An actor's career decisions can be as strategic as the moves in a chess game.

Whether or not that's the reason Ted Danson signed up for his latest television project, chess figures in anyway. The Emmy-winning "Cheers" and "Becker" veteran plays an inner-city educator who galvanizes his students by teaching them the game in "Knights of the South Bronx," a fact-inspired A&E Network movie directed by Allen Hughes ("Menace II Society") and debuting Tuesday, Dec. 6.

David MacEnulty, the man portrayed by Danson, has spent the past 15 years teaching chess; he also has written three books and six e-books on the subject, and he has produced three chess-related videos. His success is verified by the awards won by the pupils and teams he has coached, with those honors now numbering well into the hundreds.

Danson came into the film somewhat naturally since he reveals he plays chess, "and a lot better than I did before this movie. I played at that same kind of age, 10 or 11. Then I tried to whoop Woody Harrelson during the 'Cheers' years, because he could beat me at everything else, and that didn't work, so my big goal in life is to beat Woody Harrelson. I've been coached. I think I'm ready."

He most likely is, since the real-life MacEnulty was his coach. "Chess calls on all parts of the brain," MacEnulty reasons. "You must solve your problems cerebrally. You must calculate. You must do everything in your head. You have to do it all quietly without moving the pieces. It takes tremendous discipline to get through a 2 1/2-hour chess game at a tournament. And whether you win or lose, you have an amazing accomplishment behind you."

The prospect of having his story told in dramatic terms "really thrilled" MacEnulty, "and the more I heard about what they wanted to do, the happier I got. When they told me that Ted was going to be playing me, I mean, how much better can it get?

"I think the world needs to know that there are more things like this that we can do for these children, especially children in the areas where I was teaching. This was the poorest congressional district in the country, the two highest crime precincts in the Bronx. I want the message to get out that those children must be reached."

MacEnulty clearly has reached Danson as well. "It's a cliche, and I spout it all the time, that teachers are underpaid," the actor reflects, "but it is heroic, what a good teacher does for children, when a teacher comes in and does not give up on a child. These kids went on to become national champions, world champions. They went to Moscow, and they're in colleges and graduating. They went from dead end to 'the world is their oyster.'

"My job in front of these kids as an actor was not dissimilar to [MacEnulty's] job," Danson adds. "My job was to capture their attention, and they aren't polite actors who go, 'My turn to act, your turn to act.' It was a zoo, and my job was to get their focus ... and that's a little bit of what a teacher does. I was exhausted at the end of the day. My ego would get in the way constantly, but a good teacher is selflessly putting the child as the more important person in the room."

Making the child proficient in chess is another matter entirely, which Danson explains by citing a line from the movie: "'If you can win a game of chess, no one can ever call you stupid.' That's an amazing thing, the confidence it gives people, the confidence it started to give me when I started to win."

While movies such as the James Bond adventure "From Russia With Love" and the original Steve McQueen version of "The Thomas Crown Affair" have chess sequences, the only other film to depict the game to the extent of "Knights of the South Bronx" is "Searching for Bobby Fischer." MacEnulty knows that 1993 drama well, since it centers around Bruce Pandolfini, one of MacEnulty's mentors and closest friends (played by Ben Kingsley).

"I thought it was wonderful," MacEnulty says of that movie. "I thought they captured scholastic chess absolutely brilliantly. They captured a brilliant young man in his earliest days fabulously. By the way, I was also the chess teacher of Max Pomeranc (who played the central youngster in the film)."

If "Knights of the South Bronx" achieves nothing else, it will have reawakened a passion for Danson. "I started to fall in love with chess again," he reports. "I really hope this movie does what David does in life, which is to inspire people not to give up on kids and to see that chess is this amazing tool [by which] to reach out to people ... especially at that age. If we do that with our movie, we will have really done what we set out to do."