Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  One man—I’ll call him Jim—made a small fortune in the stock market earlier in his life. For the past seven years, since his wife left him, Jim has played in the chess shop or, weather permitting, in Washington Square. During these years of thousands of games, Jim’s chess ability has neither improved nor declined, and his happiness in life relates to his daily success against one or two opponents. In 1986 Jim spoke to me about chess with distaste. ‘There’s no point to it,” he said. “It’s a hostile game. Everyone here hates one another.” His eyes glowing with intensity, he announced that soon he would give it up. Several months later he came over to me again and repeated his intention. It was as if the chess shop were a penal colony with walls and bars. A year ago, one of Jim’s regular partners suddenly disappeared. I knew him to be a gentle, literate man who was greatly distressed by his addiction and who often spoke of quitting; nevertheless, I was afraid something might have happened to him. But when I asked Jim, he disgustedly waved my question aside. The man was no longer around; that was all that mattered.

  At times the Village Chess and Coffee Shop feels comfortable, like a familiar gallery in a museum. At the end of my evening jog, it is a pleasure to say hello to the players and to watch a few games—sometimes more than a few. It is remarkable how quickly the hours pass there. During the last couple of years, I’ve learned the mannerisms and styles of the players. Although I no longer play, I have acquired an appetite for chess literature and for watching games. In truth, I’ve become a persistent kibitzer, hooked on observing games in the same way that some are addicted to baseball or bridge or spy novels. In the evening, when I leave the coffee shop, I sometimes look back through the glass window at the faces riveted on the chess pieces. Night after night, the same men sit across from one another in the same chairs. They seem to have no sense of the passing of time.

  14

  JOSH AND BRUCE

  With its dense architecture and crafty manipulations, its subtle attacks, intensity and unexpected explosiveness, chess is like the city. Lives in small, thin-walled New York apartments are racked by differing sensibilities jangling at the edge of private space. Competing for territory, we attack one another in indirect ways. For example, in my building there is a man who tyrannizes his neighbors with his off-key attempts to be a jazz-and-blues singer. While he belts out his favorite standards, I cannot write. Whenever I mention my irritation to him in the hall or write him a note, he sings louder, as if trying to convince me that he really is an undiscovered talent. In a state of helpless rage, I contemplate clobbering him with a two-by-four as he races up the stairs after work, eager to begin crooning “Moonlight in Vermont.”

  When it is time for Joshua’s chess lesson, I pray that my neighbor won’t sing the blues and that the super’s kids won’t jump on the trampoline upstairs. It is a special time: we take the baby to the sitter so she won’t pull the pieces off the board; Bonnie can’t run the dishwasher or washing machine; she tries to prepare dinner quietly because a dropped pot might cause Josh to lose his train of thought.

  Week after week Bruce urges Josh to look deeper into the positions they study. While they commune over the pieces I sit in the kitchen wondering how the lesson is going. I’m tempted to watch, although I know that Joshua is distracted by my presence. When I can’t bear to stay away any longer, I watch the two of them for a few minutes from across the living room. Typically, Bruce leans back in his chair and sips coffee. Josh sits at the board, his head cupped between his hands. I can see his eyes flashing from piece to piece, his face taut and serious. He can’t find the answer. He glances up at Bruce for help and then back at the board. His lips move, “Take, take, take, take, take, take,” while he nods his head to the beat of his mumbling. He is in trouble. Bruce won’t help and leans back in his chair with a supercilious expression that both spurs our son ahead and angers him. His brow furrows in frustration. The mate is eight moves from the position in front of him, and he isn’t allowed to move the pieces until he figures it out in his head. He almost has it, but not quite. At the point in his analysis where the lines have been cleared of pieces and the mate should be crystal clear, the king standing like a lone figure on an empty avenue, he gets lost. He doesn’t see the critical check, and after a few seconds the imagined position of the pieces grows fuzzy in his head and he must reconstruct it again. “Take, take, take, take, take, take . . . knight to f8,” he says without resolution.

