Cornelius pushed a pawn and Josh developed his other knight. Cornelius pushed another pawn. He was making quiet moves and seemed to be waiting for another blunder, but his passive play was allowing my son counterplay. Josh moved the first knight toward the center of the board. All of a sudden his position didn’t look so bad; there had been a point to the knight on the rim after all. Now he had two strong knights in the center flanking an attacking queen.
The Bahamian scowled and considered the position. Finally he brought his knight back next to his king, which freed the queen to defend along the diagonal. On the next move he was planning to shift the knight to the other side of the board, where it would be more useful. But the move was a disaster. Josh immediately checked Cornelius with his queenside knight, forcing him to bring his king out to the second rank. Falling behind had somehow focused Josh and he was finding the moves easily. Now he checked with the other knight, and when the Bahamian pushed the king again, Josh moved the first knight for a discovered check from the queen. Cornelius was out on his feet, no longer bothering even to find the best escape squares. On the next move, with a big smile Josh forked the king and the queen with his queenside knight, and it was all over.
They played two more games, which Josh won easily. He was into the flow of playing again, attacking weak squares, developing his pieces, playing smartly and opportunistically, the way he had learned from Pandolfini. As they played on, Cornelius grew increasingly restless and sullen. By now it had dawned on him that Josh was not winning by luck. The Bahamian wanted to put this match behind him and be the champion of Bimini again.
I should have been delighted that my son was winning, but I wasn’t satisfied. When Cornelius was thinking, Josh looked out the window instead of studying the board. I thought of Alekhine, who had once said that a chess player’s world must be only the chess position in front of him. Even here on Bimini, beside the deep blue water of the Gulf Stream, with the sexy rhythms of a reggae band drifting in from the bar, Alekhine would have bent over the pieces for hours without letting his eye wander, a timeless, contemplative chess machine. Josh was winning, yet I focused more on his missed opportunities. He might have won more quickly and elegantly; his game lacked the crystal clarity of Capablanca’s; his combinations were predictable. It annoyed me that he tapped his leg to the music and that his eyes drifted from the position to the photographs of gamefish on the wall. Josh crushed Cornelius, but it didn’t mean anything; the Bahamian was a patzer who hung pieces.
17
LOSING IT
In the fall of 1985, Josh transferred from the Little Red School House to the Dalton School. But in the first few weeks of the fall term he was homesick for his old school and friends, and his unhappiness was so large and persistent that we thought we had made the wrong choice. As if to prove his point, he lacked all enthusiasm for chess, and his play was poor after the summer’s layoff in Bimini. When his chess friends came over to visit and challenged him to a game, he looked pained and suggested Monopoly or something else—anything else. It was distressing when Joshua’s friend Ben Rosen asked me, “Why doesn’t Josh like chess anymore?”
The first lesson with Pandolfini in the beginning of September was disastrous. They had arranged to meet on a Sunday morning at the Manhattan Chess Club, but when Josh arrived, Bruce was still working with another student.
While we waited, a spindly little boy came over and asked Josh to play blitz. “I’m gonna crush you,” he said. Josh shrugged, and they began to play. The kid was seven and moved his pieces instantly, as my son had been inclined to do at that age, seemingly without thinking. Josh was rusty and unsure of himself and moved slower and slower as the game became more complicated. When he ran out of time, the other boy had used up barely two minutes oh his clock. They played two more games and Josh lost each of them. He couldn’t move as fast as the other boy, and when he tried to, he blundered.
It was the first time that my son had ever felt soundly defeated by a child younger than himself. Among his peers, he had always been the best player. When he lost, he viewed it as an accident, a momentary lapse, and usually his opponent would savor a win against him as an unexpected stroke of fortune.
At eight, Joshua’s chess career had gone topsy-turvy. In the nationals he had lost the most important game of his life to David Arnett, and now a little boy, shorter and younger, had beaten him almost without effort. My son wasn’t feeling like such a great player anymore. During the lesson that followed, he had trouble listening to Bruce. The chess problems were too hard, and he couldn’t figure them out. It was Sunday and he wanted to be at home on the sofa with his little sister, watching cartoons on television. “Look at the board, Josh,” Bruce snapped. “Why are you looking out the window?”
