Joel Channing Talked a Better Game than He Played
In Joel Channing's final interview, as re****ted in the New York Times,
he said that since chess is a "zero-sum game" (in that there is always
one winner and one looser) his efforts to make the USCF run like a
business failed.
http://gambit.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/united-states-chess-federation-executive-board-member-resigns/
That is not what happened at all.
For almost the entire nearly three years that Mr. Channing was on the
board from August 2005 until April 2008, Mr. Channing was given
virtual carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. In no instance that I
can recall was Mr. Channing voted down on any expenditure he wanted to
make. He did things that no businessman would ever do if spending his
own money.
For example, he had twenty USCF insiders flown to Florida for a
retreat. Take a look at a picture of all the people who were brought
in for that Retreat.
http://www.chessdon.com/pictures.htm
This might seem reasonable except that those same people had also met
two months earlier in Parsippany NJ and a few months before that in
Phoenix Arizona and were scheduled to meet again in some other place
in one more month as well. In short, they had spent so much time
meeting with each other that they had no time left to get any
productive work done.
We thought at the time that Channing had all those people flown to
Florida at his own expense, since he is always talking about what a
successful businessman he is, but later we found out that they were
flown to Florida at USCF Member****p Expense.
This was just one of many examples. Channing also insisted on the USCF
hiring unproductive people that he happened to like, on paying an
Internet Guru $50,000 for advice that turned out to be worthless and
unusable, and on many other expenditures that turned out to be
unproductive. Meanwhile, he submitted the biggest expense account of
any board member. Every time he drank a cup of coffee, he charged it
to the USCF.
During Channing's time on the board and as VP of Finance, the USCF
lost $500,000. The board finally drew the line in refusing to pay
$13,000 for something called "Internet Insurance" which Mr. Channing
insisted he needed to protect his assets. The board properly decided
that Mr. Channing should use his own money to pay for insurance to
protect his assets. Therefore, Mr. Channing resigned.
Sam Sloan
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