Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  Setting up a meeting with Pandolfini can be a prolonged ordeal. This is not because he is intentionally elusive, nor is it because he is unfriendly or disinterested or aloof, as Kingsley portrayed him in the movie. It is simply because Pandolfini is perpetually disorganized. He forgets things. Sometimes he shows up for lessons an hour late; most of the time, he doesn’t answer his home telephone. “His forgetfulness is entirely democratic: he neglects to return the phone calls of grandmasters and patzers alike,” wrote Fred Waitzkin. “It is a quirk of nature that this man, who can play ten simultaneous chess games blindfolded and has total recall of tens of thousands of chess positions, has such difficulty remembering appointments, publication dates, and the departure times of airline flights.”

  It is not an overstatement to say the modern notion of professional chess teaching originated with Pandolfini, in part because he had the charisma to handle the role, and in part because he found himself in the right place at the right time, in the wake of the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972. Five hours a day of commentary on PBS had rendered him something of an intellectual celebrity, thanks to Shelby Lyman, who had offered him the job, and Pandolfini took advantage of his status. Hundreds of people called the station searching for a teacher; Pandolfini took on fifteen of them, charging fifteen dollars an hour.

  Before the summer of 1972, no one had really thought of teaching chess to make a living, since most of America hadn’t thought much of chess at all. The game was taught by parents to children, and by a few masters and grandmasters scattered here and there, many of them immigrants, who gave instructions for little or no money in return. But afterward, there was a sudden demand for teachers, and because Pandolfini was already a brand name among them, he began to make more money than he ever could have imagined. That he was making money at all—just a couple years before this he had dropped out of graduate school at the University of Arizona so he could play at a chess tournament in Reno, at which he won fifty dollars—seemed something of a miracle. “I wouldn’t say I was a good teacher,” he says. “I just worked very hard.”

  The first formal chess class he taught was at the New School University in downtown Manhattan. It was an adult education class, and he had no idea what he was doing. And he stood there in front of a hundred people—some of them novices, a few of them grandmasters who had shown up out of pure curiosity, because this was the only chess class anyone could take, anywhere, as far as they knew—and he had no idea how to tailor his message for such a widespread audience. So he prattled on about the history and about how the principles of the game had been developed. Some of his students were women who had never played the game before, who wanted to learn so they could relate to their husbands and boyfriends, and some of them wanted to learn surreptitiously because they were tired of those husbands and boyfriends using chess as a way to keep them down. It was fascinating, all these people wanting to learn his game, and it was only the beginning, because after that even more people began clamoring for private lessons. Pandolfini taught from seven in the morning until one the next morning. He taught children and adults, he taught the deaf and the blind and the disabled, and he taught prisoners, and he taught rock stars. He took on every obligation, and charged well over a hundred dollars an hour to those who could afford it, and gave ten thousand dollars in free lessons to a student who couldn’t afford to pay him anything. He was afraid to say no to anyone, for fear that the money would dry up, that this would be his only chance to spread the gospel.

  But for Pandolfini, the money never dried up, even after Fischer had disappeared into the ether, and even after chess had once again been relegated to back rooms and private clubs and to a shaded corner of Washington Square Park. Unlike many of the others, expert players who had turned to teaching simply because it was the only way to make money, Pandolfini seemed born for this avocation. In the mid-1980s he began writing books, and in a genre where incoherence often seems like a virtue, his titles stood out. Most are geared toward children and beginners, and they are written in a voice that manages to be both welcoming and authoritative, grounded in the Socratic method. Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess consists entirely of an imaginary conversation between a student and a teacher.

  Since he began teaching, he hasn’t played competitive chess. It’s one or the other, he figures, and because of the role of the subconscious mind, it’s impossible to balance both. If you’re a tournament player and you start to spend more time teaching, especially if you have a shallow ego (and how many chess players don’t have shallow egos?), you’ll find yourself in competition with your student. If you’re a teacher and you start playing competitively, you’ll be passive and nonantagonistic. “People can never truly make up for their mind-sets,” Pandolfini says, and shortly after that, he has to be reminded of what he was just talking about.

  In 1985, Pandolfini was serving as the manager of the Manhattan Chess Club and was approached by a man named Faneuil Adams, a direct descendant of Samuel Adams who was also an executive with the Mobil oil company. Adams had a surplus of funds he was willing to put toward improving the dismal state of tournament chess. He came to Pandolfini, and Pandolfini steered him toward scholastic chess. Pandolfini had an absurd ambition, which was to teach everyone in America, an entire generation, the rules and moves of chess. He figured you accomplished this by starting with young people; this was what he was best at, and this was the argument he presented to Fan Adams. “He realized that was a more interesting way to go,” Pandolfini says.

  So they began to pitch. They went to the Board of Education, and the board didn’t really understand what they were proposing, even though it would cost them nothing to wager with Fan Adams’s money. It was Pandolfini’s job to sell them on chess, and this is something he was born to do, something he had been doing virtually his entire life. He stood in boardrooms and conference rooms, in front of audiences of a hundred or more, and he explained to them how chess could really and truly be utilized as an educational tool. He cited studies and quoted research reports, and when they continued to resist, when they asked for specifics, he pulled out a chessboard and he asked them: How many squares do you see here?