  “That’s a nice try, Josh. I considered it myself, but you can see why it doesn’t work, can’t you?”

  “Because the queen protects along the diagonal,” Josh says glumly. He begins to chew on the neckline of his polo shirt while his teacher sips his coffee.

  At the age of six, Josh resisted instruction, and Bruce taught him indirectly by playing speed games and offering delectable bribes for rare moments of seriousness, but by the time he was eight, their lessons often resembled meditations. When Josh looked up from a difficult position for a hint, Bruce would say inscrutably, “I am only here to help you look. You have to find the answer yourself.”

  After years of study there is a tendency for young players to depend too much on their teachers, making moves mechanically in tournament games because it was suggested in a lesson that they were correct. Bruce has to be careful not to overteach. If Joshua’s imagination for combinations is constrained by too much information or by the fear of displeasing his teacher, then Bruce will have done more damage than good. When Josh’s games become dry and repetitious, Pandolfini is angry with himself; it means that he has concentrated for too long on one aspect of the game and that his pupil has fallen into a rut. It is all too easy for a teacher to make such a mistake.

  Joshua’s relationship with Bruce is delicate and always changing. At times there is great trust and warmth, as if Pandolfini were a third parent. Sometimes Josh feels that he will not be able to play without his teacher standing in the wings. When he is fresh and attentive, he inspires Bruce to teach long, ingenious lessons. By the end of a two-hour session, Josh has a bright pink spot on each cheek, and Bruce is pale, a little out of breath and completely drained. Nevertheless he will telephone a couple of hours later to mention a new idea to overcome a bad habit or to propose an extra lesson. During two- and three-day tournaments, he will call each night to go over the day’s games in search of an idea that might help on the following morning.

  When Joshua is playing well, the two of them seem to complete each other. The pupil brings his imagination and competitive spirit to bear upon the ideas that the teacher writes about in his articles and books. Hours of memorizing openings, of wrestling with problems and of endgame exercises translate into wins and a gradually maturing chess style. Soon after turning eight, Josh won twenty-six out of twenty-seven tournament games and placed first in tournament after tournament, including the New York City Primary Championship. Playing among his peers, he seemed unable to lose. In all likelihood he would be the number-one seed in the National Primary Championship in the spring.

  Through Josh, Pandolfini was playing the game he had given up thirteen years before, but without the burden of having to endure either losses or wins tainted for him by the pain inflicted on the loser. For the most part Josh thrived on tournament play. He would wake up on Saturday mornings and ask excitedly, “Is my tournament today?” Unlike his teacher, he felt terrific when he won. When Josh did well, Bruce, like the teachers of other talented children, was undoubtedly spurred on by the hope that he was teaching a future champion.

  ***

  ALTHOUGH PANDOLFINI WORKED at presenting a pleasant, even exterior, his interest in Josh’s chess study rose and fell in relation to many factors, including the chaos or happiness in his life, his publishing commitments and how much sleep he was getting. Josh always noticed when Bruce had other things on his mind, and he rated his lessons in much the same way as his teacher judged him by awarding “master class” points, decorative stickers and colored stars. At the end of their lesson, while pasting dinosaur
stickers in Joshua’s lesson book, Bruce might say, “You did some good work today, Tiger, but you were a wise guy. I’m only gonna give you twenty-one points.” After Pandolfini left, Josh might say, “Bruce seemed distracted today,” or “Bruce was very sharp.”

