Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  He’d been pushing Josh much too hard, Pandolfini realized. In preparing for the nationals the previous spring, he had treated his student like a robot, cramming variations into him that my son found inaccessible or unattractive. He had tried to ignore Joshua’s willfulness and age, and had grown increasingly impatient with his resistance to various time-honored ideas. But perhaps this stubbornness was a vital component of Josh’s fighting spirit and chess intuition. By nature Bruce tended to be pacifistic and compliant, whereas his pupil was competitive and pugnaciously opinionated. Perhaps the well-intentioned but constant drilling of chess principles was taking the guts out of our little player, ultimately even contributing to a fear of playing. Bruce wondered whether he had wanted Josh to win too much. Perhaps he should have allowed his student to discover more for himself, even if it meant losing games and rating points. Maybe early success had been a trap for both of them.

  Pandolfini and I decided that he and Josh had to get away from serious chess, to forget the imperatives of winning and the endless memorizing of opening variations that had taken all the fun and game out of the game. Bruce threw all of his plans and programs out the window. Chess would have to become fun again or Josh would quit. In fact, he might quit anyway; he had to have the room to make that choice. To play with enthusiasm and creativity he would have to be allowed to discover why and for whom he was studying. It wouldn’t work if he was doing it all for his father and his teacher. Bruce would have to start listening to his pupil, and at this moment Josh was thinking more about his new school than about chess. He hated taking the bus in the morning; he felt sick from the driver’s cigar and the plastic smell of the van’s upholstery; he couldn’t stand what they served for lunch. He and Bruce began to talk about such matters during their lessons. Josh was excited about the math program at Dalton and showed Bruce a tricky conceptual problem that he had figured out in less than ten minutes. Then he timed his teacher while he solved it.

  Like a married couple who have been going through bad times, the two of them had to learn to laugh together and to begin to worry about each other. One afternoon my son asked Bruce why he looked so gloomy, and Pandolfini talked about his bad day. Then Josh talked about a pretty girl in his class, clasped his hands and hoped fervently that she liked him. He asked Bruce whether he should risk asking her over and then worried about what would happen if she said yes. What do you do on an afternoon play-date with a girl who doesn’t like football?

  Pandolfini allowed chess to become incidental to other matters. When he brought the game up he did so gently and without urgency. He set up chess problems for Josh to solve, simple ones of the sort he’d introduced two years earlier. He timed his student on the clock, and they both laughed while Josh tried to find the mate before Bruce had all the pieces in place on the board. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this Pandolfini would stand up, yawn and say, “C’mon, Tiger, let’s go outside and toss the football.” Twenty minutes of beginner problems and an hour of shagging long passes became a chess lesson. After a couple of weeks of this they started playing speed games as well, but they chatted about football at the same time, and when Josh blundered Bruce turned it into a joke.

  Almost overnight, Pandolfini could see that everything was coming back together, but he didn’t want it to happen too fast. One afternoon Josh beat him in a seven-minute game without odds of any sort. Afterward, Bruce told me that he had never seen Josh play such an elegant, original combination. The two of them continued to joke and to talk about sports, keeping chess on the back burner. Bruce gave his student a new little black book, and every lesson he crammed it full of superstar and Day-Glo dinosaur stickers. Sometimes they spent a third of the lesson fooling with the book and the stickers.

  By now my son was looking forward to seeing Bruce again. His coach at Dalton, Svetozar Jovanovic, had also been concerned about his unhappiness and had arranged events to integrate Josh into the school. He called to invite Josh to play a simultaneous exhibition against the primary team, assuring him that afterward the children would know who he was and it would be easier for him to make new friends.

  One chilly afternoon late in October Josh asked me if I would take him to Washington Square to play some speed chess. I told him to grab the football and his sweatshirt so that we could have a catch afterward. In the five months since the nationals, this was the first time that, without prodding from friends, his father or his teacher, Josh himself had suggested playing. Walking toward the park, he talked nervously but also with excitement about playing fourteen games at the same time in the next day’s simultaneous exhibition. Later that afternoon, he jumped for a pass and fell back to the asphalt on his head. He blacked out for a few minutes and then couldn’t focus his eyes. At the hospital the doctor said that he had a slight concussion. The following morning he had a headache, but he pleaded with me not to call Jovanovic to cancel the event. I gave him an aspirin and agreed.

