I know that Jovanovic is right. Susan Polgar, the great teenage Hungarian international master, and her two little sisters play forty to fifty hours a week. Instead of going to school, they only play chess. In the morning they study with a grandmaster who specializes in openings; in the afternoon a grandmaster comes to their home to work on tactics; in the evening they are visited by a third grandmaster, a scholar of the endgame. In casual games, the Polgar girls move the pieces with hardly a glance; they know the board the way great pianists know the keys, and their casual manner conceals deadly combinations and perfect technique. While they play, fans swoon over their prodigious gift for the game and call them “born” chess players, “naturals.” How can you hope to compete with such “naturals” if you play only six or seven hours a week and take the summer off? As I trolled, I found myself imagining the great strides Josh would make if he worked around-the-clock with three grandmasters.
IN THE SOVIET Union nine months earlier, I had told Pandolfini that I wanted to remove myself from Joshua’s chess life. Each morning for the last two weeks they had been working on the game and my head was filled with jargon that I didn’t understand. I was angry with my son for not concentrating during his lessons, and even while we were being tailed by the KGB I worried more about his chess. “Why can’t you remember to move your knight to f6?” I snapped at him, echoing Pandolfini without having the slightest idea why he ought to move the knight to f6. For the rest of the afternoon I remained irritated with him because he had forgotten about knight f6.
Being a chess father was too painful and took too much of my time, I told Bruce. Joshua’s career seemed to be swallowing me, and I wanted Pandolfini to do more. I suppose that I wanted him to be the chess father. Bruce looked at me with his sympathetic brown eyes and nodded; whatever the problem was, he’d take care of it. For the moment, I felt better, but we both knew that it had been idle conversation. Who but a father or mother can accompany a child to all-day tournaments to make sure that he has his lunch and doesn’t eat too much candy or exhaust himself playing football between rounds? Over the years Pandolfini has heard my complaints from scores of other parents. Recently one ambitious parent offered him a significant amount of money to board his talented seven-year-old son at Bruce’s home for a year to study chess seven days a week. This father was convinced that at the end of this period of nonstop work his son would be recognized as the new Bobby Fischer. I can imagine Pandolfini seeming to nod agreement to this obsessed parent’s proposal while trying to figure out the right tactic by which to duck out graciously.
All of the top young players have at least one parent behind them, encouraging, assisting, worrying. In a sense, the child is only one part of a team. Regardless of his gift for the game, he can’t compete at the highest level without a good teacher and a supportive parent. During the last two years, it has become clear that I am the coach and Bruce is the teacher. He drills Josh on the openings, hones his tactics and trains him in endgame technique. I decide which tournaments we’ll play in and how much practice he should have the week before. I log his weaknesses and strengths during games and point them out to Pandolfini. I remind Bruce to give him homework, and I pester Josh to do it. I make sure he is asleep early on Tuesday night so that he won’t be tired for his Wednesday lesson.
Bonnie often chides me for thinking more about the chess player than the boy, and I nod sheepishly; I am guilty of this crime. It is hard for me to remember Josh before he was a chess player. It’s terrible, but when he wins or plays brilliantly my affection for him gushes. After he plays badly, I notice that I don’t walk as close to him on the street, and I have to force myself to give him a hug. Luckily Bonnie is exactly the opposite. When he loses, her motherly instincts are aroused and she pampers him. Then Josh allows himself to be taken care of like a little boy who needs his mommy. I think that Bonnie is somewhat removed from Joshua’s chess only because I am so involved. She sees her role in our adventure as the voice of moderation. She frequently reminds me that my relationship with Josh is much more important than his chess, and reminds our son that if he never played another game, his father would still love him. But when Josh and I go off to weekend tournaments without her, she grieves. I have a hunch that if I weren’t around, Bonnie would be nearly as profligate in her chess parenting as I am.
One afternoon while we trolled in the Gulf Stream Josh asked if I would find him a football league to play in. “It’s bad for chess,” I said without thinking. “Too many hits on the head.”
