Barbados, King told the assembled press, to do a film about him.
The reporters wanted Yaw to make a statement. "So on the fly I came up with our statement," Yaw said, laughing. "Then we spent 20 minutes answering questions."
The film focuses on King and Kondlo and leads, inevitably, to their world-championship match, a surprisingly intense showdown.
But it also takes time to explore the world of competitive checker players, a world Yaw discovered is populated by eccentric, unforgettable characters.
There's a man in Dubuque, Iowa, who sports a ZZ Top beard and has turned his small apartment into the World of Checkers Museum. He recites a poem he wrote about the toll checkers takes on a man's romantic life.
"He offered almost no value to the actual movie, but he was such a cool old guy, I had to put him in," Yaw said.
Then there's Alex "The Mad Russian" Moiseyev, a world champion in Three-Move Restriction Checkers -- the second form played in competition -- who comes off as cross between Boris Badenov from "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and a James Bond character petting a white angora cat.
And we can't forget the player from Bay Village who has named all of the shrubs and bushes in his yard and utters one of the movie's funniest lines.
"Why would anyone make a movie about checkers?" people would ask Yaw when he told them what he was doing.
"King Me" more than answers the question.
Related topics: american checker federation, brian glazen, checkers, cleveland international film festival, geoff yaw, king me, lubabalo kondlo, ronald suki king, think media studios
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