Jeff Sarwer, the boy who had beaten Josh that morning, was considered a genius by the regulars at the Manhattan Chess Club. Some of the old-timers who had watched Bobby play as a child referred to Jeff as a young Fischer. They had said the same thing about Josh two years before, when at six he had first played his witty, tactical games at the club, but by now this was old news. Joel Benjamin, himself once a brilliant prodigy, said that Jeff Sarwer was the strongest player for his age that he had ever seen, and Vitaly Zaltzman, his teacher at the time, touted him as the best for his age in the world.
Jeff and his nine-year-old sister, Julia, didn’t go to school. They were tutored by their father, a Canadian citizen, and spent most of their day at the Manhattan Chess Club playing and studying with various masters. Sometimes little Jeff would be snapping off five-minute games against club regulars at midnight and then would be there the next morning eagerly challenging members as they sleepily wandered in. He considered himself different from other chess kids. Chess was his life; the others were dabblers. “None of them can beat me,” he said with a disconcerting, hard-edged condescension. “I play like a master and they don’t know what they’re doing.” He didn’t spend time with other chess children, preferring the company of strong adult players. As if to further distance himself from his peers, many of whom dressed with preppy casualness and were taxied to the club by maids, he wore scuffed sandals and the same grimy running suit day after day and had the hair shaved off his head. For adults and children alike, playing against this pencil-thin child was a disconcerting experience. As he formulated ingenious attacks, one could not help wondering about the extraordinary mechanism computing away beneath his shiny bald scalp.
During the following year Jeff Sarwer was the subject of much discussion in the New York children’s chess world. The parents of some of the top players argued that their kids would show just as much promise if they too studied the game forty or fifty hours a week, but that regardless of talent, it was wrong to keep a child out of school. Some parents felt that since Jeff didn’t attend school, he shouldn’t be allowed to participate in scholastic tournaments. But many regulars at the Manhattan Chess Club sympathized with Mike Sarwer’s ambition for his son. Some of them were openly bitter that their parents had not gotten behind them as young players, and they championed Jeff’s eccentric life-style as a kind of homage to the game. He was seen as the ultimate chess experiment: a child with exceptional aptitude who would have unlimited time and the best teachers in order to grow to his full potential.
IN SEPTEMBER, PANDOLFINI was late delivering two instructional books he was writing, including one on Bobby Fischer’s games that later became a best seller among chess books. His editor was calling him every day, and Bruce was having trouble completing the manuscripts. Like many writers, he was anxious about the quality of his work. In addition, in his capacity as executive director of the Manhattan Chess Club he had to deal with pressing financial and organizational problems. He was expected to start fall chess programs at four secondary schools, and the parents of his students, back from summer vacations, were eagerly calling to schedule lessons. Each morning his answering machine was flashing with fifteen or twenty urgent demands. Desperate to finish his books, Pandolfini stop
ped returning phone calls, including Joshua’s and mine. He wasn’t sleeping, he had stomachaches and he couldn’t eat. He had no time for chess lessons. During a two-week period he canceled three sessions in a row, and my son decided that his teacher didn’t like him anymore.
For Josh the evidence was mounting that chess was filled with disappointment and pain. After two years of success and winning, the game was making him feel like a loser, and he tried to shut it out. One afternoon Pandolfini rushed over from his studio for half an hour, feeling that a short lesson was better than none. He barely said hello and taught as quickly as possible, trying to cram two weeks’ worth into thirty minutes, and left feeling frustrated that Josh wasn’t concentrating. Twice more he came over for quick sessions, talking more in algebraic notation than in English. He was so harried that he didn’t notice that my son rarely looked at him. After these whirlwind meetings Josh wondered what had gone wrong between them. Bruce no longer kidded around or talked about the Jets and Knicks. He had stopped pasting stars and dinosaur stickers in Joshua’s little black book and no longer awarded him master-class points at the end of their lesson. Bruce must have decided that he was no longer worth the effort. It was hard for Josh to talk about it. Chess made him agitated and unhappy, which in turn made his father unhappy. But when I confronted him, he assured me with a pained expression on his face that he still loved the game.