“C’mon, Freddy,” he said impatiently, “I wanna play football.” For the next half hour this aging all-star football fan argued with his eight-year-old about why football was out of the question.
When I think about Joshua’s chess life on the boat, I drift away from marlin fishing, forgetting to check the baits for seaweed and to look at the sky for circling birds. But I am only mildly disturbed that I’ve lost my edge as a fisherman; it has become clear by now that it is Joshua’s chess, rather than marlin, that gets my blood hot.
ONE MORNING ABOUT five weeks after we arrived on the island, Josh and I took our skiff across the lagoon from South Bimini, where we were staying, to North Bimini. He steered, and we trolled a couple of small jigs for barracuda and jacks, but nothing hit. I couldn’t wait to get out of the blistering late-morning sun, but Josh wanted to cut up a little fish he’d caught earlier and cast for mangrove snappers off the Game Club dock. When I was a boy I had landed a ten-foot black-tip shark off the same dock one night, and ever since he heard the story, Josh had taken to carrying a hand line, and after catching a small snapper he would hook it in the back and swim it out with the tide as a live bait for shark.
But this day we hadn’t come to the Game Club to fish for sharks or mangrove snappers. Earlier that week I had read in the Miami Herald that an open tournament was about to begin sixty miles away in the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. The article included brief profiles of some of the most talented scholastic players who were flying in from across the country for the large tournament, including several New York players whom Josh competed against regularly. Reading the piece, accompanied by pictures of young chess players, filled me with misgivings and indecision. How could it be good for Joshua’s chess to stop playing for two months? No one else had taken the summer off. Why had I made this quixotic decision? For fishing? My immediate impulse was to fly to Hollywood and register my son, but then I realized it would be a mistake. He hadn’t played a game in six weeks; he’d be crushed and we would both feel miserable.
The article also mentioned that former world champion Boris Spassky would be playing in the tournament. Probably he would give a simultaneous exhibition or a series of lectures. Eight months earlier, Spassky had played in such an exhibition in New York against forty players, including Josh, and afterwards we’d had dinner together. Spending time with Spassky had been stimulating, and also unsettling. During the exhibition he had been an elegant, articulate and witty ambassador for the game. In his lecture he had imitated the nasal speaking voice of Karpov, the raw, youthful energy of Kasparov, the paranoia of Korchnoi. In the simultaneous exhibition he had rocked back on his heels in mock horror when Josh took one of his pawns, and with regal courtesy he had offered draws to mediocre players. He was a wonderful showman, but there was something sad about a former world champion’s having to perform regularly in chess sideshows in order to make a living.
During our dinner Spassky spoke about Bobby Fischer with affection and respect, and about the Russian chess establishment with bitterness. Though he was not yet fifty, the greatest moments of his life seemed already behind him. “Bobby never offended me,” he said, referring to their time in Iceland. “He was always a gentleman. To tell the truth, I was a beaten man before I ever came to Reykjavik. There were so many lies being told about me in the Soviet Union that I was exhausted when I arrived for the match. And Bobby was a good opponent for me. For some reason, even though he was the stronger player, I could usuall
y guess his moves. But back in Moscow after the match I was lambasted by the Soviet Sports Committee as if I had tried to lose.”
“Was Botvinnik among those who attacked you?”
“No, but Botvinnik was glad I lost. I think he felt that my becoming champion tarnished his reputation. He hated being forgotten.”
Now in two days Spassky would be sixty miles away, answering the same questions about Karpov, Kasparov and Bobby Fischer, telling his stock jokes and anecdotes and then flying off to perform somewhere else. I recalled his telling me that he loved the game but hated the way of life of the professional player: “Don’t allow your son be a chess player,” he had said. I had nodded; of course Josh should do something else with his life. But at the same moment I was imagining him competing against the top grandmasters in the world. This is a contradiction in my life that I don’t understand: not wanting my son to suffer the unhappiness of a poor, itinerant player does little to snuff out my reckless enthusiasm for his early chess career.
