Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  Since the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972, when he appeared daily as a master analyst on Shelby Lyman’s televised coverage, Pandolfini’s reputation as a chess teacher has grown steadily. Even when most chess teachers are starving for work, prospective students contact him regularly. He has no time, but he can’t bear to say no. Instead he matches disappointment with heartfelt regret: “I’ll call you as soon as I have an opening. Don’t worry, it will work out.” If there is a hint of irritation or unhappiness on the other end he keeps talking. Only when he senses that his caller is appeased will Bruce hang up and peacefully forget. He is by nature a great confidence builder—one aspect of his gift for teaching.

  ***

  PANDOLFINI WAS THE manager of the Manhattan Chess Club from 1983 to 1986, and one afternoon while Josh played chess for a couple of hours before his lesson, I watched him perform his managerial duties. He came through the door three quarters of an hour late with a guilty smile that coaxed forgiveness (I knew it well), long arms swinging like Ichabod Crane’s. In passing, he gave a crisp executive “Good afternoon” to half a dozen club regulars while moving to the phone in his office, which had been ringing for some time. “Hello, Bruce Pandolfini, Manhattan Chess Club.” It was a journalist from Newsweek demanding to know where Bobby Fischer was hiding out; he had been calling every day for the past week. “I can’t speak about this right now,” Bruce said conspiratorially, as if Fischer’s sister were standing next to him. “Can you get back to me?” The phone rang again. It was U.S. Champion Grandmaster Lev Alburt calling to discuss a lecture series he and Pandolfini were planning to give on the upcoming Karpov-Kasparov championship match in Moscow. “I’ll have to get back to you,” Bruce said officiously, sipping his coffee and shuffling through his mail. He was in full stride now but had forgotten to take off his scarf, which made him appear disheveled and daft. The phone rang again while two club regulars stood outside the door to his office, cursing one another at the top of their lungs. “Keep it down out there,” Bruce called, which only fanned their fury. The caller represented a Hadassah chapter in Staten Island and wanted Bruce to give a lecture on the history of chess and the psychology of the chess player, followed by an exhibition of blindfold play. “We’re willing to pay you thirty dollars,” the man on the phone said as if he were making an unusually attractive offer.

  “You’re a liar,” one of the men outside the door was bellowing, his face purple with rage.

  “You took your hand off the piece,” said the other, who had been having arguments at the club nearly every afternoon for the past eighteen years.

  “I did not take my hand off the piece.”

  “You’re trying to steal the game! I had a won game!”

  “Touch move! Touch move!”

  “I know the kind of guy you are. You’re the kind of guy when you were a kid you stole from your mother’s wallet. I’m not going to let you get away with it.”

  “Bruce! Bruce!” By now everyone in the club was roaring at the two men to shut up, and Pandolfini was on the phone again.

  Later he scrubbed the toilet, one of the manager’s jobs at the Manhattan Chess Club. Then he did the books, cleaned the ashtrays and filled the Coke machine. These days he was especially careful not to forget the Coke machine because at the last board meeting the president of the club had been outraged that Coke sales were down four hundred dollars from the previous fiscal year.

  Beside running the Manhattan Chess Club, teaching private lessons until twelve or one in the morning and writing for Chess Life, Pandolfini lectured at the New School and ran the chess programs at Trinity, Browning and the Little Red School House. He had recently signed a contract with Simon and Schuster to write a comprehensive series of instructional chess books, which in all likelihood will make him the most widely read American chess writer of the twentieth century. By 1989 he will have written eleven full-length chess books in four years.

  But teaching chess to children is what Pandolfini considers his art form. He leads his kids laughing through deserts of tedium. He’ll spice up a technical rook-and-pawn endgame exercise with basketball analogies, dares, popcorn, cupcakes and soft threats. He carries a briefcase full of superhero and dinosaur stickers to reward discovered checks and passed pawns, and when his little students win a tournament or discover a mate in five they earn mysteriously powerful master-class points. If they achieve enough master-class points in a month they are ceremoniously rewarded with a master-class certificate that has the authoritative look of the Declaration of Independence. His little kids think Pandolfini’s magical rewards are far more significant than weak squares and maintaining the opposition; these concepts they learn almost in passing.

