Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  During the lunch break in one tournament that fall, Joshua was still playing, and this zealous father came over to Bonnie and offered to bring back a sandwich for him. Bonnie gladly accepted; unfortunately, in her preoccupation with the game, she forgot to pay the man. That afternoon, when our two children began to play each other, he stormed over to her and demanded his money, and later, when his son’s position deteriorated, he walked from parent to parent, describing how Bonnie had tried to avoid paying him for Joshua’s lunch.

  That tunafish sandwich was the beginning of a big problem for my family. A few months later our kids played again in a tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club, and the father began impugning our family character to anyone who would listen by describing the tunafish sandwich episode. It was a long, tough game. Bruce happened to be working in his office, and at one point he walked into the tournament room for a few minutes to check the positions of the more interesting games. That evening I received many phone calls from parents and officials at the club who relayed the assertion by this father that Pandolfini had signaled the winning moves to Josh by an elaborate system of ear-pulls and winks. For weeks he insisted to people that Joshua could not have beaten his son without Pandolfini’s covert assistance, and again recounted the sandwich incident as proof of the corrupt moral fiber of the Waitzkin family. I recalled Russian grandmaster Boris Gulko’s helpless rage when former world champion Tigran Petrosian claimed in Izvestia that Gulko’s exceptional results in 1975 must have been the result of cheating by his friends.

  My relationship with this parent continued to deteriorate. The next time our kids played he grabbed me by the arm, pushed me against the wall and said that we should go outside and fight. By now Josh had become reluctant to play his son, fearing what would happen to me during the game. That winter, many parents and tournament directors were confronted by this father. During one tournament he spat at the well-mannered mother of a strong sixth grader, a rival of his son for the Aspis Award. From his behavior, one might conclude that this man is deranged; yet I’ve been told by several people who know him outside the chess environment that he is a decent and civilized human being.

  THE VOYAGE OF vicarious glory is a risky one for parents. “We have absolutely no social life,” said the hardworking parents of a brilliant young player, who travel to tournaments every weekend and on most vacations with their talented son. Some of these events are three-day affairs, and these parents, who hardly know how to move the pieces, spend seventy-two hours holed up in a stuffy hotel. Everywhere there are games, the analysis of games, the tension of games, the anticipation of more games. There are games on every sofa and easy chair, games over hamburgers and french fries, games behind every pillar in the lobby. Such an event is hallucinogenic and relentless. While their child plays, the parents move listlessly, like fish in an aquarium, from table to table. They feel out of place and so tense that they can barely speak to each other. They are intelligent people, embarrassed about their avarice, but when their kid is winning, intoxication washes aside reservations. They’ve decided that it makes their son too nervous when they watch him play, so to pass the hours they look at the games of other talented kids, smiling supportively and feeling guilty about rooting against them.

  If you ask these parents about their aspirations for their child, they answer swiftly, “Are you crazy? We don’t want him to grow up to be a chess player.” It is hard to believe them; why else are they devoting body and soul to his development? Yet their zealous support may ensure his choice of some other occupation. For some fathers and mothers, passion for their child’s success has become so gargantuan that the kid’s own predilections have been subsumed by their need. Some of the best young players go to tournaments with their wildly supportive parents to satisfy Mom and Dad rather than for love of the game, and as teenagers they will probably give it up when they discover other interests.