It would be a mistake for Josh to play in the Miami tournament, but the idea had titillated me, and I wanted to see if he was still sharp after his layoff, and whether the nationals had dulled his enjoyment of the game.
THERE IS ONE chess player on Bimini—I’ll call him Cornelius—and a couple of days later I arranged a match with him. Joshua’s interest was pricked by the idea of playing for the championship of Bimini. At ten in the morning, the appointed time, we walked into the Big Game Club bar, where the temperature plummeted forty degrees, but Cornelius wasn’t there. Through tinted windows we looked outside at postcard images of the Bahamas. “Jeez, it’s cold,” Josh said, pulling his arms inside his T-shirt. “Let me go outside and cast a few times while you look for him.” He couldn’t get his mind off fishing.
We were the only ones in the bar besides Cooper, the bartender, tall and a little gray around the temples, who had been working here for more than thirty years. He asked me about Bonnie and the new baby. Cooper and I have known each other for a long time.
“Have you seen Cornelius?” I asked.
“No,” he answered; from his tone, it was clear that Cooper didn’t approve of Cornelius, who is a heavy drinker.
“Josh was supposed to play him this morning, but I guess he forgot.”
“Play him what, man?”
“Chess. Don’t you know that Cornelius is the champion of Bimini?” Cooper shook his head as if I were nuts. Cornelius is no champion of anything except booze, he was thinking.
Bimini is a tiny community of about twelve hundred people. Over the past dozen years, island gossip has switched from illicit sex and big-fish stories to tales of hometown smuggling, piracy at sea and drug-related murders. When I first came here, men made their living fishing for conch or crawfish or working on gamefish boats. Today, most industry is drug-related. At night planes from Colombia drop hundreds of bales of marijuana into the ocean near Bimini, where they are picked up by high-powered speedboats for the sixty-mile run to Miami. Each morning young men and some of the old-timers who used to be fishermen run their small boats to atolls south of the island, where they search for waterlogged bales of marijuana that were overlooked by the speedboats the previous night. A whole generation of Bimini men have become wealthy on the waterlogged refuse of the big-time drug trade. Other Bimini men (it is rumored that Cornelius is among them) off-load drug planes that occasionally land at night at the South Bimini airport.
Cornelius was indeed the chess champion of Bimini, but no one knew or cared. With the burgeoning drug traffic, it seems that both chess and fishing have become dying arts on the island. Cornelius won the title years ago when a dozen fishermen played the game in the evenings at one or another of the tiny bars along the main road. “There were some good players then,” Cornelius recalled, “but now it’s only me.” The other players had either moved away or were dead.
After leaving Cooper, Josh and I strolled down the dusty main road with our rolled official-sized tournament chessboard and brown bag filled with Staunton pieces, searching for Cornelius. The midday sun was so bright it was hard to see even with sunglasses. We stopped at every bar along the way, but no one knew where he was. We asked the Conch Island Woman, who sat on a crumbling wall next to her rusty little table, which was set up on the street. Her hot jars of conch and green pepper were marinating in the sun, the delicious smells carrying down the Queen’s Highway. She fanned mosquitoes off her legs and shook her head; she hadn’t seen him. Josh was whimpering about the burning street and stopped to dip his feet in every puddle. I was getting angry. I wanted my son to play chess today and couldn’t let go of the idea. I kept thinking about Susan Polgar and her two little sisters in Hungary getting better and better, and about the chess tournament in Florida. How could Cornelius have forgotten about the match? By now Josh was hoping we wouldn’t find him. The tide was beginning to come in and the afternoon fishing off Brown’s dock figured to be terrific. I asked a couple of drunks if there were other chess players on Bimini, and they directed us to a man who worked in the tiny insurance office. “He’s better than Cornelius,” said the guys, who were sharing a bottle. But when we found the man sweltering over his application forms, he explained that his game was checkers.
