In 1972, Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky had played in a league above all other players in the world, but the deepest meaning of that, translated as it was by Fischer’s John Wayne shyness and macho one-liners, and by Lyman’s charm, excitement and determination to make chess popular, had been lost for most Americans, including me and my friends who were off buying chessboards and fancy wooden pieces in order to enter the international chess wars. It seems now as if Shelby had intuited that the Fischer phenomenon would be chess’s big chance in America, a country too slick and fast for the royal game. While Bobby had taken a half-hour contemplating his position, Shelby and his guests had spoken reassuringly, hyping how accessible this game was: maybe he would move the knight, maybe the bishop—it hardly seemed to matter—there were many good moves. Inspired by their patter, I quickly decided how I would play and couldn’t figure out why the two grandmasters were taking so long.
Years later, I would learn that at the highest level chess demands a staggering amount of homework, and that during games a vast library of knowledge is referred to and sometimes inventively rejected. World champions have learned numerous positions, axioms and exceptions. By memory they can play over thousands of games, and can set up positions that they happened to have glanced at years before. Many grandmasters study six or seven hours a day. I know one who studies twelve hours a day, who takes his meals in front of a computer screen while he ponders games played the day before in Europe. There are many thousands of books and journals containing opening analysis, known as “theory,” and this information is constantly added to by grandmasters working around the world to improve upon or to refute old ideas. A chess world champion must know both the old and the newest theory, or he stands the risk of being beaten before the game begins.
In addition to a considerable advantage in knowledge, a world champion’s mind works differently from mine, which virtually aches from the effort of trying to peer one or two moves ahead while the pieces keep swimming off their squares (Waitzkin, years ago, that ought to have been the clue). The strongest grandmasters are truly intellectual wizards. In certain positions with few pieces on the board, they can look ten or even fifteen moves ahead, accurately calculating and evaluating the entire intricate tree of possible variations. According to chess master Bruce Pandolfini, Lyman’s regular guest on the PBS Fischer-Spassky broadcast and today a leading chess author, the deepest calculations of the world’s best players are the equivalent of doing a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in one’s head.
But to listen to Kasparov, the question of how many moves one can see ahead—a question which the world champion is asked again and again—is misleading and simplistic. The great player does not think only linearly. The highest art in chess takes place in the creating and evaluating of unbalanced positions—when, let us say, one player has less material than the other but his smaller army is attacking more effectively than the larger, when less is actually more. To conceive of such dynamic imbalances, according to Kasparov, a player must think of the game in three dimensions, and during the course of play continually invent and reject chessic constructions of enormous complexity and beauty. To do this, he must be something of an artist, trusting intuition and aesthetic judgment at least as much as raw calculating ability. “This is too beautiful to be true,” a grandmaster fretted to me recently, about an inspired middlegame tactic. He couldn’t calculate whether the move was sound or only a pretty illusion. “Intuition and profound ideas win chess games at the highest level, not counting,” says Kasparov.
After the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match was over, I studied a little, and even tried my hand in a couple of chess clubs. But without the soothing voice of Shelby I didn’t seem to be the same player. I couldn’t rearrange the pieces in my head as Bobby could. Without Shelby’s gentle nudging, I didn’t know where to place them to initiate my attacks. After losing ignominiously one afternoon to a pimply adolescent who read the newspaper while I strained and sweated, I retired as an active player. I put my elegant wooden pieces on a top shelf and didn’t touch them for ten years, until the afternoon my six-year-old son Josh begged me to take them down. That was the beginning of a great adventure in my life.
As fate would have it, my three-foot son could see where his father was blind. Within days, it was clear that Josh could calculate more quickly and more accurately than I could. He had a sense for where to place his knights and bishops so that they worked together to make threats. Try as hard as I might, my pieces were simply here and there, weak isolated soldiers fighting to survive, while Josh’s were helping one another and ultimately closing in on my king—it felt like my throat. Clever combinations played themselves out beneath Josh’s dimpled hand while I strained to defend. Within weeks, my six-year-old was beating me and my friends, the same crew that a decade earlier had been ready to follow Bobby to the top.
