Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  IN JOSHUA’S CASE, the upcoming 1986 primary championship was shadowed by the memory of losing in the seventh round the previous year. One poorly played chess game had changed him; he would never again be the same cocky little boy who was convinced that no child on earth could beat him. By his ninth year, he had studied the game more intensely than most people ever study a subject before attending college, but ironically, in becoming so accomplished so young he had been forced to scrutinize the limits of his potential. Already he had seemed to learn what many of us artfully avoid realizing for another twenty or thirty years: that wanting to be Tolstoy or Einstein or Sandy Koufax doesn’t make it so. During the past year, even when he was loving the game and was playing his best chess, he would sometimes refer to himself derisively as a patzer, and whenever he played in Washington Square and ogling bystanders made a fatuous comparison to Bobby Fischer he would wince visibly. Early success had made it more difficult for him to be a dreamer, and his rigorous, caustic self-assessments made me feel terrible. What’s wrong with imagining yourself a world champion when you’re only eight years old? I had. I was going to be an NBA All-Star, bringing the ball up the court like Bob Cousy. I was going to catch a bigger marlin than the one in The Old Man and the Sea.

  That spring I was afraid for Josh. At least once a day I would say to him nervously, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t win. You’re improving all the time. You’ll win another year in another division.” For a while he nodded patiently when I went through this ritual, but one afternoon he said to me pointedly, “If I finish second I’ll feel like a failure. Only first place means anything.” It was a lonely time for him. He took his chess lessons with a grim, pursed mouth, memorized openings dutifully on the floor in his bedroom with the door closed, and at night lay in bed worrying about losing. Maybe we were putting him in a position that he couldn’t handle. He had the highest national rating of any primary player, and as the number-one seed he would be burdened by the sense that everyone was gunning for him. He would play his games on board one, in front of a television camera, and according to the rules of the Swiss system, as long as he kept winning, his pairings for the tournament would theoretically be more difficult than those of any other player.

  Bonnie, Bruce and I tried to adopt an easygoing attitude. In the weeks preceding the tournament, most other kids practiced by playing in scholastic or adult tournaments; instead we decided that Josh should play in Washington Square. During the past year he had learned a lot about positional chess and had developed sophisticated technique and feel for the endgame; lately, however, his games had become flat and he had stopped attacking, instead waiting for his opponent to make an error. Perhaps too much theory and technique were getting in the way of creative play.

  In the warm weather of April, Josh was back in Washington Square playing seven-minute speed games against hustlers who broke away from book openings after five or six moves. The games were all improvisation, sacrifices and flashy tactics—intuitive, gut-level chess, just what he needed.

  Josh’s friend Poe, who often reeked of cheap cigars, played the white pieces against Josh’s Dragon Sicilian and showed him that if he didn’t get his pawns rolling on the queenside he was going to get beat. Poe mated him often until Josh started playing aggressively with his pawns. Everyone wanted to help. Hustlers who were usually close-mouthed about their tricks, faded masters who floated to the marble tables high on grass—all of them had something to show him: a Levenfish attack, a crafty little opening trap in the Benoni. Wouldn’t it be something if the little kid who’d started here when he was six won the national championship?

  After two weeks in the park Joshua’s game had come alive. He was sacrificing pieces for an attack, finding combinations, playing for mate instead of trying to pick off a pawn. Pandolfini had taught him where his pieces ought to be, and the guys in the park were reminding him what to do with them. It was a wonderful ragtag group that sparred with Josh every day after his classes at Dalton. By common consent, they didn’t smoke grass, drink from a bottle or take a leak behind a tree when he was around.

