Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  ON THE MORNING of the final game between Karpov and Kasparov I was furious that I couldn’t watch it live. Seventy-one games between these two men had come down to this last one, and each would be giving it everything he had. For the sports fan, teams and players are often imbued with moral qualities. In the West, besides being known for exciting, attacking chess, Kasparov represented fair-mindedness and hope. Perhaps as champion of the world he would use his influence to help Boris Gulko, Volodja Pimonov and others who wanted to emigrate or who were not allowed to play in tournaments because they were Jewish or had bucked the Soviet chess establishment. Karpov, on the other hand, seemed to stand in the way of better times; the world would be crueler, more gloomy, the morning after he won.

  To me the event was as momentous as the first Ali-Frazier fight; yet I knew that no television or radio station would cover the game, and that I couldn’t even learn the result until the next day when I read it in the New York Times. I’d spend most of my day fretting about what was going on in Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow. Then I came up with an idea. I called information for the telephone number of Tass in New York and dialed nervously. The phone was picked up by a sleepy-sounding man, who said that his name was Olof. I explained that I was writing about the match for one of the largest dailies in the United States, and that I needed the moves of today’s game the instant they came over the wire. (This was only partially a lie since I had written about the chess world for national magazines.) Olof perked up. Naturally he assumed that I was on a tight deadline and that his attentiveness to the wire would be a service to millions of readers. Perhaps it even occurred to him that this transmission of sporting news might be a useful cultural exchange between our two antagonistic countries, a small step toward understanding and peace. In fact the only peace in question was the peace of mind of me and my friend Steve Salinger, a strong C player, standing by at the chess set.

  During the next several hours Olof and I exchanged phone calls, and with a trembling hand I duplicated the moves played only a minute or two before by the two opponents in Moscow. After each call Steve and I discussed the wisdom of the moves and whose position looked more promising. Perhaps I was feeling guilty about lying to Olof or maybe I was beginning to believe the lie, because as the game progressed I felt more and more burdened by the increasingly complicated position. It was as if the Western world were counting on my analysis, a terrible responsibility which compromised my limited chess intelligence. By the fifteenth move I couldn’t make head or tail of the position. Every capture was filled with ambiguity, the pieces seemed to swim in all directions and I even began to be confused about who was playing white and who black.

  “Why do you think he put the knight there?” I asked Steve.

  “Well, he had to; otherwise it would be captured by the pawn. Where else could he put it?”

  By move twenty, the position had become delicate, and even the unflappable Salinger was unsure who was better off. In a second burst of inspiration, I called Grandmaster Lev Alburt, gave him the position and asked for his analysis. Alburt had no idea where I was getting the moves, and to my relief he never asked. Every fifteen or twenty minutes I gave him an update and asked for his opinion. At one point, after venturing that Karpov looked a little better and suggesting some future moves for black, he graciously asked for my opinion. I mentioned an idea that had been suggested a few minutes before by Steve and then added hastily, “But we are very weak.” Alburt probably took this to mean that we were weak masters. Why would two patzers be waiting breathlessly all day for telexed moves which they couldn’t understand?

  On the twenty-eighth move, two terrible things happened in quick succession. First, Kasparov apparently lost a pawn; secondly, the telex line from Moscow broke down. “You’ve got to get it fixed,” I shouted at Olof. I had made the same demand to the Manhattan Cable Company when they lost the picture, during the fourth quarter of a tense Knick game. While we waited, Alburt speculated that Kasparov was worse off, but that he still might have drawing chances. By now I was no longer rooting even a little for Karpov. What would happen to Kasparov if he lost? He had gone way out on a limb making derogatory remarks about Karpov, Roshal, Sevastianov and others in the Soviet chess power structure.

  For half an hour the only news Olof had was that the line was out. Finally, when I called him for the twelfth or fifteenth time since the telex had broken down, he said, “I have no more moves, but the last message says that black has resigned.” In disbelief I asked him to read it again. Kasparov had won. It seemed impossible. Down a pawn (two pawns, actually, but I didn’t know this at the time), Good had triumphed over Evil. Salinger and I danced around my little kitchen as if our families had just been saved from a terrible catastrophe.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1985 Grandmaster Lev Alburt won the United States championship for the second year in a row. His chess prowess, his years as a top grandmaster functioning within the Soviet chess establishment and his long-standing relationship with Karpov and Kasparov make him uniquely qualified to comment on their games.

  “The quality of chess in their first match was simply miserable,” Alburt told me, “the worst in the history of championship play since Zukertort and Steinitz. Both players made many mistakes, much of the play was boring and there were few brilliancies. In the second match the quality was somewhat better and there were fewer mistakes, but the chess was still far from exceptional. This is not surprising; both men had too much on their minds.