Soon my little boy began to take chess lessons with Bruce Pandolfini and to play experienced adults in Washington Square Park and in chess clubs in New York. It was clear to chess masters who observed him that Josh was a special little player. By the age of seven, he was winning most of his games in scholastic tournaments. By nine, he was the strongest for his age in the United States, the winner of the national scholastic primary championship for third grade and under.
During the early years of my son’s chess life, my emotional investment was very large, almost as if I were playing the games and not he. When Josh played poorly, I felt hopeless and absurd for having allowed, no, for having urged him to devote so much of his young life to a board game. But when he was inspired, sacrificing his pieces and mating elegantly, it felt as if Josh and I were shadowing Fischer and Kasparov and all the other great ones—Alekhine, Botvinnik, Capablanca, Karpov, Keres, Korchnoi, Petrosian—names that Josh struggled to pronounce, but which coursed through my head like old friends. While other fathers fantasized big-time careers for their boys in baseball and basketball, I dreamed of my son becoming a grandmaster.
Being the father of a chess prodigy was thrilling but also disturbing. By the time he was seven, I had started writing about the chess world in magazines and later in a book, Searching for Bobby Fischer, which chronicled my chess adventures with Josh and was made into a movie by Paramount. I had discovered that in the eighties in America, chess professionals were a tiny underclass, a group of brilliant men who could not support themselves at their life’s work, and who, by and large, were not respected for their gifts of mind. The Fischer phenomenon had been short-lived. When Bobby retired to begin his dark political work, chess seemed to dry up in the United States. The chess clubs quickly shrank in size or disappeared altogether. Without Bobby, chess was no longer on television or in our national magazines, and many tournaments were played in out-of-the-way places offering the most meager prize funds, only a few hundred dollars. Whereas in Europe and the communist countries, top players made a good living and were sought out for autographs and venerated by fans as celebrities, in the United States players simply couldn’t make it, and some of our best were forced to give up the game in their prime in order to try to earn a living at something else. Those who continued to try to survive as professionals were bitter about their lot in life. When they couldn’t earn enough in tournaments, some took menial part-time jobs and others spent their days in parks like Washington Square near our home in New York City, hustling games against passersby for a dollar or two in order to eat.
I suspect that such romanticism and excessive devotion to my son’s chess would never have evolved without Fischer. I could never quite get over him. I kept thinking that Bobby would show up some day soon, cured of his problem, to stride onto a stage and contemptuously push ahead his king pawn against this Kasparov fellow (who would ever have guessed that war-torn Yugoslavia, hideously dotted with concentration camps, would be Bobby’s venue of choice for his second coming against Boris Spassky?). The idea of Bobby’s crushing Garry Kasparov gave me goosebumps. At the time, Kasparov was only a Russian name to me, an
d great as he surely was, I was convinced that he held center stage only because Bobby Fischer was temporarily indisposed.
Then Garry Kasparov came into my chess life. On Monday, February 22, 1988, the world champion visited the South Bronx to play a simultaneous exhibition against fifty-nine school kids, to promote the introduction of chess into the public school system by the newly-created Manhattan Chess School. The gym of P.S. 132 was near-bursting with little players and their parents readying cameras for Kasparov, who was late. There was considerable media interest in the world champion’s first appearance in the United States. Scores of serious-looking journalists from New York papers and national magazines vied with TV crews from the three networks and several cable channels for interviews with nervous kids. Shelby Lyman, bathed in lights, grayer and a little more portly than during those Bobby Fischer afternoons, was angling with one of the organizers for an interview with the world champion. At least for this afternoon, chess was big-time again.
Kasparov came into the gymnasium surrounded by an austere group of men—his business manager and several friends from the Russian-American community—but at the time I didn’t know who they were. Their faces were joyless, all business, as was his, and I fancied that they were his bodyguards, maybe even KGB. Kasparov was solidly built, like a soccer player, handsome, unsmiling. He talked seriously for a few moments with the organizer about rules. He wore a stylish sweater and a green scarf hung around his neck, suggesting that the match against fifty-nine little ones would be over before it began and then he would be flying off to the chill and gloom of Russia to continue his inexorable struggle against Karpov and the Russian chess establishment.