  By two weeks before the nationals, Josh was playing his best chess ever, but he was also a bundle of raw nerves. He had always been a calm and confident player. Often other kids’ hands would tremble when they played him, and frequently they would cry when he beat them. Josh never showed signs of nervousness and never cried in public. Even when he beat adults as a six-year-old he had showed little excitement; it was as if he had expected to win. But in the weeks preceding the tournament he would sometimes look up from a game in the park with an expression of alarm, and afterwards, when I asked what was wrong, he would say that he felt as if walls were closing in on him and he had become frightened. Sometimes when people spoke, their voices sounded unbearably loud in his head. I asked a psychologist friend about these symptoms, and his disquieting reply was that unlike adults, kids haven’t developed methods to handle pressured situations. I didn’t feel good about his answer, or about the fact that my mother screamed at me that I was a terrible parent for allowing my son to go through such torture. At night Josh called out moves in his sleep. The week before the tournament, I noticed that he was pulling the hair out of the front of his head as he contemplated a position, making a little bald spot. When I pointed this out to him, he became angry and accused me of interfering with his concentration.

  Josh was out there all on his own.

  WE TRAVELED TO Charlotte, North Carolina, with Bruce and with Morgan and Kalev Pehme. Morgan was a year and a half younger than Josh but had the vocabulary and wit of a smart fourteen-year-old, and he was already one of the three or four strongest chess players in the country in the third grade and under. He and Josh were close friends, and I was relieved that as members of the Dalton team they wouldn’t have to play each other in the nationals, as they had in New York events. Often before playing each other in tournaments, they bristled competitively like young tomcats, but while we went sightseeing in Charlotte, they traded baseball cards and gossiped about the other top players. Without caginess, Kalev and I both admitted to feeling nervous, though with a cigarette trembling in his hand he insisted that I was in worse shape.

  Morgan and his father had been training for the nationals as if it were a holy crusade, and whenever the conversation turned to miniature golf, baseball or old James Bond movies—all of them Morgan’s passions—Kalev deflected it back to chess, reminding his son of offbeat openings that they had been preparing. Since Morgan knew more openings than Joshua, these conversations were unnerving to both of us, carrying the message that Josh had studied the wrong variations or had not prepared nearly enough.

  For the last few days I had been trying to keep Joshua’s mind off chess. I had read an essay by Mikhail Botvinnik in which the former world champion suggested that before a major tournament a player should put chess out of his mind and take long walks in the country for a week or ten days to build up the necessary energy for the struggle ahead. We had arrived in Charlotte a day early, and I immediately inquired at the hotel desk about the best place for long walks. Josh was disgusted; he wanted to play baseball and didn’t care about Botvinnik’s advice. Kalev pointed out that the Russian probably didn’t have seven- and nine-year-old kids in mind, but I prevailed, and so Kalev was forced to read aloud to Morgan from his Russian encyclopedia of chess openings as we walked beneath shady trees and along a winding trout stream.

  Besides Josh and Morgan there were half a dozen children who had a realistic chance to win first place in the primary division, the strongest of whom was Jeff Sarwer, the little boy who studied chess full time instead of going to school. “Jeff is the only one I’m afraid of,” Josh confided. “But why should you be afraid of him?” I said. “The last time you played him you won easily.”

  “Not so easily,” Josh answered. I was annoyed that he was afraid of another kid; I wanted him to feel impregnable, to assure me that he couldn’t lose. I said something about Bobby Fischer’s never being afrai
d of anyone and immediately regretted it. Josh was only being honest.

  As it turned out, there was a possibility that Jeff would not be allowed to play. A number of parents had complained that since he didn’t go to school, he had no right to participate in this national scholastic event. Kalev argued that keeping Jeff and Julia out of school to pursue full-time chess careers was criminal. “What if things don’t work out for them or if they sour on chess?” he said. “How will they support themselves? They’re living a warped life.”

  Certainly it was a monomaniacal life. Little Jeff studied and played chess from morning until night. He was insatiable about the game, happy when he was moving pieces and restless when there was no opponent to crush. “Kill, kill, kill,” he sometimes said with an impish grin as he launched his attacks.