Bruce and Josh struggled through a number of sessions. I was hoping that Bruce would be able to pull my son out of this slump, but toward the middle of October, Josh excused himself from a lesson, found Bonnie in the kitchen, and cried softly so that Bruce wouldn’t hear. “I can’t do it,” he told her. “It’s too hard.”
“It went badly—very badly,” Bonnie told me later. She had been watching the lesson from the kitchen door. Instead of looking at the board, Josh had stared at the clock and had sometimes covered his ears with his hands. He didn’t want to hear about the Samisch variation of the Nimzo-Indian. He couldn’t have cared less about mating with a knight and a bishop against a king.
“He doesn’t enjoy the game anymore,” Bonnie said firmly. “It’s stopped being fun. He can’t bear his lessons with Bruce.” She was saying things that I had been trying to ignore; it’s easy to tune out a little kid when you have fame and glory squarely in your sights. “Haven’t you noticed? They’re not the same together. They used to be such friends, but now Bruce hardly cracks a smile. He acts toward Josh like a frustrated boss on the verge of firing a lazy worker. Both of you have forgotten that he’s a little boy.”
Bonnie went on to point out that for months I had been oblivious to Joshua’s feelings about chess; I was so intoxicated by his potential that I couldn’t see what was happening. While she talked, I was thinking that if only my son and I could have a serious conversation, everything would be okay. It was just that he was out of practice and in a bad mood. The tournaments would begin soon, and despite his loss to David Arnett in the nationals, he was still the highest-rated primary player in the United States.
“You must be blind,” Bonnie said angrily in response to my silences and equivocations. “Don’t you understand? He doesn’t like playing anymore.”
OUR LITTLE CHESS team was in a state of chaos and dejection. Josh didn’t want to play, and whenever I managed to get through to Bruce on the phone, he sounded frazzled and exhausted. I was facing the possibility that there would be no more tournaments, no second chance to win the national championship, no more splendid contests in Washington Square. When I thought of Joshua’s life without chess, the alternatives—good grades, Little League games and clarinet lessons—seemed mediocre and boring.
Finally I arranged a dinner with Bruce to discuss our crisis. He looked thin and drawn. While he described his harried eighteen-hour day, he kept glancing at his watch. He knew that he had to be somewhere else, but he couldn’t remember where. He said he was falling behind on all his deadlines. He couldn’t write well when he was so tired, but there was no time to rest. I was apprehensive that he was about to say he no longer had time for Josh, and that we would have to find another teacher.
Instead, Pandolfini began to describe an idea. His mood changed completely, and he began to laugh and relax. After thirteen years he was considering playing in chess tournaments again, but the other players wouldn’t recognize him. He would dress in elaborate disguises; perhaps he’d wear a long beard and a flowing black cape and speak in one of several accents he had been practicing. He would do very well in the tournaments, perhaps even win a couple, he predicted. For one thing, he would have no rating and the best players would take him lightly, which would be an enormous edge. Also, he knew much more about the game than when he had last played in tournaments. Most important, in his disguises he could play without pressure because it would be impossible for Bruce Pandolfini to lose. Each time he began to establish a small reputation, he’d change identities and begin anew. The fantasy of playing again seemed to free Bruce from the clutter and anxieties of his life. He was intrigued by his quixotic idea, experiencing aspirations he’d first felt as a teenager while playing through the chess masterpieces of Alekhine at the Marshall Chess Club, imagining himself building impregnable positions and humbling the best players in the world. Somehow, he assured me, he’d make room in his hectic schedule for this secret life.
