Only three ninth-graders showed up to compete at the chess meet for junior high school kids from Queens in 1972. There were lots of seventh- and eighth-graders.
The two ninth-grade boys played each other in the first round. The winner advanced to the second round, where he played me. Other kids gathered around to watch us play, and teased my opponent about how embarrassing it would be to lose to a girl. That wasn't fun for either of us.
I lost the game.
We had to wait while the seventh- and eighth-graders went for a few more rounds. Meanwhile, the judges declared me the second place winner for the ninth grade.
I was about to tell them that we needed to use the third round time period for a runoff between me and the loser of the first round, to decide who really deserved second place. Then I hesitated. Wasn't that the job of the loser of the first round (if not the judges themselves)? It dawned on me that he might not want to risk the humiliation of losing to a girl; he'd rather finish third, and tell his friends that the judges cheated him. I rationalized that if he was too dumb or egotistical to ask for a third round, it wasn't my job to help him. I said nothing, and I've felt terribly guilty about it to this day.
If I remember correctly, the awards ceremony (for various sports, not just chess) was some weeks later, in the evening. I had to walk up on stage so the judges could hand me a rather large trophy. They apologized for the fact that the statue on top was of a man swinging a tennis racket---they didn't have any chess trophies so they gave me a tennis trophy instead. I averted my eyes when I passed the boy who got the third-place trophy.
A few weeks later I received in the mail a little engraved gold plate stating that Alice Silverberg had won second place in Queens in ninth grade chess, with instructions on how to glue it to the trophy's base. My parents and I weren't able to pry the "first [or was it third?] place in tennis" plate off the base of the trophy, so we glued the chess plate on top of it.
When friends asked me why there was a tennis player atop my chess trophy, I told them the story of how I won a tennis trophy for losing a chess game---partly as a funny story, and partly to shame myself for my bad behavior.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed playing chess with my older brother's friends. At first they thought it was cute, and they were happy to be the older and wiser teacher. But as I got better and started to beat them, they enjoyed it less. They didn't like losing to a much younger girl, even if it was only on rare occasions.
I quit chess in high school. It wasn't fun to play with boys who felt it was humiliating for a boy to lose to a girl, and who got annoyed with me if they lost.
(revised December 28, 2020)