November 11, 2025
All the right moves
1975 alumnus & chess champion pens new bookby Allyson Irish
The year was 1972 and a teenaged Dana Nance Mackenzie ’75 watched in awe as chess master Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union to earn the title of world champion—the first American to do so.
“It was truly a unique time for chess," Mackenzie says. “There were hundreds of thousands of Americans excited about it.”
Fifty years later, MacKenzie’s enthusiasm for the game has not waned. This past spring, the professional freelance writer published his fifth book—his first on chess.
Did You Come Here to Play Chess or to Have Fun? (New In Chess, 2025) is a way for Mackenzie, a former math professor and lifelong puzzle lover, to celebrate chess and to demystify some of the negative connotations.
As the title implies, chess can often have the reputation of being too serious, elitist, or difficult. But for Mackenzie, whose father taught him how to play at age 7, the game has provided years of enjoyment and challenge, including his work on an award-winning chess blog and being named a National Master of Chess and the two-time champion of North Carolina.
Dana Mackenzie back on campus in GW for his 50th Reunion in June 2025. (Courtesy photo)
“It’s a game that combines competition, psychology, and art,” Mackenzie explains. The game also provides a structure for important life lessons. Mackenzie has been leading a kids’ chess club for many years, and he relishes the opportunity to teach participants more than simply how to win.
“Chess teaches you to be responsible for your decisions. If you make a mistake, you've got to own it. You don't give up.”
Mackenzie was recently back on campus for his 50thReunion, and he enjoyed connecting with classmates, especially those he hadn’t known in high school. The self-described “total nerd” says he gravitated toward similarly serious friends, whose idea of fun was crashing the first-generation PDP 11 computer on campus, “just to see whomever in the math department try to keep the thing running.”
The prolific writer has a new book coming out in 2026 that focuses on another favorite topic— math.
(Top photo: Dan Coyro, Santa Cruz Sentinel)
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