Tanitoluwa is the son of Kayode James Adewumi and Oluwatoyin Kuburat Adewumi. He has a brother, Adesina Austin, who is seven years older. Kayode used to run a print shop in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, with 13 employees, and Oluwatoyin used to work as an accountant. The family is devoutly Christian, and were threatened with violence by the Islamist terrorist organizationBoko Haram. In June 2017, they left Nigeria for the United States and sought religious asylum. Philip Falayi, a pastor in Queens, New York, gave them temporary accommodation, and connected them with the New York City Department of Homeless Services. They were given a place to stay in a homeless shelter in Manhattan. Kayode took work as a dishwasher and as an Uber driver in a rented car, and Oluwatoyin as a and Tanitoluwa enrolled in.
Career
Austin had taught Tanitoluwa a chess-like game called "Latter", using a homemade board and pieces made from Play-Doh. Shawn Martinez, a teacher at P.S. 116, is a chess enthusiast who introduces students to the game. Tanitoluwa immediately took to it, and wanted to join a club run by Russell Makofsky, another teacher. That would have been expensive; the $330 fee includes not only the cost of running the club, but also such things as entries to tournaments, travel, and accommodation. When Adewumi's mother told Makofsky of the family's financial situation, he waived the fee. In early 2018, Adewumi, who had the lowest Elo rating of 105, played in his first tournament. A year later, he had accumulated seven trophies. The teachers, now his coaches, were impressed by his dedication and hard work, and by the progress he had made since starting as a novice. On March 9–10, 2019, he competed in the 52nd Annual New York State Scholastic Championships in Saratoga Springs, New York. He was seeded eighth in a field of 74, with an Elo rating of 1473; more than 200 behind the top rated players. Some of the contestants were from well-to-do families who could afford private coaches. He won the event outright with a score of 5.5/6. His style of play is aggressive: his coaches were shocked when in his fourth game he sacrificed a bishop for a pawn; alarmed, they fed the position into a chess engine for analysis. It confirmed that the sacrifice was the best move. The story was reported by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, and rapidly attracted national and international attention both inside and outside the chess world. agadmator, a leading YouTube chess streamer, published an analysis of Adewumi's only available game from the tournament. Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion, praised this achievement by a refugee immigrant. Bill Clinton, former US president, invited him to visit him in his office in Harlem, New York, and he did. Abike Dabiri, Senior Special Assistant on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora to Nigerian presidentMuhammadu Buhari, called him "a pride to the nation". On March 30, 2019, he visited the Saint Louis Chess Club in Missouri, where the U.S. Chess Championship was then in progress, and played several friendly blitz games, his opponents including Hikaru Nakamura, Jennifer Yu, and Fabiano Caruana, and was interviewed by Maurice Ashley, the world's first black GM. His coaches set up a GoFundMe site shortly after the 2019 New York Scholastics, with the target of raising $50,000 for the family by crowdfunding. It raised $254,000 in ten days. Benefactors also offered non-monetary help; including accommodation, a car, academic scholarships, chess books, and pro bono assistance by immigration lawyers with their asylum application. They accepted one of the more modest offers of accommodation, declined the scholarship offers out of loyalty to P.S. 116, gave one-tenth of the donated money as a tithe to the church which had helped them, and put the rest into a 501 trust called the Tanitoluwa Adewumi Foundation to help other children in similar circumstances. He has expressed an ambition to become the youngest ever chess grandmaster. Three film companies competed for the rights to his story; Paramount Pictures won. An autobiography, My Name Is Tani, was published on 14 April 2020.
Commentary
The media criticism organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting has criticized mainstream media coverage about Adewumi's homeless-to-chess-champion path, including Kristof's article as well as others from the USA Today, NBC New York, and The Independent; the institution has cited it as an example of "perseverance porn" pieces, which don't question the causes of the tough circumstances the person or people covered faces but rather try to uplift the reader: "The Times details Adewumi’s refugee background, his personal drive and his aggressive playing style, but neither it nor the many other outlets that also picked up the story pondered how it was possible for a child in one of the richest cities in the world to be homeless, and what that said about an economic and political system that allows this in the first place."