  20

  ROMAN

  The day Grandmaster Roman Dzindzichashvili took up residence in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park everything seemed to change. Players walked differently—more stiffly or with a self-conscious shuffle or with a list in his direction. While appraising complicated positions, they assumed various affectations: a wink, a shrill laugh or a melancholic expression. One young player, a shy psychotic who spent much of his day mumbling quietly beneath the trees, began to flaunt his madness. Within eyeshot of the great grandmaster he would fall to his knees and make obscene sexual gestures at every woman who walked through the park. Another player, who for years had felt it necessary to incant the most vulgar language imaginable in order to play his best, suddenly assumed an attitude of understatement and urbane politeness; he moved his pawns with an uplifted pinky as if he were toasting royalty with an elegant wine. Some players stopped playing altogether, preferring to crowd around Dzindzi’s (pronounced Gin Gi’s) games. “For a glimpse of genius,” they would say, but perhaps their abstinence was more an act of shame, so that this grandmaster, recognized throughout the world for his brilliancies, would not notice their fumbling play and wasted lives in the park. But others were redeemed by Dzindzi’s presence; it was proof that their way of life was valid, even noble. One thin black man about forty, with knife scars crisscrossing his face, pronounced the name Roman with the familiarity of a dear, lifelong friend, but I don’t believe that they ever spoke. He was a timid man and a weak player who lost most of his games. Year after year, during the outdoor months, he played with a brave little smile, though his game seemed to decline steadily. One afternoon, while Roman played blitz at an adjacent table, I asked the black man what he would do in the winter, when it was too cold to play in the park.

  “I’ll stay in my room studying,” he answered with a fierce pride that I hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t have the money to go to the chess shop in the cold weather, so he would study in preparation for the following spring. In effect he was saying, “Bobby Fischer used to play here. Now Roman does, and so do I.”

  AT THE TIME, Roman Dzindzichashvili had the third- or fourth-highest rating in the United States, and most grandmasters would readily have admitted that he was the most talented active player in the country. Before emigrating to the United States in the late 1970s he had been a powerful grandmaster in the Soviet Union. Boris Gulko said that if Dzindzi had been born with the dedication to match his immense talent he might one day have challenged for the world championship. But now he was fed up with tournament chess in the United States, he would explain obliquely; others speculated that lately his gambling proclivities had made him unattractive to organizers, who may have stopped offering him accommodations or waiving his entrance fees in order to induce him to attend their tournaments. Whatever the reasons, in the summer of 1986 Dzindzi was a fixture of the chess corner of Washington Square, and every player was affected by his presence much in the same way that those in a small community are touched by that of a world-famous neighbor.

  Dzindzi is a swarthy, portly man with an affable manner. Week after week he wore the same black short-sleeved shirt and scuffed black shoes. He was in the park all the time. At seven in the morning, when all the other tables were deserted, his heavy, unshaven face smeared with sleep or sleeplessness, he could be found playing chess or backgammon with some wretched soul who looked as if he hadn’t eaten in a month. At midnight, beneath a dim park light, he would be playing blitz, gin rummy or poker with a cadre of regulars until the police drove them out. His life was a continuum of games; he passed relentlessly from one to the next and hardly seemed to notice what or with whom he was playing. It was clear that Dzindzi couldn’t exist without playing something. If there was a pause, a half hour without a game, his brow would furrow in concern, and he would begin to feel the first unpleasant edge of agitation. He would start pacing from table to table until someone called him over with a gambling proposition. While he played there was rarely any expression on his face—certainly no joy, only a tired smile occasionally in return for a compliment or for a f
ive-dollar bill after a checkmate.

  Despite his incontestable genius, Dzindzi frequently lost; he was such a powerful player that in order to get opponents he had to offer staggering odds. He was a terrible gambler and everyone knew it. Whatever he offered, his opponent would shake his head; “No, no, not enough. I’m a patzer and you play as well as Korchnoi.” Then Dzindzi would give a weary nod; it was true, he did play as well as Korchnoi and had once been Kasparov’s teacher, but what did it matter now; let’s get on with the game. His opponents knew that he had to play, in the same way that a shark must swim; he would always give better odds rather than risk losing the action. He gave competent players rook odds, sometimes even queen odds, and would offer international masters a five-minute to two-minute time advantage. Or he would play them equally and offer five-to-one game odds, meaning he had to win five games in a row in order to collect the bet. But if that wasn’t enough, he’d give seven-to-one game odds, or even nine-to-one, against players with an international reputation, and when the match finally began his face would sink heavily in relief. His games were filled with magic—intriguing complexities, astounding sacrifices—sparkling games that contrasted oddly with his bored countenance and half-closed eyes.