Sometime after lunch we finally found Cornelius sipping a beer at Ozzie Brown’s bar. I was so pleased to see him that our three-hour search was forgotten. I had no idea how good a player the Bahamian was, but he had weight lifter’s arms and an inscrutable, dangerous face, and it made me nervous to think of Josh playing him. I had arranged the match with conviction, but now I asked myself why I was pitting my little kid against this dope-smuggling thug. In the moment of excitement and dread I always feel just before Josh plays, Cornelius assumed his place in the pantheon of champions beside Smyslov, Tal, Botvinnik and Karpov. The Bahamian even yawned in the world-weary manner of an old champion patronizing a beginner.
***
THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF Bimini was played in a breezy room paneled in dark, varnished wood with large open windows looking out onto the picturesque harbor. This place was filled with ghosts. On the walls there were scores of yellowing photographs I had first admired with my father—photos of tremendous marlin that had been caught in these waters in the thirties and forties by Ernest Hemingway and other all-star anglers I had read about in fishing books.
“Are you ready?” Cornelius asked Josh. He was as dusty as the road and smelled of twenty years of beer. He wore a thick gold chain with a shark tooth on his neck, the mark of coolies in the Bahamian drug trade, who more often than not carry their entire worldly wealth on their hands and neck.
Josh asked me, “If I do good, will you buy me a vanilla shake at Bob Smith’s?” Then he pushed his center pawn two squares, and Cornelius did the same, picking up his pawn between fingers burdened with heavy gold rings. Josh anchored the center with pawns and a bishop, and Cornelius pushed his pawn on the bishop file and developed his knight. On the fourth move, Cornelius prematurely brought out his queen. Perhaps it was a variation popular among Bimini bone fishermen of the sixties or a try for a fast win against a kid, but it was a mistake. If Josh played properly, Cornelius would be behind in the development of his pieces, and the queen might be vulnerable to an attack. All my son had to do was bring out his knights and bishops to their natural squares, but he looked indecisive and fidgety. Maybe Cornelius was a master and there was a deep threat hidden in this early queen move. But Josh had played games against dozens of masters and half a dozen grandmasters; usually the development of their pieces was slow, and their attacks built gradually and were unstoppable. Park players made crazy, unpredictable moves which often lost but sometimes could beat you quickly. What was behind this queen move? He was trying to size up Cornelius and at the same time trying to get used to analyzing a position after six weeks away from the game. After thinking for several minutes he brought his queen out to the third rank. “Oh, wow,” Cornelius said beneath his breath, as if he had never expected such a danger
ous move from a little guy. Now the position looked balanced and neat, with the queens on opposite sides of the board. Josh had matched the Bahamian’s unsound threat with an unsound one of his own.
Cornelius pushed a pawn two squares. His center looked very powerful, protected now on the diagonal by the queen, and I could tell that Josh wasn’t sure what to do. Hesitantly he took a pawn. The Bahamian smirked. He was quietly taunting and lulling his opponent and Josh had fallen for the bait. Now Cornelius pushed a pawn to the fifth rank, forking Josh’s queen and bishop. My son’s cheeks flushed; he was playing like a beginner. After the inevitable exchange Josh had traded his bishop for three pawns, with his queen sitting in the center of the board and his pieces undeveloped.
I could barely contain myself; this was the result of his long layoff. Josh had forgotten to develop his pieces and had fallen into a beginner’s trap. Instead of analyzing he was thinking about barracudas and ice cream. How many times had I told him, “You can’t play without trying your hardest. You’ve got to concentrate.”
On the street a native passed and hailed Cornelius. “How you doin’ against the little fella?”
“All right, all right.”
Now Josh moved a knight to the edge of the board. How could he do this? When he was six Pandolfini had taught him that “a knight on the rim is very dim.” Placed there, the knight can attack fewer squares than in the center of the board and is more easily trapped. Josh’s position was a mess.
Searching for Bobby Fischer Page 14