  There is an easy answer, of course, which is sixty-four. But what does that prove? The real answer, Pandolfini told them, the answer that a particularly imaginative student might come up with, is that there are infinite answers to this question. The four squares in the center make up another square. Each quarter of the board is a separate square. Each square can be parsed into separate squares, on and on and on and on, ad infinitum. His point was simple: Chess is eminently adaptable. It can be fused and plugged into an infinite number of problems. It is a tool within a tool within a tool, and not just in terms of mathematics and spatial relations, but in terms of art. For instance, what’s one of the major ways to solve a chess puzzle, Pandolfini asked them. Simple. Switch around the order of the moves; do the second idea first, and do the first idea second. And isn’t that kind of pliancy, the ability to juggle two disparate ideas at once, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, the chief characteristic of a creative mind?

  It took them some time to see these things. Once they did, Pandolfini and Adams thought they had won. But not before Pandolfini had to make one last pitch, to a man who served as the “head of critical thinking” in New York City, a position that may or may not exist anymore.

  They met in private. Pandolfini began by espousing the usual argument for chess, that children who play chess tend to do better in school, that a direct correlation has been proven in study after study. To which the man said, “Isn’t it true that kids getting special attention in any way whatsoever will do better in school?” He was “some big Harvard guy,” Pandolfini says. “He kept hitting me with one thing after another. I didn’t find out until later that his real passion was for bridge. He wanted to bring bridge into the schools, which was the reason for his objections.”

  After that, Pandolfini went back to Adams. He told him he didn’t think they were g
oing to get the approval. He figured the deal was dead.

  The next week Pandolfini was out at dinner with a friend, and he saw the Harvard man sitting at another table. He didn’t know what to do, whether to bother saying hello, whether he’d just embarrass himself further by saying anything, whether the Harvard man would even remember him. But he did it. He went up and said hello, and he said, I’m not sure if you remember me, and the Harvard man said, “I remember you very well, Mr. Pandolfini.” Then he said to his lunch companion, “This is Bruce Pandolfini. He’s the only one I will allow to bring chess into the New York City school system. He’s the only one who could answer every one of my questions.”

  The program was formed under the auspices of the American Chess Foundation, a relatively small, decades-old philanthropic group that had been formed in the 1950s by men on Wall Street to underwrite certain professional players, and which held its meetings in the living rooms of its board members. Pandolfini and Adams’s scholastic reincarnation of the ACF began its work in poor neighborhoods, in places like the Bronx and Harlem, under teachers like Doug Bellizzi and Maurice Ashley (who would go on to become the first African-American grandmaster). In 1987, the program had expanded to six schools, and by the early 1990s, chess was being taught in thirty-five schools, and began producing potent results, the sort of rags-to-riches stories that piqued the attention of the media. In 1991, Ashley’s team at J.H.S. 43 on 129th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Central Harlem (which was then a hub of the crack trade) tied for first at the Junior High School national championships, defeating Dalton, where Bruce Pandolfini had landed temporarily as head coach. “Juxtaposing chess with inner-city youth came as a shock to many in the press who were intimidated by the game,” Ashley wrote in his 2005 book, Chess for Success. “One of the most common questions I was asked, often with a look of befuddled wonder, was, ‘How do you motivate these kids to play chess?’ I could hear the echo of the underlying assumptions: that chess was akin to rocket science and that minority kids would prefer to play basketball.”

  Perhaps because it seemed such an improbable tale of success, the sort of feel-good story that makes for the perfect kicker on the local news, Ashley’s team (known as the Raging Rooks) became a minor sensation. They made television appearances, they did a live radio interview at the Apollo Theater, and they were invited to a victory party at the Upper East Side town house of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, who helped pay for their trip to nationals. Their story appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Two of Ashley’s best players eventually got scholarships to private schools, and afterward, the money began coming to the American Chess Foundation in waves. Ted Field, of the Marshall Field family, held a benefit dinner at the Plaza Hotel that raised two hundred thousand dollars. A philanthropist named Lewis Cullman donated a million dollars, and became chairman of the board.

  By 1994, the program had reached a thousand students. Five years later, that number was thirty-eight thousand, and the name had been changed from the American Chess Foundation to Chess-in-the-Schools. CIS became a massive operation incorporating nearly four dozen teachers and twenty administrative positions, a specific curriculum, teaching materials, tournaments, in-school programs, after-school programs, and sponsorship money for teams to travel to national tournaments. By 2003, the contributions to CIS had reached three and a half million dollars (which was spread among 160 public schools, all in underprivileged neighborhoods), Pandolfini had moved on to other things, and an experienced fund-raiser and entirely inexperienced chess player, Marley Kaplan, had been hired to head the program.

  Kaplan is a small dark-haired woman who could probably recite the CIS fund-raising spiel in her sleep. Because of her background, because she is not a chess player, she has evoked a certain amount of resentment among some of the chess teachers and administrators who form the core of the program. They are thankful to have jobs, and disdainful of the inevitable bureaucracy.