During the introductory speeches, Kasparov looked distracted, bored. When the crowd applauded, his smile was forced. The man must be all chess, I thought, a hard core of chess variations and unbeatable ideas. No emotions, no love, no humor. In truth, I was not a calm and detached observer. For me, the events of that afternoon were distorted by years of thinking about all the great players and by my rooting for my son. Kasparov was the man who was maybe better than Bobby Fischer, and my kid, wearing a yellow and blue polo shirt, telling NBC News that he wasn’t nervous, would soon be playing against him. It would probably be the only time in his life Josh would play the world champion. My heart was pounding in my ears.
The exhibition began and Kasparov seemed to explode from his detachment. He progressed from one chessboard to the next in a kind of choppy run, pushing his pieces ahead in a flash. The children had been instructed to move at precisely the moment that the world champion appeared in front of them, but he was there and gone so quickly that some kids, shaking with anticipation and worry, toppled their pieces trying to accomplish a move. Kasparov would re-create the position from memory and move instantly. He was all pace and action, banging a pawn ahead while looking at the next board, racing around the room grabbing material, his scarf swinging from his neck. He was tailed around and around by a jangling slew of TV sound booms, cameras and cables. Some of the kids became stage-struck when he stood impatiently before them, the forbidding attacker they had seen on the cover of chess magazines. They couldn’t move, although they had decided what the move should be. Kasparov understood his effect and rapped hard with his knuckle on the table three times and said sharply, “Move, move.” When he hesitated at a board where the position had become complicated, everyone in the gymnasium felt this power stopped in place like a roped horse.
I shall never forget the moment when he first paused in front of my son. Garry bent over the board until his head was only a few inches from Joshua’s, and then after about a half a minute he stood up straight and made a funny expression with the corners of his mouth turned down, what do we have here? Then he rocked from side to side, calculating, considering. The noisy gym became very quiet. What is Kasparov doing? He smiled a little and looked at Josh, who peeked up at him. Then he scratched his head and rocked some more, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Kasparov recognized that Josh had successfully fended off his attack and that their positions, after many moves, were equal. After that, each time he came around the room to Josh, he considered the board deeply, rocking, scratching his head, appraising Josh with an affectionate glance that said, a clever defense, this little kid is a player. After a few more moves, Josh offered the world champion a draw, and Kasparov accepted with a terrific smile. And after Kasparov had raced off from Josh, winning games with one hand while he scribbled autographs with the other, Josh pumped his fist in the air as if he had just scored the winning shot for his basketball team. The world champion won fifty-seven games and drew two that afternoon.
* * *
In October of 1989, I attended a party for Kasparov in the Upper East Side apartment of Olga Capablanca, the widow of the former world champion, Jose Raul Capablanca. This unusual place was crammed with chess players and well-to-do patrons of the game who hoped for a handshake and a word with the champion. Kasparov, who earlier in the evening had easily beaten the fifteen-year-old prodigy Gata Kamsky in an exhibition, spoke earnestly to Mrs. Capablanca. She was nearly ninety and wore red lipstick and a faded flowing gown from wonderful parties long ago. Doubtless, they exchanged words about Capablanca, who like Garry had been an unusually gifted prodigy, known for his uncanny intuitive play and lightning-fast vision of the board. There were other similarities between the two great world champions. Capablanca had been a moody man and, according to his wife, had a talent not only for seeing deeply into a chess position, but for correctly predicting events in the future. Kasparov prided himself on the ability to predict political developments.
They talked for quite a while. Mrs. Capablanca held Kasparov’s hand, and they seemed to be measuring one another, the champion perhaps looking for intimations of his future, the lady for a fresh scent of the past. I knew that she would tell Kasparov about the afternoon almost sixty years before when she had berated another world champion, Alexander Alekhine, Kasparov’s favorite player, for refusing to give her frustrated husband a rematch after taking the championship from Capablanca ten years before. I wondered if the world champion would find her story quaint or disturbing.