  DURING THEIR FIRST lessons, Josh refused to accept instruction from Pandolfini. When he was six, his chess ideas were like pieces of his body and he could not give them up. For example, he simply could not cope with being told not to bring out his queen early in the game. Why shouldn’t he? In games against his father or in Washington Square he had often won with an early attack using his bishop and queen. Why was this suddenly wrong? Bruce seemed to understand immediately and declared that Joshua’s obstinacy was an aspect of his talent and passion for the game. Their first lessons consisted of scores of riotous clock-banging speed games during which Bruce joked with him, and at the same time nudged his pupil in the direction of time-honored fundamentals by dint of repeated good-natured beatings and the awarding of dinosaur stickers and master-class points when Josh experimented with a “master-class move.” He chased our son’s brazenly forward queen with pawns and knights until she learned to stay on the back rank waiting for a more prudent time to attack. Gradually Josh learned more orthodox openings and maneuvers without fully realizing that they weren’t entirely of his own design.

  PANDOLFINI IS CONTENT playing the pied piper, but when he emerges again into the adult world he often feels pressured and frantic. “I’m doing terribly,” he will answer frequently to a friend’s question. He is frazzled by too much work and too little sleep and nagged by guilt and confusion about his life choices. “Certainly in the traditional sense I’m a failure,” he said one harried afternoon at the Manhattan Chess Club. “In our society a chess teacher is not considered in the same league as a professor of chemistry or mathematics. I could have made a lot more money in the commercial world. My mother still asks me when I’m going to get a serious job. The worst time is holiday dinners with the family, when I have to explain that I’m still giving chess lessons.” He gestured out the door toward rows of club regulars who were eating cheap Danish, snapping time clocks and bickering. “Let’s face it, we’re not exactly saving humanity up here at the Manhattan Chess Club,” he said wryly.

  OVER THE YEARS, the parents of some of Pandolfini’s most gifted young students have guided them away from chess. This is true for other teachers as well. It’s hard to blame the parents. In our culture there is virtually no respect or payoff for chess players. Sometimes at a scholastic tournament a couple of teachers of children shake their heads and talk nostalgically about the great ones who are now long retired. It is like Red Holzman and Red Auerbach remembering Cousy, Guerin, Pettit and Arizin—except that the chess teachers are talking about players who retired at nine or ten years of age. Today some of these brilliant kids, who left the game at the top of the rating list years ago, are completing Ivy League educations, and others are already making big salaries in conventional careers, but from the point of view of their impoverished chess teachers, it is a tragic loss.

  It is upsetting to me when Pandolfini confesses his self-doubts. Why are we working so hard at chess? I wonder. Some of the men outside his door have given up families and careers to spend their afternoons and evenings pushing wood at the Manhattan Chess Club. What for? Why should it mean so much to me when Josh wins a children’s tournament or even a casual game? Why am I bringing my seven-year-old son for chess lessons twice a week and waiting in a rage when Pandolfini is late? Sometimes I think that Josh a
nd I are on a thrilling, precipitous slide, with certain doom and failure at the bottom.

  ONE AFTERNOON I was leaving the club with Josh when an old woman, a club regular for almost fifty years, approached. I was prepared for a pat on Joshua’s head and a warm greeting from this woman, whose quaint smile and thinning gray hair reminded me of my grandmother. “So you’re here again with your seven-year-old son,” she said with a sad smile. “Dragging him in to this smoke-filled place to play chess. Don’t you know you’re making him an addict? You’re trying to make up for all the things you couldn’t do with your own life.”

  SOMETIMES I WATCH Joshua’s chess lesson. During the course of their hour and a half or two hours together, Pandolfini is upset or delighted with Joshua’s work, and my emotions trail along behind his. Later, thinking about the lesson, I realize that I haven’t been following what they’ve been talking about; I’ve been dreaming about championships—his, my own. They are the same. The old woman is right, of course.

