We had traveled to Lille for a simultaneous exhibition against twenty students selected from different engineering universities. For the three-and-a-half-hour event, advertised as a contest of intelligence and sponsored by Sollac, one of Europe’s largest steel manufacturers, Kasparov would be paid the equivalent of about twenty thousand dollars, more than any chess player would earn in any tournament in 1990. Then, as now, the world champion was hugely popular throughout Europe, frequently in the papers and on television. He is asked to give many such exhibitions, but usually refuses because they are not serious chess.
Before the event and the spate of press conferences and TV interviews to follow, we were taken to a fine seafood restaurant by five student organizers and their girlfriends. Kasparov immediately launched into a political exegesis, as though he were addressing a symposium of newspaper editors. At some length he elucidated Zbigniew Brzezinski’s faulty evaluation of European communism in his book, The Grand Failure. He indicated reservations about Boris Yeltsin, arguing that the man lacked a comprehensive political vision and, despite his recent political evolution, maintained deep roots in the Communist Party. Gesturing sharply with his hands, Kasparov framed his points with such irreproachable authority that his audience responded as if we were listening to a man Kissinger’s or Gorbachev’s age. The waiter interrupted and the world champion ordered small eels in butter sauce with the élan of someone who has been appreciating small eels for many years.
“The police in Moscow are no longer doing their job. They are out on the streets fighting democrats,” he said. The student hosts kept trying to guide the conversation to chess, but Kasparov patiently explained that right now, chess was not important in his country; people were starving. The student hosts, all of them players, were a little confused. For months they had been looking forward to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to talk chess with the world champion. Two of the girls were looking Kasparov over in a way to suggest that their thoughts were not entirely political. Garry became a little shy. This was an unusual lunch for him. Normally, meals on the road were shared with celebrities, promoters, editors, politicians, people who were much older. He was clearly attracted to the students, who were only a few years younger than he, but at the same time he felt hopelessly at a remove. They were so much more casual, their mannerisms, posture, dress and language suggesting a carefree life that he could only imagine.
The young men persisted asking about chess and finally, when one of them brought up Dan-Antoine’s tournament the following weekend in Paris, Garry relented. “After I beat Speelman,” he said of the great English grandmaster Jonathan Speelman whom he would play in the first round, “I will face the winner of Korchnoi-Renet.” In a few sentences, he predicted whom he would beat en route to taking first place in the tournament. “I should not have much trouble,” Kasparov ventured uneasily. “But of course at speed there is luck as well as skill.” Kasparov had taken first place in every serious competition he had entered for the past nine years (this did not include tournaments with rapid time controls such as Dan-Antoine’s Immopar Trophée). A remarkable record, when one considered that virtually each “serious” tournament he had entered was a small round robin event consisting of the very strongest grandmasters in the world, often including Karpov. Only the very top players inspired his best efforts; but still, in his mind, his games were never a contest between two equals. In a sense, Kasparov played against himself. He believed that he could lose only if he was stupid or rusty, that the only one on earth who could beat Kasparov was Kasparov. He still thinks that.
One of the students asked what it had been like for him playing two games against Deep Thought, the world’s strongest chess computer. The match had taken place seven months before in October, 1989, and was televised on the PBS show Nova. “It was uncomfortable because I didn’t exactly have an opponent,” he answered. “At first I tried to concentrate on the man who made the moves, the programmer. I tried to convince myself that I was playing this man. It’s very odd to play the computer. I was playing against a force without a human dimension. I knew that I was stronger than that force—he or it, what should I call it? The computer was helpless from the beginning, but it didn’t realize this. After I won the first game, I had this uncomfortable thought. It wouldn’t be affected by the loss. It wouldn’t care. I was affected by the win. You cannot isolate yourself from the previous game, unless you are a computer. I realized that sometime in the future, in a long match, this could be the computer’s advantage; it wouldn’t become discouraged, overconfident or tired.
“But even if chess computers become stronger than humans, so what? Humans will create the art.” On this afternoon, perhaps inspired by the enthusiasm of the students and the ogling of the girls, opinions were flying out of Kasparov. “No one will care that this artificial intelligence can do it better.” Asked about Jan Timman, one of the several strongest grandmasters in the world, and for years a big chess celebrity in Western Europe, Kasparov said simply, “He is not a serious player.”
One of the students wondered about the potential of the Polgars, three Hungarian sisters who were chess prodigies and considered by some grandmasters to be extraordinarily talented; in 1991, at the age of fifteen, the youngest, Judit, would become the youngest grandmaster in chess history, and has often been written about as a potential world championship contender. “She is talented, but not greatly talented,” Kasparov said somberly, as if the future of this teenager were already history. Garry leaned my way to inquire if I were going to try the eels. I answered, “I use the slimy things for bait to catch striped bass.” With a quick grin he changed his order to lobster.
“Women by their nature are not exceptional chess players,” he continued without missing a beat. “They are not great fighters. For that matter, not many of them have been great composers or novelists.”