  In the afternoons aficionados who were strangers to the park began coming to watch Dzindzi play. In good weather forty or fifty people jammed around his table, jostling one another for a better glimpse. They cheered his sacrifices and rustled with excitement at his puzzling constructions. Then, after four wins in a row, he would titillate his admirers with yet another outrageous sacrifice, but this one wouldn’t quite work, and he would lose the game and his bet. Within a few weeks he didn’t have a nickel and owed half the people in the park. But losing didn’t seem to bother him, and it made the park regulars feel special to lend him money so that he could play on.

  During Dzindzi’s months in Washington Square he was shadowed everywhere by a thirty-year-old man from California, a weak master who craved chess genius more than anything else in life and had latched onto Dzindzi in a move of desperation. If he could be around Dzindzi twenty-four hours a day, watch each game he played, listen to his chess ideas and his philosophy of life, beg him for tidbits of advice, observe the way he walked and breathed, his eating and even his sleeping habits, then maybe he too could become a great player. He knew that it was his last chance; it is rare for a thirty-year-old master suddenly to become much stronger.

  This man was forever at Dzindzi’s side. While the grandmaster played blitz against a patzer, the Californian scrutinized the games as if Alekhine were playing Capablanca for the world championship. When Dzindzi was hungry, the man followed him to a sandwich shop. When Dzindzi slept on a park bench, his head on a folded newspaper, his devoted acquaintance sat nearby studying a book and waiting for the grandmaster to wake up. The Californian was an extremely intelligent man and a keen observer. One morning, while Dzindzi slept, he spoke about the ruined lives in this corner of Washington Square and speculated like a sociologist on the social environment that allowed such degradation. “What a waste,” he said sadly, flicking his hand in the direction of the grandmaster.

  In Los Angeles the weak master was a law student, and he said that soon he would be returning there to finish his degree. Almost gaily, he referred to his time in the park as a final hedonistic fling before his real work in life began. He talked with warmth and nostalgia about his close-knit family and about the beauty of the mountains and the Pacific near his home.

  A few minutes later Dzindzi roused himself like a sleeping bear, and instantly the Californian stood up and stretched. As Dzindzi blinked his eyes and scratched his tousled black hair, the weak master smiled broadly, as if he had been touched by the vibrant potential of a new day. In a few minutes the two men were preparing themselves for an eight A.M. poker game.

  Whenever we chatted subsequently the Californian made it a point to say that he was planning to leave within a few days. As the weeks passed and the weather turned cooler, we stopped speaking, but whenever I paused on my way through the park to look at one of Dzindzi’s games, the Californian smiled at me and shook his head with a certain irony.

  THE MOST SHOCKING event to take place on the day of Dzindzi’s arrival in Washington Square was the departure of Israel Zilber. From the moment Zilber had first slumped at a table, ready to play all comers for a dollar, it was clear that he was far and away the best player there. From time to time all the regulars tried to unseat him, but no one had ever offered a serious challenge. Zilber would usually win, even against strong masters, all the while arguing raucously with his private voices or trying to soothe them with soft Latvian lullabies. Wearing a large sheriff’s badge on his grungy vest, he truly perceived himself to be the best chess player in the world and occasionally spoke incoherently about his victories over Karpov and Kasparov. Had Zilber remained sane and in Russia, these games might have actually taken place. But even if he weren’t beset with raging voices and hallucinations, his megalomania might be explained by the park itself, because in time, the park gets into the blood of all its players and becomes the world.

  When Dzindzichashvili arrived, Zilber’s voices apparently spoke to him about self-preservation and the need at certain vulnerable times in a man’s life for a stressfree environment. The cruel logic of chess was too powerful even for schizophrenia. Evidently Dzindzi was too strong an opponent for the Sheriff, who had known the grandmaster decades before in Russia, and must have recognized him as from another life. Zilber packed his chipped army of pieces, clutched his bulging suitcase of rags, hunting knives and girlie magazines in one hand, his outsized billy club in the other, and tottered away from Washington Square. It must have been like searching for a new frontier, and one might have supposed that Zilber was bitter at having to leave, except that in his new home, a tiny strip of park with several chess tables eight blocks south on Sixth Avenue, he chatted just as before to the trees overhead and looked happy enough. His new location was very close to our apartment, and Josh and I passed him several times a day. Except for an occasional scouting trip to Washington Square, Zilber was always at this new place, his pieces set up, exchanging remarks with his voices while waiting for a challenge. With the exception of half a dozen games with Josh, I never saw anyone stop to play a game with him for all the months he was there. Heaven knows where he found the money to survive.

