Georgia on my Mind

The other day I had a brief exchange with a new member, nocab.  He is William Bacon who works for the Atlanta Chess and Game Center which is the Atlanta Chess Club. He has a personal blog that is deep into chess at http://baconlog.blogspot.com

That he is from Georgia got my attention since we have another prominent (ex-patriot) Georgia player here, Rex Blalock (Reb).

He also mentioned another Georgian, simply as "the Legendary Georgia Ironman."

I, of course, had no idea who this was so i went on a private mission to discover his identity. It wasn't too difficult to learn that the Ironman of Georgian chess is Timothy H. Brookshear.

With this information I visited both the USCF site and the Georgia Chess Assoc. site. Now I'm a bit confused.

I had found a 2003 newsletter from the Decatur Recreation & Community Services Department which read:
          Come and learn the skills and technical aspects of chess from
          a master chess player. Instructor Tim Brookshear was awarded
          the title of Master by the United States Chess Federation in 1990
          and was Georgia’s state co-champion for the last three years.

Yet, from the USCF lists the results of the George State Championships in 2003, 2002, 2001 and 2000,  Mr. Brookshear, a fierce competitor who is shown to have competed in 227 USCF (!) sanctioned tournaments from 1992 to present, placed 31st, 14th, 16th and 14th respectively in the Georgia State Championships for those years.  (It shows him playing in 7 additional Geo. Championships)

The Georgia Chess Association lists Mr. Bradshear's best result as tying for 2nd with 4 other competitors (Guillermo Ruiz, Donny Gray, Georgi Angelov and John Austin, all a half game behind 1st place GM Sergey Kudrin) in 1995. USCF simply lists Mr. Brookshear as obtaining 6th place until one accesses the actual tournament tables to examine the result details.

Other than finding indications of Mr. Brookshear's obvious devotion to chess, I didn't learn much about the legendary Ironman of Georgia. But I did learn something about the peculiarities of results reporting.

For the record, Reb is listed as co-champion of Georgia (with Guillermo Ruiz form above) in 1987!
And as trying for second place (with Guillermo Ruiz and Richard Benjamin behind 1st place Thomas H. Rowan) in 1996.