King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

by Paul Hoffman

  GIVEN MY EXPERIENCE WITH MY FATHER, I MIGHT BE EXPECTED NOW TO have a sixth sense for exaggeration or deception. Instead I’m not at all skeptical, at least on a conscious level. I habitually believe that people are telling the truth. It is simply too disturbing for me to think that they’re not. In the chess world it is particularly hard for anyone to separate fact from fiction because many seemingly over-the-top chess stories turn out to be entirely or partially true. Or we simply don’t know enough to be able to judge their truth.

  On August 17, 2003, ChessCafe. com published a remarkable interview that Susan Polgar, a former women’s world champion, conducted with Paul Truong, her business manager and friend. Truong revealed that when he was five—yes, five!—he won South Vietnam’s first National Junior Championship for players under the age of twenty-one. “All of a sudden, I became a sensation, a child prodigy,” he told Polgar. And he followed up this success by winning his first national championship when he was eight. “I thought I had a chance to showcase my talent on a world stage,” he continued, but then, when the North Vietnamese occupied Saigon on April 30, 1975, his life “came tumbling down.”

  Truong said that because his father had worked for the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, his family was singled out by the Communists. His father went into hiding, and the new government prohibited Truong from continuing his chess training and traveling abroad, although he was permitted to defend his title four times. On the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Truong and his dad escaped from Vietnam by boat.

  The tale he told Polgar was harrowing: six hundred people were crammed into a small wooden boat with no food, no water, no bathrooms, no ventilation. The overworked engine exploded. Truong and his father were fortunate to be rescued and towed back to Vietnam and thrown into jail. After bribing officials to release them, they left by boat again, but were attacked five times by different bands of Thai pirates, who looted their possessions, raped the women, kidnapped the young girls, and finally sank the boat. People drowned and were eaten by sharks. A U.S. oil tanker rescued the survivors and brought them to Malaysia, where they were confined in a primitive, overcrowded refugee camp on an abandoned soccer field.

  The Malaysians eventually forced Truong, his father, and seven hundred other refugees onto a boat that was equipped with inadequate supplies of water and gas. After weeks at sea, watching their fellow passengers perish, Truong and his dad found themselves on a

  wild and deserted island…. But we still had no food. I had to hunt and fish with my bare hands, and find fruits from the jungle…. This was areal survivor experience, not the game you see on TV. Many more people died as a result of malnutrition. We stayed here for about 5–6 months, I think. Then finally, we came to New Jersey on December 1, 1979. I spoke no English. I was frail. I was very rusty in chess. It was a disaster.

  In the United States, he said, he struggled through high school because he didn’t know the language, while working seven part-time jobs to earn money to send to his mother and sixty other relatives in Vietnam. He played chess again but couldn’t afford the entry fee of big tournaments. In 1982, at the age of seventeen, he decided to give up his dream of “being a grandmaster and even world champion” to pursue college and a career in business. “How could I be a world-class player,” he said, “if I did not even have the opportunity to train or play?” After succeeding in unnamed business ventures, Truong decided to devote himself to giving every child who wants to play chess the guidance and support needed “to pursue his or her dream…. I want to bring respectability to chess. I want to bring chess to the same level as golf or tennis…. If I can survive everything I’ve went through in life, why can’t I do this?”

  The ChessCafe interview concluded with the following exchange:

  SP: Have you thought about putting your inspirational life story into a book, maybe even a movie? I know that there are a lot more incredible details (including an episode where you had a gun pointed right at your head and you refused to back down to the Communists, you would rather die for what you believe in) that you did not want to go into. Your story can rank right up there with the Anne Frank story and many other WW/Holocaust stories.

  PT: I would love to but I don’t know how to go about and do that. Maybe someone can help me. But if and when it happens, I would like to use the money from book sales or a movie deal to help chess. I will only do it for a meaning, not just to make money for myself…. I will only re-live this painful part of my life if it can benefit millions of children and women.

  When the interview appeared on the Internet, it received a lot of attention. I found the story very moving and shared it with others. These people had a different reaction: they were completely skeptical. They thought that it was a calculated attempt, like a carefully laid swindle on a chessboard, to land a movie deal. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if the story was true (and, even now, I don’t know that it wasn’t). Or if it wasn’t literally true, maybe it was emotionally accurate, with a basis in reality at its core. I liked Paul Truong—he had sent me photos that he had taken of me at the ESPN match and at other chess events, and I admired his efforts to promote the game—and so I didn’t even want to consider the possibility that he was stretching the facts. I was disillusioned with the number of dishonest men and Grobsters I had met through chess, and in the larger world, too. So I closed myself off to the idea that he might be yet another one.