  For reasons that seem mostly due to that bureaucracy, CIS has no relationship with the Right Move foundation (at one point, Goldhirsch says, his people started offering some classes in city schools and CIS objected, saying the Right Move was “infringing on their territory”). Despite all of that, CIS has become an unquestioned success, the first of its kind, and its formula has been replicated in other cities. All of its schools are Title I (a government designation reserved for schools populated mostly by underprivileged children), and nearly all are elementary and junior-high schools like I.S. 318, the school that produced five members of Murrow’s team.

  Every Thursday afternoon during the school year, CIS also holds an alumni program, a loose amalgam of tutoring and mentoring and instruction and college preparation for its high-school-aged students. The best thing about the Thursday afternoon meetings, if you ask Willy or Oscar or Nile, is the presence of some of the city’s top teachers, like Jennifer Shahade and her brother Greg, and like Miron Sher, a Russian grandmaster. The worst part is the constant prodding from Sarah Pitari, a young administrator who handles the “college bound” portion of the program (she also holds separate academic sessions), whose job is to push CIS’s former students toward higher education. It can be a lonely job, complicated by indifference from both students and their parents, by the fact that many of them would rather while away their hours playing blitz than even think about taking the SATs. So go Sarah’s interactions with Willy and Oscar, who have failed so many classes over their years at Murrow that their chances of graduating on time are looking slimmer and slimmer, and there is only so much Sarah can do without holding their hands and leading them into class by herself.

  “Murrow doesn’t need us,” Kaplan says. She’s sitting in a conference room at the CIS headquarters on Eighth Avenue, a neatly apportioned full-floor loft that resembles the headquarters of a midsized dot-com operation. An enlarged photo of Bill Clinton visiting the offices looms on the wall behind her. One gets the feeling that Kaplan has spent a great deal of time in this very room, making studied pitches to corporate sponsors. But because its mission is to serve poor neighborhoods, Murrow simply doesn’t fit into their plans. “They’re not a Title One school,” she says. “And they already have a chess program. They don’t need us.”

  It doesn’t matter, of course, that the majority of the chess players on Murrow’s team are kids who attended Title I schools, and it doesn’t matter that the only reason they’re attending Murrow in the first place is because CIS led them to this point through chess. CIS offers its older members a lifeline through the alumni program. Whether they decide to take advantage of it is up to them, really.

  And the lack of a relationship certainly doesn’t matter to Eliot Weiss, who, because of his ties to the Right Move, has made clear his disdain for the bureaucracy of Chess-in-the-Schools, and who, in these past few months, has been doggedly pursuing a mission of his own.

  EIGHT

  ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

  THIS WHOLE TRIP HAD BEEN HIS GRANDEST PUBLICITY CAMPAIGN OF ALL, the product of a stream of phone calls and faxes and letters written to congressmen and senators and community relations officers, to anyone on Pennsylvania Avenue who would listen to him without hanging up the phone: I coach a chess team, you see . . .

  They had already met with councilmen and assemblymen and representatives and senators and governors. But this . . . this was the last great frontier of the political meet-and-greet; if he could pull this one off, well, then he had done it all. If he could do this, at the age of fifty-one, after more than twenty years of selling lapel pins and holding bake sales to keep this team alive, maybe he could start thinking about retirement. To win an audience with the president of the United States, even this president—it was worth the effort, the calls made in the after-school hours from the wall phone in his classroom, speaking over and over to Melissa from the White House and Nathan from the White House and Lisa from the White House. Every two weeks, he called again, and was passed along to someone else. This did not deter him. They were the nat
ional champions, after all, weren’t they? And didn’t the perks of a national championship in virtually every other sport include an audience with the president? Didn’t the president meet with people who had done much less than what these boys had done? It was still a long shot, he knew, but this was Mr. Weiss’s trope, the pitch he kept on making. And perhaps it wasn’t entirely altruistic—maybe, in the moment, he appreciated these visits more than his players did—but someday, he knew, they would look back at the photographs and realize what they had accomplished, and how lucky they had been just to get there.

  The woman who saved Eliot Weiss from beggary and public appeals doesn’t have a surname. For months, he won’t even reveal her first name, only that she had started funding the program a few years back, fulfilling every request Mr. Weiss made to her, and had been doing it ever since. Nobody except Mr. Weiss knows Rita’s last name, and Rita is hesitant to mention it even off the record.

  Rita is a diminutive Upper East Side society lady in her late seventies, with tufted gray hair and sharp blue eyes. On the day the city championships are held, Rita usually makes her annual appearance before the team. Most of the time, she shows up between rounds, on her way to a Sunday theater matinee with her brother and a friend. (“I have no idea what we’re ever going to see,” she says. “I just go along.”)

  Here is what can be revealed about Rita: She was born and raised in New York, and majored in math at NYU. She became a high-school teacher (she taught, for a while, at DeWitt Clinton, in the Bronx) and also worked at several colleges. She married, had two children, and after her husband died, she decided to funnel some of the money he’d left behind toward philanthropic causes. She started giving to a ballet school in London where many of the kids can’t afford to pay for lessons.