He washed them in the shower, then dried them on a hotel radiator.Įditor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Īfter the man at the Rotary Club told you about this story, what happened next? How did you start to put the wheels in motion? The Athletic caught up with Crothers about how the project came to be - traveling to Kampala and then to a competition in Siberia, where an airline lost his luggage and he wore the same clothes every day for two weeks. She’d like to one day return to Katwe and take on a role like Katende’s. She met someone from the university when she came to America in 2012 to help promote the book and ended up meeting Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a chess aficionado himself.

Today, Mutesi is a student at Northwest University, a Christian college near Seattle that offered her a full scholarship. Katwe is a place of disease, unimaginable poverty, starvation and constant struggle. It’s about a 10-year-old girl who couldn’t read or write but picked up chess to satisfy her hunger, then fell in love with a sport that changed her life. The ensuing story, first an ESPN The Magazine article, became a book and then a movie in theaters starring Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o and “Selma’s” David Oyelowo. By 2010, four years later, she had become an international chess champion. Mutesi - who ate maybe once a day - stayed at her first meeting because she was offered a bowl of porridge. Robert Katende, also from Kamapla, was holding chess club meetings to help local youth. He explained to Crothers that he had recently read a three-paragraph write-up in a Sports Outreach newsletter about a young girl living in the Katwe slum of Kampala in Uganda. “I think I have a good story for you,” he said. Patrick’s Day, 2010, and the stranger - over corned beef and cabbage - had a pitch for Crothers.

The Queen of Katwe by Tim Crothers