  5

  THE GREATER NEW YORK OPEN

  Soon after Josh began to study chess I went to a tournament to see the professionals. The players in Washington Square directed me to a game room called Bar Point on the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue, which was where most master-level chess tournaments in the New York area were held at that time.

  I arrived at a shattered glass door, labeled “Bar Point: House of Backgammon,” that was flanked by a couple of reeling drunks. Inside were two flights of stairs, littered with cigarette butts and reeking of urine.

  It was the weekend of the 1984 Greater New York Open, and the rooms inside were packed. The congregation of talent at this tournament made it one of the strongest in the United States that year, according to promoter Bill Goichberg, the Don King of chess. Scores of chess players were sitting across from one another at cafeteria tables, sighing, saying “Shhh,” moving a piece, pushing a time clock, writing on a score sheet, but mostly just sitting on hard plastic chairs and thinking. Beyond a door padded against slamming with wads of newspaper and silver duct tape, the best players were in a sorrowful front room over a pizza parlor, with discolored wall paneling, peeling paint, torn rugs and electrical wires dangling from holes in the ceiling. From time to time Goichberg’s voice boomed from the back room, “Keep it down!”

  Most of the players with international titles—the stars—sat at a table near a row of curtained windows, closest to the din of buses, trucks and ghetto blasters cruising up Sixth Avenue. Grandmaster Dmitry Gurevich, the tenth-ranked player in the country, was playing against Asa Hoffmann. Gurevich, a short, handsome man, had a finger jammed into each of his ears and flinched at noises as if he were being stung by wasps. Hoffmann, ranked ninetieth at the time, is a tall, thin man with black hair and a weary, acne-scarred face. He played more casually than Gurevich and didn’t take nearly as much time between moves; he didn’t seem to care as much.

  Next to Hoffmann sat Joel Benjamin, twenty, who had just finished his junior year at Yale. Many in the chess world feel that Benjamin is the most talented young chess player in America, a potential world champion. While he studied the board, his pale boyish face was calm and cheerful, and he waved casually when he noticed a friend enter the room. He sat on folded legs as if he were doing yoga, but his fingers moved with a will of their own. They were in his mouth or wrapped around one another or quivering indecisively above a rook or a bishop.

  For many minutes, sometimes for an hour or more, players analyzed the positions on their boards. At times they seemed to be meditating or daydreaming. In fact, as a player explained, “They’re boiling inside with attacks and counterattacks. Emotionally, it’s a battle of life and death. You enter into someone else’s head and battle against his ideas.”

  When played beautifully, chess goes on, hour after hour, with the tension of a baseball game tied in extra innings. But unlike baseball, the tactics involve such complicated ploys and feints, the crafting of such devious illusions, that what appears to be a tie is often no such thing. In even the sleepiest of games, the player must consider the possibility that what looks like a draw may be the artful precursor of a decisive, crushing attack. After minutes of painful stillness, he will move a piece, then bound from the board as if suddenly unchained. During one such break, Asa Hoffmann chatted with friends. “I’ve got him thinking,” he said referring to Gurevich, who had been agonizing over his move for more than an hour. “Maybe I’m gonna win a pawn.”

  Hoffmann, the son of two lawyers, grew up on Park Avenue, went to Horace Mann and then to Columbia until he dropped out “because I became a chess fanatic.” He is one of the most active tournament players in the country, participating in about two hundred tournament games a year and earning a consistent two thousand dollars annually from all these competitions. “My family would be real proud of me if I were a baseball player and made a couple of hundred thousand a year,” he said, “but they’re ashamed of me because I’m a chess player. I’m forty-one, and they’re still asking me, ‘When are you going to get a job?’”

