From the outside, the green-and-white house on Warren Boulevard near Ashland doesn’t look much different from any of the other buildings in the neighborhood. The paint has started to peel and the windows are gray and sooty. The only thing a little unusual about it is the dusty checkerboard propped in one of the downstairs windows.
The greatest American-born checker player that ever drew a breath, some say, and without a doubt the greatest Chicago ever had. An international grand master who played in tournaments in Italy, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union, Smith won at least a dozen American national championships. In 1938, when he was 17, Buster Smith became the checker champion of Chicago. On the day he died, October 8, 1992, Buster was still the undisputed champion.
How pool checkers got to African American communities in Chicago, Detroit, Saint Louis, and other American cities is something upon which checker historians don’t always agree. But it may have traveled from France to Louisiana during the days of French colonial rule and grown popular there among black slaves. It certainly came north during the great migration of the early 20th century. The game’s popularity in America appears to have peaked during the Depression, when many would have had time on their hands to play. Checker clubs sprouted up in city parks, community centers, and barbershops.
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Carl Sylvester Smith was born in Chicago on January 26, 1921. He grew up on the south side and learned checkers from his father, who gave him the nickname Buster. Smith wrote in his scrapbook that when he was 11 he was hounded by a checker-playing prodigy named Thomas, who kept challenging him to checkers matches and then beating him soundly.
“He beat me and beat me until I began to see a little light. He aroused my curiosity for becoming a player,” Smith wrote. And soon Buster wasn’t losing to anybody.
“He was a boy wonder,” said Pickens. “He was a beast, the meanest thing you ever saw on a checkerboard. Everybody who ever beat him talked about it for a long time. Some players would take lucky games from him and they’d be talking about it forever. All the checker players knew who Buster was, and if they didn’t know they soon found out.”
Buster Smith claimed that between 1954 and 1963 he didn’t lose a single match. In 1965, when the first championship of the American Pool Checker Association was held in Detroit, Smith became the national champ. And it was about this time that he started receiving international attention.
