HOW TIM CROTHERS FIRST MET THE 'QUEEN OF KATWE' PHIONA MUTESI

How a young girl's chess skills lifted her out of the slums of Uganda, inspiring a journalist's award-winning piece and a major motion picture

The stranger approached, proffering nothing more than a tattered clipping from a religious newsletter and a hackneyed opening line: “I have a good story for you.”    

Tim Crothers knew better than to swoon at those words. A former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, Crothers had spent decades listening to suggestions that he should write about the gramps who shot a hole-in-one or the amputee who’d run a 5k. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, it’s just a fish story that turns into nothing,” says Crothers. “But that one other time, it can turn into The Queen of Katwe.”

On Friday, September 30, The Queen of Katwe will be released nationwide. It is a film based on the odyssey of Phiona Mutesi, a girl born into abject poverty in the slums of Kampala, Uganda, who became an international chess prodigy. Shot entirely on location in Kampala, this Disney film stars Academy Award–winner Lupita Nyong’o and was directed by Oscar nominee Mira Nair. The Queen of Katwe just took second runner-up at the Toronto Film Festival, where Nair quipped that it is the first Disney movie set in Africa that does not include any animals.

Tim Crothers playing chess with Phiona Mutesi

Phiona Mutesi        

Mutesi, now 20, has undertaken an incredible journey in her short life. Crothers embarked on a pilgrimage no less remarkable, one that, like his heroine’s, was rooted in faith and perseverance.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 2010, Crothers, a modest man with a modest wardrobe, spoke at Squid’s, a seafood restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is a local: a UNC alum who had repatriated to the area in his mid-30s,Crothers had just written his second book,Hard Work, a biography of Tar Heel basketball coach Roy Williams. “It was just corned beef and cabbage and a bunch of Carolina diehards,” he says.

Afterward, Troy Buder, a financial adviser based in Charlotte, approached Crothers with a clipping from a monthly newsletter put out by a Christian missionary group called Sports Outreach Institute. On three separate occasions Buder had tossed the clipping, titled “Slumdog Champions,” into the garbage. Each time he had retrieved it. Now he handed Crothers the story about a girl from the Kampala slum of Katwe who had just won an international chess championship in South Sudan. After perusing it, Crothers said, “Is this true?”

Within a week or so, Crothers met Rodney Suddith, the author of the story and president of Sports Outreach, in Chapel Hill. This ministry created the chess club where Mutesi learned to play. Having vetted the story, Crothers phoned J.B. Morris, an editor at ESPN the Magazine and a former colleague at Sports Illustrated, with a pitch of his own. “J.B. dropped the phone, and he walked off,” Crothers recalls. “I didn’t know if he didn’t care, or what was happening.”


As the film will reveal, the game of chess and the selflessness of Robert Katende opened up a world for Phiona Mutesi and her family that was previously unimaginable. But so, to a degree, did the writer who told her story. She graduates from boarding school in November and when Crothers last saw her in July (he has made three pilgrimages back to Kampala), he asked her what was next for her. Mutesi looked him square in the eye and, slightly exposing that gap-toothed grin, said, “I’m thinking Harvard.”