“Feminists would not like you for saying such things.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
I took advantage of this brief window of opportunity to ask his opinion about problems in the American chess world: Why was it that since Fischer we had not produced a single player who consistently ranked among the top dozen in the world? Why was it that with few exceptions, tournaments in the United States were dreary affairs offering pitifully small prize funds? Was he aware that the situation on the professional level seemed to be growing worse?
Kasparov rarely minces words. “The problem with the game in America is that the leaders of the U.S. Chess Federation are small-minded,” he said immediately. “They are trying to hold onto power and won’t give professional organizers room to build something new. They are trying to keep it an amateur game. They are caught in old habits.” The remedy: members of the federation must be purged like entrenched communist bureaucrats.
One of the students inquired when I had first met Kasparov, and I told them about Josh’s game at the simultaneous exhibition. Kasparov overheard, and surprised me by recalling that my son had played the Benoni Defense against him. “I had a good attack against Josh, but then I misplayed it,” he said, and then recited the moves of the game. Then he described exactly where Josh had been sitting in the gymnasium packed with children, parents and journalists, and then the final position of another game which had also been a draw against K. K. Karanja, whose name Kasparov also recalled.
He said that his prodigious memory was only of limited use to him as a player, that ideas born from inspiration and intuition were far more important. One gets the feeling that his memory sometimes annoys him, like a tune that replays in the mind; it wars with his craving for the exhilaration which comes from breaking free of traditional constraints, to play moves which come to him like little miracles, unexpected and terrifying for his opponents. “I have so much coming into my head, it is difficult to keep it under control. Sometimes I have to clean up my brain, just to get rid of the rubbish, like erasing an old tape.”
At one point during dinner, Dan-Antoine was trying to remember if he an
d Garry had visited a particular city during a whirlwind trip a year and a half before. At machine-gun pace, Kasparov, who is on the road constantly, described the itinerary of the fifty-day journey, rolling days, places and events past his eyes, until he came to the city in question. At the end of this feat, he spoke ruefully about all the cities he had visited over the years but had not had a chance to experience—a press conference, a speech, the mayor, a rich dinner, autographs and on to the airport. Mayor Koch once asked me if I appreciated his beautiful city and I answered that I had not seen it, except from the window of my hotel or the window of the plane.”
And all this time, he continued to observe the students and their girlfriends with curiosity, as if he were learning about a younger generation, but also with a certain wistfulness. Around these young adults he would have liked to have been unrestrained, to fool around, but he couldn’t let himself go, he didn’t know how. “If you are world champion . . .” he said, with his voice trailing off.
At the age of twenty-seven, Kasparov was haunted by the idea that early success born of painful struggle had cost him a normal childhood, leaving him without the capacity to experience life’s lighter side. While friends rode bikes, flirted with girls, played ball, he had studied chess books and had done rigorous analysis with coaches. The games themselves are a great strain on anyone who plays at a high level, but for young Kasparov there was the additional tension of playing against adults, of judging himself relative to men who had dedicated themselves to chess knowledge for decades.
“When I was ten, I was playing against fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds,” recalls Kasparov. “When I was fourteen, I competed in adult competitions. Now it is normal, but then it was unusual. I was among the first. Fischer did it also. I was isolated from players my age. Though I was convinced that it was my destiny, I felt the pressure of trying to live up to adult standards.
“I entered into the big life much earlier than other kids. I was used to talking with older people and thinking their way. I felt lost being in the company of my generation. The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.”
For that reason, he speaks against serious tournament competition for young children. “Can you imagine my feelings when I entered Disneyland a couple of months ago? I was very sad. I was with a child and his parents and everyone was happy. I knew with my mind that this was a great place, a funny place. I could analyze it. But I couldn’t feel what that boy and his parents felt.”
Still, for this child chess was an auspicious choice. Adults who analyzed with the little boy came away from the experience stunned. Typical was the recollection of Ashken Petrosovna, who worked at the department of mathematics in Baku and was a strong chess player, the woman’s champion of Baku in 1964. She recalls her first meeting with Garry in 1971, when he was eight years old: “Several days before, I had played a game that was adjourned in a difficult position. I had studied this position for two days and still I wasn’t sure of the correct move. On a Sunday morning, I had arranged to study the position with my coach at the Pioneer Palace. When I arrived that morning, there was no one there, so I set up the pieces and started to analyze. Soon a few little boys came into the room. One of them came over to the board and looked at the position. Almost immediately, he showed me variations that I had not considered. After this, I couldn’t think about the chess. I was just looking at this boy, Garry, as if I had witnessed a miracle of nature.”
According to Kasparov’s childhood friend, grandmaster Lev Psakhis, a former Soviet national champion, by the time Garry was ten years old he understood the game at the grandmaster level. In Garry’s generation, a number of boys in the Soviet Union, such as Psakhis himself, Sergey Dolmatov and Artur Yusupov, were considered to have great talent, possibly even world championship—level talent, but, according to Psakhis, they all knew that Garry’s potential was much greater, that he was the true genius.