  Jovanovic had set up a circle of desks for the exhibition in a spacious Dalton classroom. When Josh arrived, looking shy and insecure, Jovanovic hugged him to his ample belly and presented him to the group of parents and children with all the pomp and circumstance of Yuri Averbakh introducing Anatoly Karpov in the House of Trade Unions. Josh rolled his eyes as Jovanovic listed his accomplishments in chess, and the fourteen kids he was about to play trembled with the importance of this moment.

  For the next two and a half hours my son circled the room with the presence and composure of a little man. It was disconcerting to watch. His concentration was unwavering, his expression peaceful, and he seemed years older than the little boy who had cried during his lesson six weeks before. After making his move at each board, he announced it in descriptive notation for his opponent to record on the score sheet. When the position was complicated, he paused in front of the game for what seemed like a long time, though it was probably no more than half a minute. Everyone in the room became nervous during these pauses. Why doesn’t he move on? Is he in trouble? Is it possible that Josh Waitzkin is losing? Finally he would advance a piece and move on to the next game, but a little reluctantly, glancing over his shoulder at the position he had just left as if with regret. At some tables which were half a foot lower than the others, he dropped to his knees so that he could better absorb the position. At one such table a little red-haired girl concentrated on her game. Her eyes never left the board, and she was giving Josh a tough time. Now he made a mistake, and immediately she took his rook. “Oh, no,” he said and rolled his eyes. He paused at the table a long time before taking back her bishop with his king. When he returned to the board again he analyzed for an eternity, then moved his knight to where she could take it with a pawn. A few moves later he had her in a mating net.

  Josh won thirteen out of the fourteen games he played. Later he helped Jovanovic collect the pieces and pack them away as they talked about one of the games. Josh had played a tricky combination to win a rook from a little boy, who afterwards had looked confused and sad. With his arm around Joshua’s shoulder, Jovanovic said, “You know, Josh, that was the same trap that Naomi Spiro used against Elliot Lum two years ago in Syracuse.” The little chess traps of children ring in Svetozar Jovanovic’s head for years.

  LATE IN NOVEMBER we were passing the Manhattan Chess Club and on the spur of the moment decided to go up and say hello to Bruce. He wasn’t there, but in a far corner Jeff Sarwer, the boy who had beaten Josh in September, was playing a speed game against Michael Rohde, a strong international master. Several other masters were standing around watching the game and chatting. Jeff looked up for a moment, nodded to Josh and then focused on the board again.

  After the game was over, Josh challenged Jeff to play a few. I felt sick to my stomach. Bruce had made a point of explaining to Josh that he ought not to compare himself with Jeff, who was a full-time player, in effect a seven-year-old professional. If there had been any plausible excuse to pull my son away, I would have grasped at it. Nothing good could come of this match. />
  The two of them sat down, and one of the masters jocularly called out for others to come watch “the battle of the titans.” The dozen or so men who gathered at their table joked about the size of the players, but everyone was curious. I felt only dread. The adult players watching, most of whom probably hadn’t even known how to move the pieces at that age, had no idea that a match between these two was as loaded emotionally as a contest between Karpov and Kasparov.

  When they started to play Josh looked composed and eager, and in that moment I knew that even if I had been born with chess talent, I still could never have been a player. I would have wanted to run from this kind of confrontation. The nakedness of the moment was appalling. One of these little boys would lose, and at least for a time a carefully constructed edifice of fantasies and expectations would crumble. The stakes were also bloody for the fathers, but I noticed that Mike Sarwer had stationed himself at a far corner of the room where he couldn’t see.

