Raleigh’s chess cheerleader, who revived junk-talking games downtown, has died
Every day at lunchtime, Sherman Leathers would stride down Fayetteville Street, belly up to the chess tables where the junk-talkers were slapping down rooks and bishops, pull his pieces out of a maroon satchel and declare, “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
He spent more than a decade as tireless ambassador for chess downtown, hosting daily matches with “gunslingers” nicknamed Billy the Kid or Abdul the Gatekeeper, taking on all comers with a smile and beating them so effortlessly they hardly seemed to mind.
“It’s such a fellowship,” he told The N&O in 2008. “We get judges to play. We get engineers to play. We get Shaw University students to play. You can see what’s going on in their mind by what’s on the board.”
Leathers died earlier this month at 89, leaving Fayetteville Street a sleepier place.
But a generation of downtown workers will remember him perched under an umbrella in the swelter of July, a damp towel over his head, slapping his chess clock and repeating his mantra: “White says, ‘I can beat you in five minutes.’ Black says, ‘Time will tell.’”
‘Chess is life’
A retired transit worker from New York, Leathers arrived in Raleigh when downtown largely emptied out at 5 p.m., and Fayetteville Street languished as a pedestrian mall — a literal dead-end street.
He and his maroon bag started showing up at the stone chess tables in 1991, slowly building a community with his motto inspired by “Field of Dreams.” Soon, when Leathers wasn’t playing chess, he was serving as deacon in his church, or helping feed the homeless downtown.
In the ‘90s, he found a constant foil in fellow player Jerry McLeod, then a business teacher at St. Augustine’s College. Leathers described him as the Bluto of Raleigh’s downtown chess scene, while he played the role of Popeye.
“The baddest guy in town,” Sherman said during a 1992 match, “the one who wins the most, is called ‘The Sheriff.’ The guy who loses,” he added with a big smile, “is ‘The Town Drunk.’”
“No sir!” McLeod shouted back. “My game’s a little hack right now, but I’m STILL the Sheriff.”
When Raleigh tore up the Fayetteville Street mall, knocked down its sagging convention center and reopened Fayetteville Street to cars, Leathers lobbied the city to pull the tables out of storage.
He got six of eight of them back.
Then he lobbied for more comfortable seating because the concrete blocks Raleigh set out were so tall they squished a player’s legs under the table.
He got one lawn chair per table.
“Chess is life,” he once told The N&O. “It’s bad to live in a house and only use the living room. Chess gives you a chance to use another facet of your brain.”
Leathers is gone, but his tables still stand outside the Sir Walter Apartments, waiting for a new sheriff.