  But not totally, it seems. Because in the many months since the interview appeared, I’ve been tempted occasionally to investigate the accuracy of Truong’s story. I asked Truong once if I could speak to his father to get his view on what had drawn his son to chess. What I said was true, but I particularly wanted to speak to his father to see if he would support Truong’s life story. Truong responded that he would put me in touch with his dad, but then he never sent me his father’s phone number. Nor did I pursue it. I actually preferred to avoid talking to his father. I wanted to believe Truong. And if he wasn’t telling the truth, I didn’t want to use his father to expose him and drive a wedge into their relationship. I knew how destructive it could be when deception comes between a father and a son, although here the roles would have been oddly reversed.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER MY OWN FATHER’S DEATH, I CLEANED OUT HIS APARTMENT in the Village. It was a Herculean task—he had so much junk. But I welcomed the job because I wanted to find clues to who he really was. I was hoping that I might be able to figure out whether he had ever been an athlete, whom he had dated besides my mom, and how much money he actually made from gambling and hustling. In the end, though, after I had gone through all of his papers, I felt that I hardly knew him any better than before.

  I was overwhelmed to discover that my father had kept carbon copies of every letter and handwritten note he’d ever sent me, including one-sentence thank-yous. The “Paul file” of these copies, and all the letters that I had ever sent him, filled a deep unlocked drawer in his office. Why had he kept all this? Because he was lonely and liked to reread his mail? Because he was paranoid and had to document everything? Because he had an exaggerated sense of his place in history and wanted to leave his correspondence as a record for posterity?

  I found the last letters I had written to my father particularly difficult to reread. I had finally confronted him in writing about his lying, because my attempts to do so in person had been too tearful and frustrating; he would twist what I said and try to persuade me that I was the one who was misperceiving reality and needed psychiatric help—the same suggestion he had made to my mother years ago when she’d tried to talk to him about problems in their relationship. I wrote these letters when my father was dying of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones and, ultimately, his brain, reducing his 300-pound frame to half its former bulk. I should have been comforting him during his final months—my mother, after barely seeing him for a decade, had taken him into her home to care for him at the end of his life—but instead my letters were angry and contemptuous. Was it weirdly admirable, maso
chistic, or simply a sign of compulsion that he had kept these letters along with the others instead of simply tossing them in the trash?

  Aside from the “Paul file,” the drawer contained four curious items. The first was a long handwritten list of two-and three-letter words, compiled by my dad in the days before there were strategy books on Scrabble; he was so competitive with me when I was young that he had concealed the fact that he had memorized these particular words. I could only hope now that he had learned them not specifically for the purpose of beating his ten-year-old son but also because he played Scrabble for money.

  The second was a sealed manila envelope on which he had written, “BURN IT! JIM’S JUNK. PLEASE DESTROY WITHOUT OPENING, AFTER I DIE. IF YOU DARE OPEN THIS ENVELOPE, MY HAND WILL GROW OUT OF THE GRAVE AND CHOKE YOU!” He was taunting me even after he was gone. I put the envelope aside, postponing the dilemma of what to do with it.

  The third item made me laugh. It was a series of contact sheets of photographs that had been taken in the apartment. Each image was a group of lounging nude women. Way to go, Dad, I thought. His story that he had rented out his apartment as the set of a porn film was apparently true; the fact that some of his outrageous tales were credible only complicated my efforts to make sense of his life.

  Finally, under all of the papers, I found three chess pieces from my childhood set, on which we often used to play together. I don’t know whether he had intentionally kept these pieces as a reminder of better times between us or whether they had just settled, like pennies and paper clips, at the bottom of the drawer. The two White bishops were sooty and oily from tobacco smoke, almost as dark as the Black pawn.

  I realize now that I was drawn to chess because there can be no doubt about the result—there is no room for deception. Nothing is clearer than checkmate, the king threatened with execution with no place to go that’s not controlled by the enemy. In the postmortem you can debate your adversary for hours about what might have happened if you had played differently, but there is no avoiding the fact that the actual game ended in a win, loss, or draw. Because my father was my main opponent when I was young, the unambiguousness of the result was important to me, although at the time I didn’t know why. When my father lost a game, he couldn’t worm his way out of the defeat. I had witnessed the loss myself—indeed, I had inflicted it—and so he could not claim that a confused referee had raised the wrong guy’s hand.

  There is truth on the chessboard in other ways, too. The opponent can try something tricky, as Pascal did in the Dragon game against Drenchev, but everything is there for both players to see. In poker you need to judge whether an adversary is bluffing without knowing his cards. In chess nothing whatsoever is concealed. Both players analyze the same configuration of pieces and pawns.

  Emanuel Lasker, the world champion from 1894 to 1921, famously said:

  On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite. Our little chess is one of the sanctuaries where this principle of justice has occasionally had to hide.

  Lasker further claimed that chess was not merely a substitute for life but a way of rekindling interest in the larger world.

