homage to a legend
The play of Duncan Suttles shows how it’s done
Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, March 08, 2008
Bruce Harper, a Vancouver-based federal-government lawyer by day, has produced a three-volume homage to retired Canadian chess legend Duncan Suttles. Many times a B.C. champion, Harper has spent the last 30 years collecting and analysing the play of the chess wizard internationally renowned for his quirky approach to the game.
He teamed up on Chess on the Edge with another Suttles aficionado, Seattle grandmaster Yasser Seirawan, a four-time U.S. champ, celebrity chess commentator and prolific author. For both, it was a work of great affection. Harper and Suttles go back 40 years, Seirawan and the grandmaster almost as long.
“Suttles viewed the chessboard the way a painter views a blank canvas — as an opportunity to create something of lasting beauty,” Harper writes. “Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, this aspect of Suttles’s chess has created legions of devoted fans, and surprisingly acerbic detractors as well.”
Born in San Francisco in 1945, Suttles came to Canada as a kid. He learned to play chess at 15 and participated in his first Canadian championship in 1961. He represented Canada at the chess Olympiads from 1964 through 1984.
A Vancouver resident, Suttles had his heyday in the 1960s and ’70s when he played the best of the day, including world champions Mikhail Botvinnik, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov and Robert Fischer.
Here is the full story.
He’s truly a Canadian legend.
DS ” The eternal wildcard”..Hypermodern never ever got more hypermodern than out of British Columbia! If you combined the English, single or double fianchetto, endless Indian, mixed with modern and avant-garde then you have Duncan. Perhaps he showed that learning 110 years of opening theory doesn’t matter but we still do!! To double as a really good correspondence player, like Purdy, is rare but here was another icon, now gone in 2008… Memories of the the 1970 Suttles – Fischer at Palma has now seen both exit in 2008….Modernism will never be this modern again.
Hi Susan. You might be interested in this on Suttles.