"“Who was that masked grandmaster?” Larry Christiansen asked when I showed him the game some months later.

What’s of particular interest to me is that Mills didn’t offer any variations at all as he was playing through the game (nor was he able to defend his moves with actual variations). Instead, he would explain everything he did by naming a pattern that he learned from the aforementioned Vukovic book. Thus we were pelted by verbal nutshells of wisdom like, “Central King, kill it!” and “Ripping open the center!” and “Maximizing the activity of my pieces!” and “Sacrific­ing to open lines to his King!” and “It’s a double attack!” and “I’m building a mating net!”

Of course, Mills won the brilliancy prize, and none of us could do anything but applaud him. Few players (of any rating) ever create an evergreen such as this, so he can consider himself blessed. It’s truly a fantastic creative effort and, perhaps, the greatest game by a non-master of all time!

After my original article came out in 1974, this game had a couple of curious ramifications. The first “oddity” occurred when Mills was accused of purposely losing games (to qualify for large class prizes at bigger events) in his chess club’s one game a week tournaments. The club officials said he was clearly of master strength, and their proof was ... a certain article in Chess Life Magazine titled MASKED GRANDMASTER! When these fools asked me to testify at their monkey trial, I pointed out that Mills was barely “B” strength and that he lost all those evening games because he had narcolepsy, a disease that causes a person to suddenly fall asleep (It also made Mills the perfect chess student: he would demand a 5 hour "intensive" chess lesson. I would lecture for 30 minutes and he would fall into a deep sleep. I would wake him up 2 hours later and he'd say, “Okay, tell me that again.” I would repeat the same information, he would fall asleep, and round and round we’d go until the 5 hours was up.).

In the end, the club morons (who ignored everything I said since it didn’t fit in with their false/insane/misinformed view of reality) banned him for a significant period of time.

The second oddity hit me in the face when I was in Eastern Europe acting as head coach of the American junior team. These events always featured Russians selling books outside for next to nothing, and this led to me buying (for $2.00) a very nice 441 page book by Belov, Shakarov, Tsaturian, and Vilensky (with a foreword by Kasparov) called ANTOLOGY OF CHESS BEAUTY (Yes, they misspelled the word Anthology, but such things are common when hasty translations of Russian to English are made). This is a fine anthology of 1,640 games (ALL with notes!) that have won official brilliancy prizes from 1876 to 1995. Looking through it, I saw games by one chess legend after another. And then I happened upon a certain game by M. Mills! That’s right, the Mills masterpiece, now immortalized, proudly stood side by side with history’s greatest chess names!"