  Many a man, struck by injustice as, say, Socrates and Shakespeare were struck, has found justice realized on the chessboard, and has thereby recovered his courage and his vitality to play the game of life.10

  When I was immersed in chess as an adolescent, my sentiments were similar to Lasker’s. I thought the game’s special decisive nature made it a rare bastion of truth in a world filled with confusing falsehoods. I was wrong. The irony is that chess, which seems so pure in the abstract, is a magnet for deceptive people. I moved away from the game not because I lost interest in what was happening on the board but because I could not tolerate the dishonesty and psychic aggression all around me in the tournament hall.

  As an adult, I have met many top players who are unable to maintain close friendships. “The longer you play chess, the more self-centered you become,” said Aleksander Wojtkiewicz, a Polish-American grandmaster. “It’s necessary in chess to put yourself first,” Wojtkiewicz told me. “It’s easy to forget that anyone else exists. That attitude doesn’t work in the rest of life. That’s why few of us chess players can hold marriages.11 Look at Karpov and Kasparov.”12 If I was going to remain in the chess world, I wanted to find strong players, chess role models if you will, whom I admired not only for how they guided their cavalry and clerics, but also for how they conducted their lives.

  7

  FEMALE COUNTERPLAY

  “They’re all weak, all women. They’re stupid compared to men. They shouldn’t play chess, you know. They’re like beginners. They lose every single game against a man.”

  —BOBBY FISCHER

  “Women could be just as good at chess, but why would they want to be?”

  —MARGARET MEAD

  “I believe chess can bring me closer to the spiritual part of this world in a way that simple material stuff can’t.”

  —IRINA KRUSH

  “DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH, PAUL?” KASPAROV asked. We were having dinner at a sleek French restaurant a few blocks from his Manhattan hotel. “Or do you want me to be politically correct?” The latter question was, of course, theoretical: even if I had opted for the sanitized version, he still would have steamrolled me with his version of the truth. Kasparov was about to tell me why there would never be many women in the top echelons of chess. This disquisition had been prompted by our waitress, a tall young woman wearing a slinky black dress and a jeweled stud in her nose, who was now across the room getting our drinks. Kasparov was obviously intrigued by her beauty—her charcoal-black, waist-length hair, her high cheekbones, her sallow lips—and confounded by her conspicuous lack of interest in chess, which emerged after she’d recited the seafood special in a detached, listless voice. Kasparov, ever observant, had noticed on the back of the menu, in small type, a list of regular weekly events at the restaurant: a jazz brunch on Sunday, a string quartet on Monday, and so on. Tonight was “chess night.” He asked her when people would start playing.

  “Chess,” she snorted, “you’ve got to be kidding. It may say that, but I’ve worked here three months and never seen anybody play.”

  Kasparov forced himself to smile. It must have been a novel experience for him to talk about chess with someone who had no idea who he was. He seemed both humbled and disgusted, and when she left to fill our drink order, he shook his head as if he were confounded by an unexpected development at the chessboard.

  “Most women are not contemptuous of chess,” he told me. “They admire what we do, the force and passion with which we throw ourselves into the battle. How we destroy our opponents.” I liked how Kasparov was using the collective we, including me in the brotherhood of chess players, but I didn’t agree with where he was going. “But there’s a reason why women themselves do not excel at the game,” he continued. “Chess is a combination of war, science, and art, areas in which men dominate and women are naturally inferior. Not by choice but by design. I tell the truth, even if it is not what people want to hear.”

  It was a truth Kasparov had been telling since 1987, when he wrote Child of Change and pondered why “the female is much less deadly than the male” in chess:

  Botvinnik believes there are physiological reasons why women will always play less well than men, that a woman’s nervous system is designed to cope with her function as a mother of children, leaving her with less natural aptitude for making decisions. This, of course, is a contentious subject, especially in these days of women’s liberation. But I have to say that I think Botvinnik is right.

  Kasparov then observed that in areas of abstract thought like music, mathematics, and chess, women have historically shown less talent than men.

  There are no women grandmasters at composing music or painting. Women’s minds cannot handle the concepts of
Euclidean geometry. They do better in areas with a human dimension, such as medicine or writing fiction. Also, I think top-level chess requires a degree of natural aggression which does not come naturally to many women.

  He went on to note that modern scientific research supported Botvinnik’s view:

  Men do much better in tests to measure spatial-visual ability, such as breaking up patterns into smaller units, a key factor in chess. [Moreover] a woman’s train of thought can be broken more easily by extraneous events, such as a baby crying upstairs. This is not part of their environmental conditioning, but organic, part of their genetic molecular structure. The effect, in computer terms, is to overload their memory bank with a series of little events to which they are programmed to respond, thereby limiting their powers of concentration.

  Kasparov concluded by apologizing to women for his seemingly chauvinist views:

  Only in fiction (Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis) does a woman take a game from the world champion. I’m sorry, ladies, but there it is!

  When Kasparov wrote these words, there were no women ranked within the top one hundred players in the world. And now, two decades later, there is one, Judit Polgar, who got as high as number eight. Kasparov believes she is just the exception that proves the rule. “An individual woman may play well,” he told me, “but as a group, they’ll never succeed.”