  Jeff’s father demanded perfection from his kids. In an interview he once described how he had taught Jeff not to have nightmares. Instead of comforting the child, Mike Sarwer would tell him to go back to sleep and bring his dream back, but this time he had to overcome the conflict that had terrified him. Mike claimed that both his children had learned to do this. On occasions when little Jeff didn’t come up to the mark, his father would order him to stand facing the wall for hours reflecting on his ways. But whether because of his father’s training or because of a natural fighting spirit, spindle-legged, bald-headed little Jeff perceived himself to be a chess superman. On the Shelby Lyman show, where he later appeared as an analyst during the Karpov-Kasparov matches, he ridiculed Kasparov’s play as if the contender were an amateur. He boasted that he would be the youngest world champion of all time, and some experts who observed his ingenious attacking style and natural feel for the endgame thought that he might be right.

  Jeff dismissed all other chess children as dull and stupid. He hated them for being pretenders at his game and way of life. He was different from any other chess kid I had ever met. His passion for the game was hotter, and his arrogance at eight was so disarming that it was easy to forget that he was a little boy.

  But sometimes the veneer cracked. A couple of weeks before the nationals Jeff had ventured into Washington Square and played a few speed games against one of the guys with whom Josh practiced regularly.

  “You ought to play my man Josh,” the black man said while he moved the pieces.

  “Josh is a putz,” Jeff answered.

  “I think Josh’ll beat you” was the home-field response. Other Josh supporters chimed in, and soon Jeff began to cry and left the park. These bantering remarks had tipped his world. In his mind he had no equals, and these were the terms by which he played the game.

  Kalev argued with me and Josh that if people took a stand against the Sarwer kids’ playing, maybe Jeff’s father would come to his senses and send them to school.

  “It would be terrible to keep Jeff out,” Josh answered firmly. “How could they do that to him? No one loves chess as much as he does. It’s his whole life.”

  Despite their tense relationship, Josh respected Jeff and deferred to his greater passion. If Josh happened to win the national championship after Jeff was excluded, it wouldn’t feel right. I also suspect that if Josh had suddenly withdrawn from the tournament, Jeff would have been disappointed.

  JOSH SAYS THAT no sport makes him sweat as much as chess. He is referring to the hours of straining to peer ever more deeply into the position in front of him, to the flood of energy needed to develop an attack, and to the dread he experiences trying to fend off an assault which seems directed at his soul more than at his pieces. In the nationals, children play four games the first day and three the last. Each game can last as long as three and a half hours; the longer it takes, the more intense the emotional experience and the more difficult it is to gather energy for the next one. The last game of the first day might not end until ten at night. There’s hardly time for the child to eat and get a good night’s rest before tomorrow’s eight A.M. game. Haggard parents demand instant sleep from their little warriors, but after an intense fourth game on Saturday night, eight-year-olds are so wound up that they can’t relax. They toss and turn in bed searching for checkmate, and on Sunday morning, the day they have been training for all year, they may be nervous and drained. Coaches of the best players dread long games in the early rounds and hope that the other contenders are softened up by such efforts before their kid plays them.

  Josh played his games in a large banquet room on the second floor of the Quality Inn. Most players sat beside one another at long cafeteria tables, but since he was ranked first, he and his opponent sat alone at a smaller table in front of a television camera mounted on a tripod. It felt eerie to Josh to play in front of this unattended camera.

  Except for a cough or the snap of a chess clock, the room was quiet while the children played. A dozen men were posted throughout to answer procedural questions and to accompany a child to the bathroom, so that there would be no temptation to speak to a parent or coach in the hall. While the kids played, these men looked as grave and ceremonial as palace guards, and they appeared to be very large, no doubt because their wards were so small.

