My daddy taught me the moves on a board he burned into a piece of pine with a poker, with bottle caps for men. That was the moves. That isn't checkers. I learned checkers on the courthouse square, the summer of 1937, when I was eighteen and had a job sweeping out the hardware store across the street.

There was a bench on the north side of the courthouse under the maples, and a board on a nail keg between two benches, and old men playing from after dinner until the light went. I'd sit on the courthouse steps on my break and watch. Nobody asked me to play. You didn't ask, either. You watched until somebody decided you'd watched enough.

That somebody was Clint Hastings, who cut hair two doors down and was the best player on the square. He was thirty-one then and seemed old as the hills to me. One afternoon in September he waved me over, set up the men, and beat me. Then he did it again, and again, every afternoon that fall. I lost forty-some games before I got my first draw off him, and I remember that draw better than my wedding. Shirley says that's the wrong answer. It is. It's also the true one.

Clint never once told me what I did wrong. He'd just stop, put his finger on one of my men, and wait. After a while I'd see it. That's how I learned to look, and looking is the whole game.

The Army had me from 1942 to 1945, and I played on a board drawn on a ration box with whoever would sit down. I came home and went to work at the high school in 1946 and stayed until I retired in 1984, and in all that time I played on the square nearly every day the weather allowed, and some days it didn't. The nail keg is long gone. The county put in a concrete table with the board painted on it in 1971, and Bill Scott touches up the paint every spring.

I played in the state tournament four times, in 1951, 1955, 1962 and 1970. The best I ever did was fourth, in 1962. That's all the bragging I've got, and Heath says I should put it in, so there it is.

This is American checkers, the same game the English call draughts. Here it is short:

• An eight by eight board, the same as a chess board. You play only on the dark squares.
• Twelve men a side, set on the dark squares of the three rows nearest you.
• The men move one square forward on the slant. Never backward.
• You capture by jumping over the other fellow's man onto the empty square past it. If you can jump again from there, you keep going.
• If you can jump, you must. That rule is the whole game. Remember it and you'll understand everything else.
• A man who gets all the way to the far row is crowned a king. Put another man of his color on top of him. A king moves and jumps forward and backward.
• You win when the other fellow has no men left, or none that can move.

To write down a game, every dark square has a number, 1 through 32. In the books the two sides are called Black and White, whatever color your men are, and Black always moves first. Black starts on 1 through 12 and White on 21 through 32. A move is written from one square to the other, so 11-15 means the man on 11 moved to 15. Here's how the numbers go:

If you've never played, Heath and I wrote it all out slow, with the jumps and the kings and how to write a game down, on its own page: Learn Checkers in an Evening. It really does take an evening. After that it takes the rest of your life.

Here is what sixty-two years have taught me, in the order I learned it, which is also about the order it matters.

1. Look before you move. Every time. Before you touch a man, ask what jumps you are giving the other fellow and what jumps he'll be forced to give you. Because jumps are forced, a man can make you take one of his and then take two of yours, or three. We call that a shot, and nearly every game on the square is won by one. Most of the old men on this bench could beat you without knowing a single opening, just by never once forgetting to look.

2. Keep your back row as long as you can. Those men sitting at home are guarding your king row. As long as they're there, he can't get a king. Every man you move off the back row is a door you've opened. Sooner or later you have to bring them out, but make it later.

3. Take the center. The four middle squares are 14, 15, 18 and 19. A man in the center has two ways to go and cramps the other fellow. A man on the side has one way to go and can't be jumped, which sounds nice until you notice he isn't doing anything either.

4. Keep your men together. Men standing side by side and backed up from behind are hard to jump. A man off by himself is a meal.

5. When you're ahead, trade. If you're a man up, swap one for one every chance you get. Twelve against eleven is close to even. Get it down to three against two and that extra man is most of the game.

6. When you're behind, don't trade. Keep it crowded and look for a shot. Plenty of men have been a man down and come back.

7. Learn the endings. Two kings will beat one king every time, if you don't get careless and let him jump one. He'll run for the double corner, and you have to know how to drive him out of it. Then learn the endings the books call First Position and Second Position. Every good player knows them, and I'll tell you honestly they took me a long winter.

8. Play better players. You learn nothing beating people. I learned everything I know losing to Clint Hastings.

There are six of us most afternoons from April to October. In the winter we go inside the feed store, where the owner lets us have a card table by the stove as long as we don't block the scales.

We play the winner sits, the loser gets up. Nobody keeps a score book. We all know exactly who's ahead anyway. We used to have more on the bench, and every fall there's one fewer, and that is how it goes. A man who has played checkers with you for forty years knows you better than your brother does. When you lose one, you play the next game a little slower.

Anybody is welcome to sit down. You have to watch first. Not as long as I did.

Every game has somebody who was the best there ever was, and you can argue about most of them. Not this one.

Marion Tinsley was born in 1927 in Ironton, Ohio, which is up the Ohio River from us, and he became a professor of mathematics, down in Florida. He was the world champion at checkers from 1955 to 1958, and then he gave it up for a long while, and then he came back and was champion again from 1975 to 1991. In something like forty-five years of serious play he lost seven games. Seven. I lose seven on a slow Thursday.

At the big tournaments, the first moves of each game are drawn by lot from a list of openings, so the masters can't just play the same safe game over and over. That means you have to know how to play all of them, the good openings and the bad ones. Dr. Tinsley knew them all, better than anybody.

Then some fellows at the University of Alberta, up in Canada, built a computer program to play checkers, and they called it Chinook. In 1992 it played Dr. Tinsley a match. I followed it in the newspaper and so did every checker player I know. He won it, four games to two, and the rest were drawn, thirty-three of them. Two losses to a machine. People made a lot of that. I made more of the four wins.

In 1994 they played again. Six games, all drawn, and then Dr. Tinsley had to stop because he was sick. It turned out to be cancer, and he died the next spring, in April of 1995.

I never met him and never saw him play. I wish I had. I've played the games of his that were printed, move by move, on my kitchen table, and every time I come to a spot where I'd have done something else, and every time he was right. That's the best I can say about a man who played my game: I've spent sixty-two years on it, and he could still teach me something from a newspaper.