David MacEnulty stands at the front of the class, a pro in blue jeans and a T-shirt working the crowd this Wednesday morning. “How many of you know what the back-rank checkmate is?”

One hand flies up in the air.

“How many of you can tell me what checkmate is?”

They’re all up, fluttering in the ozone above the rows of plastic blue chairs.

And he’s off, working somewhere between Point A and Point B, talking rooks and queens, kings and pawns. In minutes, he’s moved on to such subtleties as the queen sacrifice and ladder checkmate.

And everybody at the Lincoln Chess Foundation’s chess camp is with him, hands waving frantically, the minds attached just dying to offer their answers to the man at the front of the room.

This is not new to MacEnulty, a chess teacher whose classroom experience is rooted in poverty and in privilege, in the disparate worlds of opportunity and hardship.

And he brings the same message from both: Chess is a wonderful teacher.

It teaches a wealth of technical skills: creativity and logic, reason and math.

But there’s more, says MacEnulty, an actor-turned-real estate-businessman-turned-teacher.

There’s self-discipline and determination and learning to perform under pressure. There’s learning to respect your competitors, learning to respect yourself.

That’s why he’s here, halfway across the country from his New York City home, to teach the game and all the lessons that come with it.

He’s come to Lincoln along with his friend and colleague Miron Sher, a grandmaster chess player and nationally renowned coach.

It’s their fourth visit to Lincoln at the invitation of Ken Kiewra, president of the Lincoln Chess Foundation.

“They’re just tremendous people,” Kiewra says.

They not only bring their expertise but also their love of the game and their passion about what it does in the classroom.

MacEnulty — who shared that passion Wednesday in a talk co-sponsored by the Lincoln Chess Foundation, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Education and Human Sciences and UNL Academic Senate — learned this most dramatically 15 years ago in the South Bronx.

There, in an elementary school in the poorest congressional district in the country, one sitting in the middle of the two highest crime precincts in the Bronx, MacEnulty became a teacher.

He already taught chess to students in Title 1 schools through a program with the American Chess Foundation. That took him to the South Bronx, where the principal liked what she saw so much she asked him to leave the foundation and teach full time in her school.

He taught chess, a required class for students, like math and reading and science.

His students faced hardships, but it didn’t define them.

“The kids there were wonderful kids,” he says. “They were looking for something to give them value.”

In chess, if you are diligent, if you stick with it, you will improve and excel, he says. That was a lesson many of his students in the South Bronx desperately needed to learn.

“It was my job to teach them how good they could be,” he says. “Chess was the vehicle.”

Every student took a chess class. But they also could come in before school, or stay after to practice. They could participate in chess tournaments. They could push themselves.

“My big message to them was if you’re going to be successful at something, you have to work harder than anybody else.”

The game — and the competitions — taught other lessons. How to make decisions under pressure. That winning was not as important as playing with dignity and integrity. That you need to win or lose with grace. That you always  respect your opponent.

You don’t have to celebrate in front of them if you win, he tells his students.

“Checkmate says it.” 

He began teaching in the South Bronx  in 1992. By 1994, the school’s chess teams were state champions, a title they held for five years.

His story — and that of his students — inspired a television movie  released in 2005 starring Ted Danson called “Knights of the South Bronx.’’

It was a fictionalized account of MacEnulty’s time there, the need to manipulate reality so it would fit in a 90-minute box. That was fine with him, because they got the important part right.

“They told a very important truth. They just got all the facts wrong,” he says. “And that truth is, those kids can reach the stars if you give them the opportunity.”

MacEnulty made a cameo appearance at the end of the movie.

That was great, he said, but the real thrill came this year, when students from his first class began graduating — from college.

“Most of their peers, if statistics bear out, didn’t graduate from high school, but these kids …”

Temple. Morehouse. Duke. The universities of Delaware and Virginia and Vermont.

“It just makes a huge difference to give those kids a chance to see how good they can be at something,” he says.

MacEnulty left the South Bronx after the principal retired, and he couldn’t work with her replacement.

Today, he teaches in a private school. He loves it there, too, he says. Although his students don’t face the same struggles, they benefit from the same lessons. They excel in competition and have won national titles. This summer, he’ll go to South Africa to share with teachers what he’s learned.

Among those lessons is one his  second-grade students taught him six weeks into his new career in the South Bronx. He was teaching the names of the chess pieces and where they went on the board.

When he asked his students to put one of the pieces in the corner, not one knew what the word “corner” meant.

“I had been teaching them what I thought they needed to know. Not where they were.”

Now, he makes sure he knows, whether he’s in a private school in New York or a chess camp in Lincoln. Are we at checkmate or rank-back checkmate?

Because once you know that, you can move forward.

And the possibilities are endless.

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.