  To make ends meet, Hoffmann hustles chess games for a couple of dollars each. “The chess-hustling business is bad. It’s down with the economy, and O.T.B. and Lotto have hurt.” He is a great speed player, generally thought to be the most savvy and successful of the chess hustlers, and makes about one hundred dollars a week this way. “It’s not a good game for a gambler,” he explained, “because chess players are too rational and conservative. You have to find a true compulsive who happens to play chess—someone who’s essentially masochistic and enjoys being humiliated. One of my best customers was a rabbi. He would come in to play me wearing a yarmulke and would say a prayer in Yiddish. While I beat him, he cursed and screamed, begging me to have mercy on him. I’d tell him, ‘What a fish you are. I’m gonna crush you.’ I took a lot of money from him. Unfortunately, he’s dead now.”

  A few minutes later, Gurevich resigned and walked quickly from the front room. “I wasted him,” Hoffmann said matter-of-factly. “It was a classic psych job. Before we started playing, I said something about his old girlfriend. I set him up.”

  At the next table Joel Benjamin moved the white queen forward three squares, and after considering for a moment, his opponent reached a hand across the board to resign. The position seemed much the same as it had an hour before. The pieces were all engaged and balanced against one another, but both players knew that in six or eight moves something terrible would happen to black; it was inevitable.

  Immediately the two men began to analyze. “If only you hadn’t put the bishop on e7,” Benjamin said sympathetically. “I think you had winning chances.” “Yes,” the loser answered softly. For young players particularly, losing is terrible—a chaotic, vulnerable moment, a glimpse of ultimate limitations.

  “I used to play against Bobby Fischer all the time,” said Asa Hoffmann, taking a break from a backgammon game. “I lost hundreds of games against him for two dollars. I was Fischer’s fish.”

  BOBBY FISCHER MOVED like a phantom through the broken-down rooms. Everyone had a Fischer story. One player said he’d gotten a letter from Fischer three weeks ago but wouldn’t let anyone read it. A grandmaster who played in the front room was supposed to have just returned from a two-month visit with Fischer in California, but he walked away without a word when asked about it. Bobby is the libido of the game, a chess player who could call a press conference tomorrow and play a game for a million dollars.

  “During the Fischer period, it wasn’t chess that turned people on,” said Joel Benjamin. “It was Fischer. He was a lunatic, and at the same time such a great player that he could beat the Russians single-handedly.”

  Slightly built and wearing gold-rimmed glasses, Benjamin has the look of a young librarian, but his speech is full of willfulness, sharp judgments and more than a few Fischerisms: “Sometimes during a match you get a bad feeling about a person. Mannerisms affect you. The way someone moves a piece is important. If a player bangs down the pieces, I
know he’s an idiot and it makes me want to tear his head off.”

  Benjamin, who learned how to move the pieces when he was eight while watching the Fischer-Spassky match on television, acknowledged that if the economic realities for chess players were different, he probably wouldn’t have bothered going to college. “It worries me that chess players in this country can’t make it,” he said. Still, when he graduated from Yale, he devoted himself to the game, winning the U.S. championship in 1987. “My goal is to be world champion someday,” he said, just as Fischer had said thirty years ago in Washington Square. “I dream about it.”

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK on the last night of the Greater New York Open, all but the final game was finished. The winner of this one, which was in its sixth hour, would take the four-hundred-dollar first prize.

  Joel’s father sat waiting while Bill Goichberg tallied the results. His son’s biggest fan, Alan Benjamin is the chess coach at Madison High School in Brooklyn, where he is also a history teacher. When Goichberg finished, Benjamin would drive Joel back to New Haven; he had been driving his son to and from chess tournaments since Joel was a young boy.

  Joel ended up with two wins and two draws, which tied him for third place, but because he had to share the one-hundred-fifty-dollar purse with four others, he ended up losing money after paying his entry fee and expenses for the weekend.

  “This was a special tournament,” said Goichberg. “Normally I can’t afford to pay prizes like this. It’s been nearly a year since we’ve had a four-hundred-dollar first prize here. New York doesn’t seem to support chess.”

  Meanwhile there had been a mishap in the dimly lit back room where Joel was analyzing a game with several other masters. The single working toilet at Bar Point had finally given out, and the floor was awash; Coke cans, broken glass, soggy candy wrappers and wads of toilet paper floated on the putrid rug. A young woman in shorts tiptoed across the room, ineffectually spreading newspapers over the mess.