For Tevis Tsai 1k, one of the highlights of this year's Congress began long before the first stone
was played.
Tsai, his spouse Wren Tillery, and Stu Horowitz traveled together by train from Baltimore to Boston. For the past five years, Tsai and Horowitz have met nearly every week to play at Horowitz's retirement home, making the trip north an opportunity to continue a friendship built over countless games.
The pair even squeezed in another match during the train ride.
But after arriving at Boston's South Station, the trip took an unexpected turn when Horowitz, 83, fell on an escalator.
"It was quite a scary occurrence," Tsai recalled.
Horowitz was taken by ambulance to Tufts Medical Center, where Tsai and Tillery spent Saturday night with him in the emergency room. Despite the frightening accident, Horowitz remained in remarkably good spirits, chatting baseball with the first responders along the way.
Doctors wanted to be sure that Horowitz wasn't experiencing any confusion or cognitive effects from the fall. Tsai and Horowitz found an unconventional way to help with the evaluation: they reviewed the game they had just played on the train.
The photos accompanying this story show the two players reconstructing their moves in the emergency room. (For those wondering about the result, Horowitz prevailed by three points.)
Fortunately, scans showed no broken bones, and Horowitz was discharged late Saturday night, allowing him to make it to the Congress after all.
The final image comes courtesy of Tillery, an artist, who captured Horowitz in a delightful sketch while he was engrossed in one of his many Baum games.
What could have been a disastrous beginning to the week instead became a testament to resilience, friendship, and the enduring bonds that grow around the goban. Even in an emergency room, with uncertainty hanging in the air, the conversation returned naturally to baseball, to go, and to a game shared between friends.