  IN THE AUTUMN, Dzindzichashvili left Washington Square, and life quickly returned to normal. The player who had respectfully given up his vulgar language began to curse again; the twenty-year-old psychotic quieted down and stopped harassing women. In the chill of fall the play at the tables seemed crisper than in the summer, and while the regulars waited for a game they talked about their winter plans. Some were looking for part-time work; others would try to survive on welfare. When they could afford it, they would meet at the chess shop on Thompson Street.

  As soon as Dzindzi left, Zilber returned to his old table, and his game was as sharp as on the day he had departed.

  21

  SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER

  In the fall of 1986, I flew to California to find Bobby Fischer. During my interviews with his friends and travels to his old haunts, it occurred to me that if it weren’t for Fischer, Josh probably wouldn’t be a serious player today; in fact, many of our best young talents wouldn’t be studying and competing. In the seventies, Fischer elevated the game to national importance and convinced the world that being a chess player was respectable, even romantic; he captured many more imaginations than he did enemy kings. Today, parents of talented players are enthralled when their kid plays well and someone observes reverently, “Maybe he’s the next Fischer.” They encourage him, and prod him when he doesn’t feel like studying. They tell him about Fischer’s dedication to the game when he was eight and what it was like that summer watching him beat Spassky on television. As the child’s rating soars, his parents begin daydreaming about world championships. They spend whole weekends standing in n
arrow aisles between rows of chess players watching their child weigh the relative value of pawn to e4 or bishop to f3. When Josh engineers a lovely combination or sacrifices his rook for mate, the electric excitement that runs through me and the pride that lingers is somehow justifiable in this practical and fiercely materialistic era largely because of Fischer.

  AFTER WINNING THE world championship in 1972, Bobby Fischer became an American folk hero, like Daniel Boone or John Wayne. He had bragged to the world that he was going to beat the Russians and he had delivered. He had become the ultimate chess genius in a land inimical to talented young players. While for the most part he had educated himself as a player, Spassky and other Russians had been provided a systematic chess education by the state. While Fischer accomplished his victory working alone, the Russian champion was backed by a vast machine of sports doctors, therapists and scores of grandmasters to analyze during the match, a national effort much like a contemporary America’s Cup assault.

  At the time, George Steiner wrote of Fischer: “He has made world headlines and popular features of a totally abstract, esoteric, terribly narrow cerebral hobby. He has boosted ten- and twentyfold the financial rewards at the summit. . . . He has generated a chess fever across the United States. . . . These are staggering achievements for a twenty-nine-year-old loner whose bad manners and indifferences to customary social behavior and to the personal feelings of others verge on the transcendent.”*

  According to those closest to him in the early seventies, Fischer was a hugely unattractive person. Consider this description by Brad Darrach, a Life journalist who wrote frequently about him:

  Bobby is tall and broad-shouldered; his face is clean-cut, masculine, attractive. But on second glance this impression dislocates into a number of odd parts. His head, for instance. That amazing brain is lodged in a small oval skull that doesn’t reach very far above the ears. His low forehead makes his jaw look large, at certain angles almost Neanderthal. When he feels weak or uncertain he resembles the dopey kid Jerry Lewis used to portray. Yet there is a sense of danger about Bobby. When he is angry or confident his face is alert but unthinking, the face of a big wild animal that hunts for a living. His eyes are like a tiger’s, with the same yellow-green serenity and frightening emptiness. When he laughs, his wide, full-lipped mouth opens into a happy cave filled with white teeth. Most of his facial expressions are rudimentary displays of fear, hunger, anger, pleasure, pain, suspicion, interest—all the emotions a man or animal can have without feeling close to any other man or animal. I have rarely seen him register sympathy, invitation, acknowledgment, humor, tenderness, playfulness. And never love.