  Along with fifty or sixty other parents, Bonnie and I watched Josh on a large television set in the lobby of the hotel. Some of the onlookers didn’t understand the game and reacted to the televised moves with a dumb respect, as if listening to the theoretical musings of a molecular biologist, but others were sophisticated about chess and followed the action with lively interest. I was constantly on guard. When I wasn’t worrying about a kingside attack or Joshua’s weak pawns, I concentrated on keeping my face composed, so that it was neither manically happy nor gray with pallor. I wanted to be calm under fire, but I could feel the truth seep out in twitches, grimaces and grins. Often the parents of Joshua’s opponent were sitting hip to hip with us on the sofa, pleading audibly for little Tommy to pull off the big win, and it was hard not to hate them. I tried to be careful that my rooting didn’t transgress the limits of propriety, but sometimes I couldn’t restrain myself and would bound off the sofa with a whoop when the other kid hung his rook or failed to notice the threat of mate in three. The parent beside me would wince or clench his jaw, and once a father said “Damn” with such raw bitterness that I felt ashamed. Watching your little boy play for the national championship is a roller coaster of hopes and dashed dreams.

  IN THE FIRST round, Josh was paired against the eighty-second-ranked player. We expected the game to be easy and quick; afterwards, he and I would have a catch outside for twenty minutes, and then he could have a sandwich and rest in his room for half an hour before the second round.

  But it didn’t work out that way. The boy considered his moves thoughtfully, like a seasoned player. He shadowed Josh through a difficult opening without making a mistake. I sat watching the monitor beside the boy’s father, who mentioned that they had driven up from New Mexico for the tournament. I began to sense that they wouldn’t have traveled all the way from New Mexico to North Carolina if the son weren’t very good. After an hour and a half, not a single pawn had been exchanged and the position was murky with tension and multiple threats. Most of the other children had already finished playing their games and were jumping into the outdoor pool adjacent to the lobby or racing into the videogame room. Intermittently the stronger players walked over to check Joshua’s position; they were surprised that he was having such a difficult time in the first round.

  The father was a nice man, and I tried to be congenial. After a while he mentioned that his son didn’t have a high rating because there weren’t many scholastic tournaments in New Mexico, but that in the local chess club he frequently beat players with a rating of 1600 or 1700. This information cracked whatever was left of my calm. Wasn’t there something vaguely illegal about this? In the very first round we had been paired against a ringer. A couple of months earlier, I had watched with amusement and contempt as a frantic father complained to a tournament director each time his boy’s position became difficult that other parents and
coaches were conspiring against his son. Crazy though it was, I wanted to do the same thing. We could easily lose this game.

  After two hours neither player had an advantage, and the other father said pleasantly, “This is a no-lose situation for us. If he wins it would be spectacular, but if he loses, it’s to be expected. After all, he’s playing the number-one seed.” By now every other game was finished, but on the first board the position was completely closed down; only a couple of pawns had been taken, and for both players all avenues for attack seemed blocked. By now dozens of kids were eating sandwiches in front of the set, assessing the position. Josh was playing solidly, but so was the other boy. The father smiled at me and asked questions about my son’s chess education. He remarked that there weren’t any good chess teachers in New Mexico, which at this moment seemed to invest his son with monumental powers; the boy had learned on his own! I tried to respond but found it difficult to make conversation. Even if Josh managed a victory, the game was taking too long; he wouldn’t have the strength to win three more games today.

  The boy’s father was happy and growing more confident and chatty. After hours of watching the game I couldn’t focus on the pieces, which seemed to drift and blur like a heat mirage. Pawns and bishops were impossible to distinguish on the monitor, which caught the reflection of children splashing in the pool outside. Was that a knight hiding in the shadow of a queen? Then there was a quiet exchange, one of the few in the two-and-a-half-hour game, and afterwards Josh seemed to be up a pawn, but no one could tell for sure. Two moves later, the boy from New Mexico pushed a piece, and immediately Josh took an unprotected pawn with his bishop; the boy had made a blunder, and half a minute later he knocked over his king. There was still plenty of play in the position, but losing the second pawn had unnerved him. It was strange. The game had been even for so long, and then in a minute it was over. The boy’s father was still smiling. “My son has never played better in his life,” he said. The father didn’t even seem disappointed, except maybe a little at the corners of his mouth. He is a different type than I am.