In 1975, at the age of twelve, Garry, along with a group of schoolchildren from Baku, played against the new world champion, Anatoly Karpov, in a simultaneous exhibition. Neither of them could have guessed that, before long, their lives would be joined in perennial battle, that their seemingly endless matches would come to have a mythic quality which spurred people to argue systems of government. Kasparov writes in his autobiography, Unlimited Challenge, “The other boys . . . were nervous, and went into the game looking rather lost. In the hotel lobby where the tournament was taking place I said to them: ‘What’s there to be afraid of? Karpov may be world champion, but he can still make mistakes.’ This remark was evidently overheard, because the next day one of Karpov’s backers, Anatoly Tupikin (then secretary of a Leningrad district Party committee), told my mother: ‘Bear in mind that Karpov never forgets a slight.’ ”
In the exhibition, after all the other boys had resigned their games, Karpov sat down head to head with Garry, while photographers snapped the picture. For a time Kasparov was winning the game, but eventually he missed a combination and lost. Afterwards, many journalists speculated that young Kasparov would be Karpov’s future rival for the world championship.
By the age of thirteen, Kasparov was working hard at chess and traveling abroad to represent the Soviet Union in various tournaments. By eighteen, he was Soviet champion, an amazing accomplishment.
However, not everyone was pleased by Kasparov’s precocity. Karpov was one of the most influential men in the Soviet Union, with a close relationship to Brezhnev. According to Garry, the world champion was surrounded by a chess mafia, who Kasparov believed tried to block his chess progress. In 1982, to prepare for the elimination tournaments for the world championship, Kasparov applied for travel permits to a strong tournament in Bugojno, Yugoslavia, but instead was offered a second-class tournament in Dortmund, West Germany, an insult to such a promising player. More importantly, for an up-and-coming grandmaster, participation in the strongest events was essential to development. Kasparov writes, “Karpov ruled as the king of chess. As befits a reigning monarch, he was surrounded by a large retinue. His was the power to decide who should go abroad and who should not. All chess players found themselves divided into travelers and nontravelers, and the principle by which they were divided was no secret.” Those who pandered to Karpov by offering him their best ideas were given privileges, Kasparov says; those who didn’t were frozen out. When he asked Nikolai Krogius, head of the chess department of the USSR Sports Committee, why he had been refused permission to compete in the Bogojno tournament—he was Soviet champion, after all—Krogius replied, “We’ve got one world champion, we don’t need another.”
While still a teenager, Kasparov discovered that good chess moves alone would never give him the chance to win the world championship. He understood that to get his opportunity he would have to learn something of political infighting, lobbying and organizing, and so he tried some politicking of his own. He made contact with Geidar Aliev, first secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party. Kasparov acknowledges that it was heady for him at the time to be on speaking terms with a top communist. Aliev intervened for Kasparov, who was finally permitted to play in the Bogojno tournament—and Kasparov finished first.
The following year, after beating Alexander Beliavsky in the first round of the candidates match (a knock-out competition among the final eight candidates competing to face the world champion), Kasparov was next scheduled to play Victor Korchnoi, who had defected from the Soviet Union in 1976. For months before the players pushed a pawn, the match was shrouded in political intrigue, and the young Kasparov barely survived elimination by default. As Kasparov tells the story, he was tricked by a member of the Sports Committee into changing his order of preference for the venue of the match, which made his first choice different from Victor Korchnoi’s. According to the rul
es of FIDE, the international governing body of chess, when two players disagree on the playing site, the choice is made by the FIDE president, who was Florencio Campomanes from the Philippines. Campomanes, who it later became clear was a close friend of Karpov’s, chose Pasadena. Soviet authorities then promptly rejected Pasadena, claiming that the city could not provide proper security. To Kasparov, the maneuver had been clearly prearranged between Campomanes and the Soviet Sports Committee, working in the interest of Karpov. Stukalin, the head of the propaganda department of the CPSU Central Committee, told the increasingly suspicious Kasparov, “As a citizen you’ve got to understand that it’s in the interest of our country . . . You’re still young, you can afford to wait three years [for the next cycle].”
Kasparov again asked for the help of Aliev, by then a powerful member of the Politburo. But still, on the day appointed, Korchnoi went to the tournament site in Pasadena, started the clock, and Kasparov, half a world away, was declared the loser by default. Kasparov felt as though he were fighting for his life. He gave numerous interviews; he sought out fellow chess players for support. At a tournament in Yugoslavia he lobbied with the strongest players in the world to sign a petition, and, in the end, Victor Korchnoi was compensated and agreed to meet Kasparov in London. Kasparov won. Then, just twenty-one, he beat former world champion Vasily Smyslov in the finals for the right to face Karpov, in a match that would be remembered more for its political infighting and dirty tricks than for its chess strategy and tactics.
The simultaneous exhibition in Lille was held in a blue and white tent bulging with four to five hundred people. Before he appeared, there was a thrill in the air, hard rock blaring from big speakers, people nudging one another, whispering, “Kasparov.” The champion entered, his arm in the air with a self-conscious smile that spurred a wave of cheering and applause. A couple of girls whispered, “It’s him.” Everyone crowded around the tables of the players, creeping over shoulders to get a glimpse of his moves. We’re talking about chess here, not Bruce Springsteen.
Mortal Games Page 6