Olga Capablanca peered into Kasparov’s eyes as they spoke. What a bewitching beauty she had been. Sitting on an end table beside them was a photograph of her in the twenties, when she had looked like a young Marlene Dietrich. I wondered if Garry also reminded her of her first husband, a physical powerhouse, a horseman and adventurer, a descendant, she liked to say, of Genghis Khan. Like Garry, this dashing young man had championed the cause of Armenians. In the 1920s he had been a pioneer aviator in the Caucasus, and had eventually taken over the fledgling air force of Armenia at a time when the Turks had been slaughtering Armenians by the thousands.
Olga Capablanca’s dark apartment, cluttered with relics from her storybook past, was a place chess luminaries visited to look at photographs of Capablanca and to try to know him through his wife and her stories. She sometimes said, coquettishly, that buried in her papers she kept a Capablanca masterpiece that had never been published, a private game played in the thirties between her husband and a top grandmaster of that time. Her husband had dedicated it to her, and Olga would not show it to anyone, a Rembrandt hidden in her closet.
But Olga had her own story to tell, and the Cuban world champion was but one chapter, though she pointed out softly, “I was with him until his last breath.” I wondered if, knowing Kasparov’s interest in military history, she had also told him about another of her husbands, Admiral Jocko Clark, commander of the Pacific Fleet during the Second World War. I got the impression that she loved Jocko a little more than the others. On the walls and end tables, along with photographs of the Armenian aviator-freedom fighter and Capablanca smiling calmly beside his chessboard, were many photographs and oil paintings of Jocko Clark aboard his warships: the admiral heroically turning on the lights, and thus risking submarine attack, in order to save his planes from running out of fuel over the Pacific;
the admiral shaking hands with Admiral Nimitz at the signing of the peace treaty with Japan. Kasparov, with his passion for history, could not help but have felt the evocative and odd mixing of memorable events from the past. However, he and the other guests could not have suspected that at Mrs. Capablanca’s there was a contemporary subtext that was both a little sinister and sad.
Just off the living room where Olga held Kasparov in thrall was a door with a brutal-looking police lock. Behind this door lived a hundred-year-old man, Hamilton Fish, and his much younger wife. Fish had been a longtime United States congressman, best known for his political battles with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to Mrs. Capablanca, he had inherited a share of this apartment from her deceased sister, to whom he had been married. Mrs. Capablanca said that over the years she and Fish had become mortal enemies, and claimed that, among other vicious things, the congressman had discarded her treasured photographs and papers, and waited for her to die so that he could take sole claim to the apartment. She was tormented by Fish. She whispered—lest he hear—that the congressman’s young wife had worked in a butcher shop before entering into this unlikely relationship. Mrs. Capablanca’s home, this temple of fighting men, was also a battleground on which two feisty old people were making a last stand.
Kasparov had been in New York for several days prior to the exhibition and party. I had hoped to interview him, but each time I had called Andrew Page at the Regency Hotel, he had put me off. I approached the Englishman at the party and asked for an hour in the world champion’s schedule. Page’s eyelids drooped with weariness from journalists asking him for Kasparov interviews. “They all think that they are so bright, that their point of view is bold and sparkling, but they all ask the same boring questions,” he told me some time later, in his British drawl. He explained that it would be impossible to talk to Garry during this trip. Kasparov was much too tired, and tomorrow they would be flying off to Europe. His demeanor reflected the weariness of living the high life, too many five-course meals at Lutèce and the Four Seasons, too many Concorde flights sipping champagne. Oxford-educated, Andrew Page is suave, handsome and eloquent in the style of Peter Jennings. At that moment he also came across as slick, smart and unreflective. Over time, though, I learned that he is very thoughtful, and not infrequently stopped in his tracks by self-doubt, but that he enjoys portraying himself as a rake and power broker. Page is apt to dismiss a proposition as impossible and then upon reflection, embrace it as utterly wonderful. Whereas Kasparov is set in his points of view like granite, Page is buffeted by his own keen sense of irony—indeed, he sometimes appears amused by his own whimsicality and crumbling convictions, and perhaps that is what makes their close relationship viable.
Mortal Games Page 2