Never heard of ‘em. Well, duckies, Lisa Lane was the first chess player to ever appear on the cover of … Sports Illustrated. The 1959 Women’s U.S. chess champion, Ms. Lane dropped out of Temple University to enter competitive chess playing, which she also abandoned after making a lot of news, largely because of the media’s obsession with her looks, and the unequal treatment of women in the sport. This was in the late 50s and early 1960s, so I think we can pretty much say treatment (shitty treatment) from Male Media, Male Writers, Male Editors, Male Photographers, Male, Male, Male. Lisa Lane, you see, was both young and pretty; she was also, unlike many of her female competitors, not well-off, having to figure out a way to make chess work for her on a day to day scale, paying the rent.
Lane was also impatient (oh, girl, I feel you) with the perception that being good looking meant she was somehow ‘tricking’ her male competitors, distracting them, or that she was the front for a genius male chess master pulling her strings. At the time she was playing, women received $600 for winning the US Women’s Championship; male champs received $6000. Several previous contemporary winners of the female competition donated their winnings back to the U.S. Chess Federation where these funds were used to sponsor – you guessed it – men’s tournaments and male chess-players. Let’s just say this didn’t sit well with Lane. Why would it?
Lane was also known for being volatile, and, again, I feel you, girl. She wasn’t the proper lady type the powers that be wanted, or expected. I am reminded of the wonderful film, I, Tonya about Tonya Harding’s incompatibility with the posh types and perceptions of the skating world. Like Harding, Lane was not the quiet, submissive type; she was young, working class, had grown up in Philly without a father and learned chess in coffee houses in her neighborhood, not in her father’s den while he sipped brandy.
Lane stopped playing chess in her early thirties, after a decade of trying to make it work while being at the receiving end of ‘enough already’ sexist bullshit. In the early 70s she played against an IBM computer programmed to play chess, winning every single game. The computer, she was quoted as saying at the time, didn’t resent her beating it at the game, unlike the majority of her male competitors.