  “There is a tendency of people in the West to portray Karpov as a kind of villain, and to see Kasparov as a dissident idealist, but that’s an oversimplification. Kasparov is also a member of the ruling class, the nomenklatura, as well as Karpov. They are both members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. What makes these matches unique is that for the first time in the history of Russian chess two members of the ruling class are playing for the championship. The real drama here is the struggle between two powerful cliques.”

  “How does this affect their play?” I asked.

  Alburt elaborated with a mixture of fact and surmise. Several weeks before the start of the first match, Karpov was making many phone calls to reach a friend who was close to a general in the army, instead of studying openings. He had come up with an idea that would be more irksome to Kasparov than any opening preparation. He wanted to ask his friend to bribe the general into drafting one of Kasparov’s top aides just before the beginning of the match. It would take dozens of phone calls before Karpov accomplished this dirty trick, and meanwhile he wasn’t thinking about chess. Of course Kasparov soon caught wind of the plot and was quickly on the phone himself, calling friends to block Karpov’s plan.

  “Did this actually happen?” I asked incredulously.

  “Of course,” Alburt answered, as if he thought everyone knew. “Grandmaster Gennady Timoshenko was in his late thirties, old for the army, and had been working with Kasparov for many years. His loss was a severe psychological blow. But it wasn’t only that Kasparov lost a top assistant; he also lost a political battle. More likely than not this dirty trick contributed to his poor start in the match.

  “There were many intrigues during the course of the match, which was emotionally draining for the players. There were at least ten illegal delays, each of them the result of a power play. After Kasparov won the third game he requested a rest day. With Karpov so depleted, it made no sense, and many people in the West wondered why he had done it. Obviously Kasparov was forced into it; Karpov had been able to put pressure on him through a political connection. For both of them, the war being played in back rooms and on the phone determined the outcome of the match more than preparation, and it didn’t make for good chess.”

  “From reading the papers, I got the impression that the second match was largely free of dirty tricks,” I said.

  “For the most part that’s true,” said Alburt, “but in the middle of the match, Kasparov did lodge an official protest with the jury about Karpov’s use of drugs.”<
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  “I thought it was normal for Soviet players to take drugs.”

  “There are no rules against taking stimulants, but in each game of the match, Karpov received from his aides a glass of a certain drink, and in his protest Kasparov insisted that the drink should be prepared and delivered to Karpov before the game. His objection was that during the game the grandmasters who worked for Karpov could convey a message with this drink. For example, the message might be ‘You faced a novelty in the opening and are already in trouble. Try for a draw.’ The drink could be distinctive by the container in which it was delivered, or by its smell, taste or color. By these signals it’s easy to convey several simple messages. His analysts might signal Karpov that they’d found a winning line and that he should try to adjourn the game. For a player to know that a team of trusted grandmasters considers his position better or worse is an extremely important advantage.

  “But there was another factor in Kasparov’s protest that was even more important. Different positions require different approaches. In one it could be clear that combinations and tactics are needed. In this situation Karpov would need a drug that would stimulate his abilities for a short period of time to provide an explosion of concentration. Then he could relax. So if his analysts saw that a tricky series of moves was coming up, they might give him a strong stimulant, which would convey the message that he should watch out for a combination and at the same time would provide him with energy. Or imagine a different position: the players have bishops of different colors and Karpov is a pawn down, so a long, careful defense is called for. In this case a strong stimulant, even coffee, would probably not be right because it would give him an up followed by a down. Another drug would be called for which would give him a steady flow of energy. What Kasparov was saying by his protest was ‘Let Karpov take one type of drug before the game which will help him—I can’t prevent that—but don’t allow him to vary the drug from position to position.’”

  “Where did you learn about this?” I asked.

  “I read about the protest in the newspapers, but the details were related to me recently by some Soviet grandmaster friends in a tournament in Reykjavik. The grandmasters said that Kasparov was complaining openly about the matter.”

  Alburt had endless inside stories about Karpov and Kasparov, the Mafialike tactics of the Soviet chess establishment and the Machiavellian wheelings and dealings of Florencio Campomanes. He listed recent examples of payoffs and political blackmail in the world of international chess and described in minute detail how a grandmaster sleuth goes about identifying a fixed game between two other grandmasters.

  Alburt is the Bob Woodward of the chess world, but for a fan like me who dreams about the resurgence of Tal and about Kasparov’s flamboyant sacrifices, maybe it’s better not to know too much. The inside dope is depressing, and being a chess fan is difficult enough without it.

  19

  CHESS PARENTS

  In the fall of 1985, before the start of an elementary school chess tournament, I found myself standing next to the father of one of the highest-rated sixth-grade players in the country. I complimented him on his son’s recent results and he said some nice things about Josh. We were working at being casual, but we were also measuring each other and doing the kind of chess calculation that most chess parents are proficient at. According to a recently published rating list, Joshua’s playing strength had taken a big jump and was now nearly identical to that of the man’s son, a fact that was reflected in the body English and strained banalities of our conversation.

