Lisa Lane was the U.S. Women’s Chess Champion in the 1950s and ‘60s and the first chess player featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
- Died: February 28, 2024 (Who else died on February 28?)
- Details of death: Died at her home in Carmel, New York, of cancer at the age of 90.
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Lisa Lane’s legacy
Unlike many chess champions, Lane wasn’t a child prodigy who learned chess at the knee of a parent or grandparent. In fact, she never played a game of chess until college, when she happened to see fellow students playing in a campus lounge. Intrigued, she learned the game, then quickly mastered it, playing as often as possible. Just two years after discovering chess, Lane won the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship in 1959. She was often told she played chess “like a man,” aggressive and ruthless.
Lane held the title through 1962, and she became the subject of fascination for the press. Her youthful beauty was surprising to many, who thought of chess as an old man’s game. Her 1961 Sports Illustrated cover shoot included images of her lounging in a gauzy nightgown. When she appeared on the game show “What’s My Line,” the panel failed to guess her occupation, admitting they never considered anything intellectual because of her appearance.
Lane said she was unbothered by the attention to her looks – she was just interested in playing as much chess as she could. After losing the championship in 1962, she regained it in 1966, sharing the title with opponent Gisela Gresser after a tie. But Lane was becoming frustrated – not with her public image, but with the vast disparity between chess tournaments for men and those for women. The men’s championship title then came with a prize of $6,000; the women’s prize was $600. She mounted a protest, rallying other players to picket the women’s championship tournament, but the response was lackluster.
Lane was fed up with the disparity, and she said she grew to dislike being challenged by men: “I just couldn’t put the title of women’s chess champion on the line every time I sat down to play,” she told Sports Illustrated in 2018. She left the world of competitive chess in 1967, just ten years after she had discovered the game.
For a time in the 1960s, Lane ran the Queen’s Pawn Chess Emporium, a New York City club for women chess players. Later, she and her husband ran the stores Amber Waves of Grain and Earth Lore Gems & Minerals.
Lane on the press she received
“It didn’t bother me. It wasn’t like they said I was beautiful and not a good chess player… I wasn’t a deep thinker about anything but chess in those days. I didn’t really think about the connection between my looks and my chess, except that it got attention.” —from a 2018 interview for Sports Illustrated
Tributes to Lisa Lane
Full obituary: The New York Times
