
Having vetted the story, Crothers phoned J.B. This ministry created the chess club where Mutesi learned to play. Within a week or so, Crothers met Rodney Suddith, the author of the story and president of Sports Outreach, in Chapel Hill. After perusing it, Crothers said, “Is this true?” 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. On three separate occasions Buder had tossed the clipping, titled “Slumdog Champions,” into the garbage. “It was just corned beef and cabbage and a bunch of Carolina diehards,” he says.Īfterward, 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. 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. Patrick’s Day, 2010, Crothers, a modest man with a modest wardrobe, spoke at Squid’s, a seafood restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Crothers embarked on a pilgrimage no less remarkable, one that, like his heroine’s, was rooted in faith and perseverance. Mutesi, now 20, has undertaken an incredible journey in her short life.
#Queen of katwe playing near me movie
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. Shot entirely on location in Kampala, this Disney film stars Academy Award–winner Lupita Nyong’o and was directed by Oscar nominee Mira Nair. 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. On Friday, September 30, The Queen of Katwe will be released nationwide.


“But that one other time, it can turn into The Queen of Katwe.” “Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, it’s just a fish story that turns into nothing,” says Crothers. 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. Tim Crothers knew better than to swoon at those words. 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.”