  Josh moved quickly and confidently, and Jeff seemed to sense a message, because his thin little fingers began to tremble against his will, indecisively pausing over the pieces as his clock ticked. Josh won the first game on time with the position fairly equal. He didn’t make any mistakes, and in the next two games he checkmated Jeff. The boys stood up and shook hands with the decorum of grandmasters, but there was no meeting of the eyes. When we left the club, Jeff was sitting in a corner crying by himself. He cried for the next hour and a half, I was told later.

  Outside I asked Josh what he thought about the games—whether he was stronger or whether Jeff had played poorly—the kinds of crummy questions that chess parents lay on their kids. My son shrugged. “Maybe I’m stronger, but maybe he is. It was just a few games. Next time we play he’ll probably get me.”

  Perhaps at least one of us was beginning to learn something.

  18

  A CHESS FAN’S NOTES

  Being a chess fan in the United States is a difficult and lonely hobby. Many of the best tournaments are continents away, and even the top ones here get little attention from the media. If I am interested in keeping abreast of José Cucci’s New York Open, one of the largest and richest tournaments in the world, and if I don’t have the time to hang out at the Penta Hotel on Seventh Avenue, I must buy the Argentinean newspaper Clarin and ask my friend Jon Lehman to translate Miguel Quintero’s article. If I want the latest Karpov-Kasparov gossip I must read the London Times or wheedle information from one of our Russian emigré players, who have their own sources.

  While in our country it is acceptable and even respected in many social circles to memorize mountains of arcane sports statistics and to spend time away from work and the family to root for the Yankees or the Mets, there is little empathy for the chess fan. People become uneasy when they realize that you are absorbed in distant board games. To the nonplayer, being a chess fan seems an eccentric, perhaps even seedy, preoccupation.

  Unfortunately this view is shared tacitly even by the tournament directors and players, who complain year after year about the lack of money and interest in the game. At most tournaments, the fan is at best an afterthought. The playing area is roped off for the contestants, and for other players who are taking a break or have already finished and are interested in watching games still in progress. Often, in his eagerness to see the action, a fan will creep beneath the rope to glimpse a position over the shoulders of half a dozen grandmasters. But tournament directors are like hawks, and they can always pick out a fan. Again and again, directors shepherd us away from games and threaten to throw us out of the hall if we don’t stand behind the rope, where we can’t see.

  Players in the United States aren’t accustomed to having fans around and have not bothered to cultivate graciousness. Rising from hours of sweaty analysis, grandmasters are put off by applause or by unsophisticated questions. Often they are surly, as if the presence of the faithful is a painful distraction.

  International Master Victor Frias explains it this way: “Many GMs and IMs consider weak players more or less worthless as people. They have developed this defensive attitude because their own social status is so low. Many fans are highly paid professionals, doctors and lawyers, and despite their interest in the game, basically they consider the professional chess player a bum. Of course the players counterattack. Disparaging the chess fan is a way of putting down the big shot who’s always putting you down.

  “With a certain justification, American players feel they don’t owe the fan anything. Players give a show without compensation. Unlike in Europe, chess professionals in the United States must pay their own entry fee and transportation to tournaments, so if after a game a guy asks me a stupid question, without thinking I give him a dirty look. But if he had to buy a ticket to get into the tournament, and if this covered my entry fee and food for the week, maybe I would grit my teeth and tell him why I lost.”

  Occasionally I ask a player what happened last week at a tournament in Ohio or in Atlanta, and I can see suspicion cloud his face: Why does he want to know? He’s not even a player.

  It is different abroad, where chess is frequently in the newspapers and the top players sign autographs, and where games are sometimes televised into auditoriums, which allows fans the release of cheering the good moves of their favorites without distracting the players. Like a spectator at a football or basketball game, the chess fan needs to cheer in order to feel that he has participated in the victory, so that he can feel like a winner himself.