  “It’s a nice day,” I said cheerfully. Since he was playing against older children, there wasn’t much pressure on eight-year-old Josh to win today, and therefore not much pressure on me.

  “Too nice to be inside all day playing chess,” said the other father, his voice catching a little in his throat.

  There were sixty elementary-age children playing in this tournament, and the man’s son was considered the one to beat. For a time, it had been heady for him to be the father of the top player, but now it was largely a burden. If his son finished in any position other than first place, they would leave the gymnasium feeling depressed, hardly able to look at each other. Walking past rows of cafeteria tables holding the second- or third-place trophy for his son, he would avoid the eye contact and salutations of other parents, particularly the father and mother of the winner, who would be looking around for praise from parents and coaches, ready to offer assurance to the sixth grader’s father that his boy would win next time. Whenever his kid lost he could feel the other parents climbing all over his back. It was like drowning. Parents of weaker players were silently indicting him for having focused so much energy on chess for the past four or five years, for not having been more relaxed and worldly about the game, like themselves. Parents of strong young players like Josh were licking their chops, moving in for the kill. On the way home, he and his son would argue bitterly about what went wrong in the critical game.

  The father of the sixth grader glanced at the rating sheet that was taped on the wall and shook his head. “I’ve never seen the competition so tough in a local tournament,” he said, trying to find a way to justify a loss. “You’re not kidding,” I said, feeling relaxed because of the other father’s uneasiness. In a small corner of my mind I began to calculate: Josh is two and a half years younger than the other boy; think how strong he’ll be when he’s a sixth grader. If things go perfectly he could be a master at twelve, and no one will be able to touch him. And if he’s a master by the sixth grade, think of how much better he’ll be six years after that. At this moment, while the other father tried to force a smile, Joshua’s horizon seemed limitless; he was way ahead of the pack, and I had conveniently forgotten about younger players like Jeff Sarwer, Morgan Pehme and John Valoria, who could already play competitively with my son. They didn’t fit neatly into my blue-sky projections.

  IT’S PAINFUL FOR the parent of an eleven- or twelve-year-old to deal with the challenge of a younger player. It’s as if his child were being personally attacked, or as if the parent himself were being displaced. Despite the steady improvement of a talented child, there is always someone catching up, someone a little smarter, a little better. The parents of the strongest players live nervously with a sense of the irremediable ticking of the clock. When people refer to a six-year-old as a prodigy, it seems to imply that he or she is the only one in the world with this gift. That there may be other little kids with even greater aptitude is a fact that parents tend to resist. But by the time a player is twelve and has been studying for four or five years, he is no longer evaluated by what he might be but by his results and his rating. Unless the child is truly a genius, it is difficult for him and his parents to continue to believe that he will be the next Fischer or Kasparov, both of whom were playing at master strength in early adolescence. Almost overnight, the magic and charm, the admiration and compliments, the seemingly open-ended potential are replaced by limitations and fast-receding possibilities. The little genius is suddenly referred to as a solid player but without the creative imagination or exceptional memory needed to reach the top echelon of the adult chess world. It is always hard to say exactly why his game didn’t evolve. Perhaps his early success was more the result of an excellent chess education than of exceptional talent—to a certain extent, a parent can manufacture a top young player by sending him to good teachers and forcing him to study—or perhaps the child simply lost his drive.

  “HOW’S YOUR WORK?” I asked the parent of the older boy, trying to steer the conversation away from chess.

  “It’s a bad time for me,” he answered with a frankness that surprised me. “Things are frantic. I’ve been working on a project for the last two years. It was on the back burner, but all of a sudden there’s been a flurry of interest and money has become available to do it.”

  “That sounds great.”

  The way he nodded indicated that it ought to be but wasn’t. “My boy’s in the sixth grade,” he
said. “This is his last year to win the nationals. I can’t walk away from him now. What choice do I have? The deal is gonna have to wait.”

  For both of us the winter and early spring would be shadowed by the approach of this event so filled with portent. To chess parents, winning the nationals is the gold at the end of the rainbow, the payoff for all the hard work. It is glory, pictures in newspapers, the adulation of children and parents, tangible evidence to nonchess friends that you may not be completely crazy; even more, to yourself it is concrete proof that your child’s ability is something significantly more than your own wild hopes and projected dreams.

  But for the parent of the sixth grader, the nationals also represented an enormous relief, a finish line. After coaching and suffering through six years of scholastic tournaments, he intended to back away from chess after the nationals. He was emotionally exhausted and worried that weekend after weekend of tension might be ruining his health. After years of allowing his young son’s chess life to intrude on his own priorities, it was time to put his house in order, he said. But maybe he also welcomed the end of the tournament grind because in his heart of hearts he knew that his son would never be another Bobby Fischer. Or perhaps he was simply kidding himself; the drug would prove to be too potent, and after the nerve-racking event in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’d tousle his kid’s short black hair and start planning for the next tournament.