  When Josh was feeling bored with chess, or too tired after school to concentrate, he was apt to feel irritated with Bruce. Then he would sit as far away as possible from his teacher, his hands covering his ears as if trying to shut out the street noise, but in fact trying his hardest to tune out his teacher. There were periods when he simply couldn’t bear the rigor of his lessons. Playing chess was one thing, but analyzing with Pandolfini was work. During weeks of trying to wake up his distracted student, Bruce’s softness and good humor would give way to prodding lectures that Joshua either didn’t understand or didn’t care to heed. Pandolfini’s attempts at politeness took on the sound of irritation, and Joshua’s little jokes, which during good times were grace notes to serious study, became examples of his lack of concentration. As though he himself were the reason for his pupil’s poor play, Pandolfini would complain at the start of a lesson that he had been working too hard and was tired. It must have occurred to him that all these hours of study might come to nothing, that this clever little boy might not really be a chess player after all. When Josh was playing poorly, Bruce looked frayed and was harder to reach on the phone. During these periods Josh would point out that his lessons weren’t as long as they used to be, that Bruce looked distracted and complained a lot, and that his teacher didn’t really like him anymore. Bonnie and I would assure him that this wasn’t so, but in fact there were periods, as in all marriages, when they weren’t fond of each other.

  Pandolfini had become my friend as well as my son’s teacher, but I saw that when we got together frequently or spoke regularly on the phone, Josh tended to withdraw from Bruce and to be less interested in his lessons. At such times, without ever talking about it, Bruce and I called each other less often and rarely socialized. Joshua’s chess was more important to both of us than beer and good conversation.

  FOR PANDOLFINI, AS well as for other teachers, like Sunil Weeramantry, Svetozar Jovanovic and Bobby Fischer’s former teacher, John Collins, there is little or no irony about the endeavor of imparting large doses of arcane chess information to young children. Once, during Joshua’s first year of study with Bruce, I asked Collins, the dean of American chess teachers, how often a talented youngster ought to study with a chess master. He answered immediately, “Every day,” but then added sadly, “Of course it’s not possible.”

  One afternoon at the Manhattan Chess Club before his weekly lesson with Pandolfini, Josh, who was then six, paused to watch seventeen-year-old Maxim Dlugy, the strongest player for his age in the country, take his lesson with a Russian emigré, Vitaly Zaltzman, who is one of our few master-level trainers. With his customary baby brashness my son offered a few suggestions to Dlugy and Zaltzman. They spoke in Russian and for the most part analyzed without paying any attention to him, but later Zaltzman came over to me and asked, “What is his rating?” When I explained that Josh, who at that time was sitting on a telephone book to see the pieces, had never played in a tournament, Zaltzman looked at me quizzically. Why not?

  IN THE PRIMARY grades of the Dalton School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, children learn reading, writing and arithmetic within a carefree environment of playacting, backyard archaeological expeditions, musical productions and museum and farm visits, all administered by good-natured and tolerant teachers. But in the chess class, Svetozar Jovanovic, a Yugoslavian emigré, lectures to his six-to-nine-year-olds with the ceremony and dry sobriety of a no-nonsense college professor. Dalton’s chess program, designed and run by Jovanovic, is the most ambitious and successful primary and secondary school chess program in the United States. Following the Soviet and Eastern European example, all children at Dalton are introduced to the game, and those with talent are encouraged to pursue advanced studies in an after-school program. The results are extraordinary. For the past several years, out of the top fifty chess players eight and under in the United States, nearly 30 percent went to Dalton, a medium-sized private school.*

  Like no one else I have ever met, Svetozar Jovanovic has the ability to communicate the sublime importance of chess. At the start of a class, he looks at his giggly group of children poking and kicking one another, their mouths smeared with after-school snacks from the newsstand on Lexington Avenue. Sternly he takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger as if to say, Why am I wasting my time on you guys? Soon the children become quiet and attentive. Jovanovic places a basket of beat-up pieces in front of each player, the kind of basket used to serve hamburgers and greasy fries at diners. His manner and conviction invest these chipped little armies with enormous power and tradition, as if the class were about to participate in an ancient rite. He begins by describing a game played a hundred years ago, his English heavily accented and laden with Russian chess jargon, and his eyes sparkle while he speaks about traps and combinations.