  I know that my friends aren’t interested in the latest chess news, but occasionally I can’t restrain myself, and over a beer, I enthuse about an upset in Barcelona or an up-and-coming thirteen-year-old in Great Britain who has played a brilliant opening variation. But I never seem to learn; it doesn’t make for good conversation. In the fall of 1985, in addition to the Karpov-Kasparov rematch, I was looking forward to the candidates tournament in Montpellier, France, one of a series of round-robin events to determine the next challenger for the world championship. Mikhail Tal was playing. What a thrill it would be to have him play for the world championship again! One evening, after reading in the foreign press that the great forty-nine-year-old grandmaster had surged into the lead over some of the best young players in the world, I tried to express my exhilaration to Bonnie, but she wasn’t interested. When Tal drew in the last round and had to enter an exhausting playoff with the younger Jan Timman of the Netherlands to determine which of them would proceed to the next round, I knew in my heart that my hero would lose. I was depressed for two days, but I didn’t mention it to Bonnie, who probably thought my moodiness had to do with my writing. For the most part I keep my chess life to myself.

  Before falling asleep, instead of prognosticating, as in the old days, about which offensive lineman the Jets are likely to choose in the draft, or whether or not Mike Tyson has the potential of a Marciano or a Frazier, I think about the great young Russian chess players: Vaganyan, Yusupov, Sokolov and Dolmatov. Which of them will emerge from the pack to challenge for the championship? Is Grandmaster Shamkovich right in believing that Yusupov’s style is better suited for Karpov than for Kasparov? Is Kasparov really the best attacking player since Alekhine? Is Karpov the greatest defender in the history of the game?

  During our trip to the Soviet Union Grandmaster Eduard Gufeld insisted that both Karpov and Kasparov were much stronger players than Bobby Fischer. Months later, in bed beside my sleeping wife, I was still upset by his assertion. Fischer was like Shakespeare, Muhammad Ali and Babe Ruth, a figure larger than the game, dwarfing all other players and at the same time raising their possibilities to unheard-of heights. Could the two Russians, who seem destined to play each other again and again, have surpassed Fischer’s genius, or was Gufeld’s view merely jingoistic posturing?

  Like most chess fans, I was infuriated when Florencio Campomanes, the president of FIDE since 1982, stopped the first Karpov-Kasparov match at exactly the moment when Kasparov seemed to have broken his opponent and was moving in
for the kill. Newspaper articles and editorials all over the world suggested that the outcome of the match had been rigged by the Soviet government, which was uneasy about the prospect of an outspoken half-Jewish chess champion. In several unusually candid interviews at the conclusion of the match, Kasparov claimed that the Soviet Chess Federation, dominated by Karpov’s cronies, had asked Campomanes to stop the match when it became clear that their man could no longer win. Kasparov believed that in addition to the Soviet Chess Federation, FIDE, Campomanes and even the referees had conspired against him. He remarked with dark humor that in a future match he might be able to beat Karpov, but not Karpomanes.

  It was a difficult time for a chess fan. How could one root for these great players if their results were predetermined by the machinations of a few overly zealous chess fans who are members of the Politburo? If Karpov cheated or even countenanced cheating on the part of others, what about Vaganyan, Yusupov or even Kasparov and Tal?

  Fortunately, basketball, boxing and chess fans alike have encountered such situations before and have developed deep resources. Moral outrage passes, and when it was time for the Karpov-Kasparov rematch in the fall of 1985, I was excited all over again and no longer dwelled on Russian chess politics. The match played itself out like a movie script. Kasparov forged ahead; Karpov fought back. Three times the lead changed hands, and some analysts were saying that both grandmasters were at the top of their contrasting but marvelous games. Karpov jockeyed for safe positions from which he could engage in quiet, devious maneuvering. Kasparov attacked directly and theatrically with combinations and sacrifices. After the nineteenth game, he held a two-point lead, and most experts thought that the match was all over. But then Karpov won the twenty-second game and drew the twenty-third. If he could manage to win the twenty-fourth game with the black pieces, he would be even in the match and retain his championship. After the first match, dominated by Karpov’s back-room political tactics with Soviet politicians and Campomanes, the world champion had been characterized in the media as Satan after the fall. But now, in the final hour of the return match, Satan was up off his back making a Rocky-like comeback. As much as I was rooting for Kasparov to win or draw the twenty-fourth game, I was also rooting a little for Karpov.