While Bruce talked on, I realized that years of writing articles for Chess Life, lecturing at universities and producing popular instructional books had made playing the game he loved too threatening. If he did poorly, wouldn’t it tarnish his reputation as a writer and teacher? But wasn’t it also possible that his reluctance to play might quietly infect a student of his? At eight, Josh was also trapped by a reputation—reluctant to play, afraid to lose. “You know why I didn’t want to play Ben,” he had said to me a few days earlier. “Let’s just say that by accident I lost a game. He’d tell everyone in school.”
At seven, Josh had often been referred to as a genius, and for Bruce it had been wonderful to have such a highly regarded student. For both of them it had been like living in a Peter Pan fantasy. Josh could fly and couldn’t fall. When he lost a game playing against adults, he came out a winner nonetheless; invariably he was praised for his talent and potential. Perhaps without realizing it, Bruce and I had fueled this illusion of invincibility. To each of us it was unacceptable for him to lose to other children. Before he was old enough to write, Josh had learned that winning was the most direct way to his father’s heart. I was insatiable for his wins, and we didn’t talk about losing; that was an unacceptable reality that he had to wrestle with on his own. Even when he lost a game to someone who was several years older and had a higher rating, Bruce was quick to point out Josh’s carelessness and how easily he might have won; rarely did he praise the other child’s ingenuity.
AN EXCEPTIONAL STUDENT is likely to be a losing financial proposition for a teacher. While his wife or girlfriend is urging him to find wealthier pupils, the teacher finds himself scheduling extra sessions with his star, lessons that are sometimes not paid for. There is never enough time to cover the material, and one-hour lessons frequently stretch into a third hour. In addition, the teacher spends time planning tournament strategies, photocopying problems, scanning foreign periodicals for the newest opening lines, searching bookstores for out-of-print material, worrying about results. He does all this because he is infatuated with his student’s potential, riding hopes that are unlikely to come to fruition and that he would be embarrassed even to admit. Perhaps his student will become a national champion someday, maybe even world champion. For the teacher, this would be like becoming a champion himself.
In the back of his mind, Pandolfini had a goal. Given Joshua’s rapid progress as a seven- and eight-year-old, he had a chance to become the youngest American master ever. Almost without realizing it, Bruce had picked up the pace. In the past Josh had solved problems faster than any child he’d ever worked with, and the more difficult they were, the better he liked it.
Gradually Pandolfini had begun to talk to my son as an equal, often verbalizing complex chess variations without demonstrating them on the board. This saved time, but for a while he didn’t realize that Josh would sometimes nod without understanding; it simply wasn’t in his nature to admit to a weakness. Also, on some days, or even for entire months, Josh seemed to be able to grasp master-level concepts. At such times his chess ability was years more advanced than during those periods when he couldn’t bear to face the stern demands of his lessons. During the first years of my son’s play, Bruce had often reminded me that such inconsistencies were normal for a child, but lately he and I had both expected a more even performance. Pandolfini was impatient for his pupil to begin playing advanced contemporary openings, which would raise the level of his game, but Josh had trouble memorizing the moves. He also had difficulty recording his moves accurately in notation during tournaments, and would expend more energy scribbling and erasing on the scoresheet than in playing; as a consequence, until he learned to write with more dexterity, his offhand games were more creative and sophisticated than his tournament ones. Sometimes Bruce accused Josh of not trying—younger kids could write the moves accurately—and my son would complain bitterly that he was trying. He was so good at some things that it was easy to forget that his aptitudes for different tasks were uneven, just like those of other seven- and eight-year-olds.
The realization that he might be losing Josh was a terrible blow for Pandolfini, who had begun to feel like part of our family. Twice a week after the lesson he had sat at our small kitchen table eating dinner, discussing Joshua’s homework, or what school he ought to go to, or expressing pained concern about a second-grade infatuation that had turned out badly. On his own, he had spent many hours worrying about his pupil’s future and systematically plotting its course. Now he had to face the fact that their lessons simply weren’t working. When he tried to introduce new material, Josh sat at the table with a sullen expression, fooling with a ball or a toy car, waiting for Bruce to leave.
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