  Many of his students, the children of millionaires, professionals, politicians, actors and rock musicians, wear designer labels. Jovanovic’s suits are disheveled, and he bemoans the privations of the chess teacher in America, but against all worldly logic he has these little kids believing that nothing is more important than this game—neither violin or tennis lessons nor weekends in the country. Chess is the real thing; it is sport, art and philosophy rolled into one. In his Yugoslavian accent, the names Alekhine and Botvinnik take on the religious significance of Moses or Jesus.

  Jovanovic tells parents that it is important for the children to be well-rounded and that schoolwork comes before chess, but during the one hour he spends with their kids each week, the game is larger than anything else, and he tolerates little fooling around. Again and again he sternly reminds the kids that if they don’t concentrate here, they won’t be able to attend to business during tournaments. He teaches them Russian so that they will be able to study Russian chess material. He drills them in problems and frequently explains that talent is no substitute for hard work. With pomp and circumstance he rates his players against the great Yugoslavian youth teams of the fifties. Jovanovic knows by heart thousands of games that talented children have played over the past thirty years, and when one of his students blunders into a trap, he can recall a similar disaster that happened seventeen years ago to an eleven-year-old in Yugoslavia.

  Once, after Joshua had been accepted at Dalton, he lost a game in a local tournament to a ten-year-old. Jovanovic called later in the evening to inquire if our son was in bed yet; he wanted to talk about the game. While riding the subway back from the tournament to his apartment in Washington Heights, he had been analyzing Josh’s game in his head and had found a forced win for him on the seventeenth move. They played through the moves and quickly agreed on the pity of it: a forced win if only Josh had seen it. Perhaps someday Jovanovic will be lecturing a seven-year-old about moving too quickly and will bring up the example of Josh Waitzkin’s horrible oversight in 1986 against Vaughn Sandman.

  “THIS IS DRIVING me nuts,” Josh said to Pandolfini during his lesson. He had been staring at the same position for nearly an hour, and wanted to turn on the Bill Cosby show, or to run outside and play football—anything to get away from this maze of chessmen, which he had rearranged in his head a hundred times. But after nearly three years of studying, there was another part of Josh that couldn’t bear to let it go like this. If Bruce were to say, “Okay, let’s forget about it, Tiger,” the position would nag at him for the rest of the evening. While Pandolfini rocked back in his chair and waited, it occurred to me that I had never studied anything this intensely before I was a college senior studying for comprehensive exams. As a student, I was rebellious and looked for shortcuts; nevertheless, I have little patience for Joshua’s laziness and his lapses of concentration. It has become one of my greatest joys to watch my son work throug
h difficult chess ideas, solving problems I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

  Bruce knew his pupil very well. If he’d told him to look back at the board and try again, Josh would have argued or changed the subject. Pandolfini waited. In a few seconds Josh had worked through his resistance and was biting his shirt and mumbling, “Take, take, take, take, take, take.” Then, suddenly, “Oh! It’s so simple,” and he banged his head with his hand. Both of them were smiling. Pointing at squares and pieces and talking excitedly in a garble of algebraic notation, Josh demonstrated his lengthy plan while Bruce looked a little bored.

  During these sessions the two of them were working on process more than on problems. Josh was learning to look further into a position, to restrain his first impulse in order to consider it from different perspectives. During their first year, Bruce had asked him always to consider at least two plans. Then he began asking for three or four plans. When Josh complained that he couldn’t look deeply enough without moving the pieces, or couldn’t hold the position in his head long enough to find the answer, Bruce urged him on like a physical therapist of the mind. At times when my son was thinking, I could see the strain of it on his face, as if he were stretching his brain like a muscle. Finally he would say something like “I forgot that pawn was there. It’s so simple. What an idiot I am.”

  At the end of a tense lesson, the two of them sometimes played a few speed games, with Bruce giving Josh five-to-two time odds. Occasionally Josh won one of these games. Bruce would giggle and look embarrassed at the winning move, but whenever this happened Josh was never sure if Bruce had played his hardest or had merely allowed him to capitalize on a preconceived weakness to emphasize the lesson of the week.