Nc Leader Adept At Commanding Kings, Queens

Nathan Fewel had brown hair when he won his first two state high school chess championships, black hair for his third, and purple hair for the fourth.

For the fifth, he had a silver eyebrow ring and a hemp bracelet.

With his 17 years, a dozen chess trophies and a Lucky Charms bowl of hair colors, Fewel is a punk prodigy.

“I just do what I want and don’t worry about stereotypes,” said Fewel, a junior at North Central High School.

The chess phenom has won his age division at the state high school chess championship every year since the seventh grade, when he topped his age group after playing just three months.

“It’s instinctive, I guess,” he said.

Last month,- back to his natural sandy brown, he placed second in the state all-grade high school competition and easily won the state high school “blitz” tournament. Blitz chess has the equivalent of a 24-second shot clock. A game runs five minutes, a fraction of the time of a traditional match.

He was also elected North Central student body president in January, beating another student Fewel described as a jock in the “in” crowd.

With a mind as sharp as a Ginsu knife, he is a vacation morning of possibilities.

Ask him about chess, and the conversation is likely to stray into less structured grounds: the media’s influence on social mores, behaviorist philosophy, art-house movies, concerts of the band Phish, or his favorite book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

The book “opened his mind” and made him aware he was just at the entrance of the catacombs of learning. Influenced by the book and encouraged by his mother, he began exploring Zen Buddhism.

“It was so great to realize there was so much out there I didn’t understand,” said Fewel, who just finished reading John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.”

He is as nice as he is smart, fellow students say. As a sophomore, he played and defeated 30 student and adult chess players in one sitting, but there was little resentment.

“He’s just such a nice guy,” said senior Elise Mordick, the past student body president who talked him into running. “Everyone knows he’s for real.”

He snowboards and likes hanging out. He’s mellow, soft-spoken and a bit shy, and a teacher once asked if he was on drugs.

“They didn’t know why I was so quiet,” he said.

Chess is his one passion, the one thing he is un-Zen and “really intense about,” he says. He regularly plays lawyers and doctors in the Spokane chess club, but few are at his level of expertise.

He is rated an “A” level player, one of only four in the city.

“It embodies sport, art, war; it embodies everything,” he said. “It encompasses a perfect balance between strategy and tactics.”

Disappointed to lose the state title match, he is considering a trip to the national high school championships. There is, of course, next year, but he wants to prove something to himself.

“I don’t like to let myself off the hook,” said Fewel.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo