By the time of Korchnoi and Karpov’s second championship match, in Merano, 1981, politics had become far more important than chess. Backers of Karpov argued that the world champion was defending his country and system of government. For his part, in press conferences before and after the games, Korchnoi pleaded repeatedly to the press for the release of his family, who were, in effect, being held hostage in Leningrad. “The two opponents found themselves in totally different circumstances,” wrote Kasparov in his autobiography. “Whereas Korchnoi was ill-prepared . . . , Karpov had received help from all our best grandmasters. We’d been obliged to furnish him with information about our opening lines and variations, to reveal all our professional secrets. We were given clearly to understand that this was our patriotic duty, since the ‘traitor’ had to be routed at all cost.” (The youthful Kasparov had refused this order.) Korchnoi lost again.
Still, as if fueled by his old battles against the Soviet system, in the years following, Korchnoi continued to compete successfully in the highest-level tournaments against grandmasters less than half his age. To be sure, he had paid a price. His long face was permanently creased with suffering and suspicion. Although he had lived in the West for many years, he continued to look over his shoulder while playing the game. When he lost, he was apt to complain that someone had tainted his food or that a hypnotist was in the hall.
Against Kasparov, the old grandmaster played in a rage, as if the title that had escaped him for three decades were finally within his grasp. He made his moves quickly, and dramatically tossed his head when he sensed that the world champion was off-balance. Korchnoi was known as a tireless student of chess, and it was clear that he was well-prepared for this match. He had anticipated Kasparov’s opening setups and had planned sharp, tricky replies. From the start of the first game, Korchnoi took the initiative by developing an intricate attacking formation while brazenly ignoring Kasparov’s threat. Korchnoi built the tension of the position, as Kasparov had against Speelman. His pieces found the best squares and roamed ahead. To save the first game required Kasparov’s most careful defense. The game was a draw.
The second game was a carbon copy of the first, with Kasparov’s kingside attack crumbling and the world champion forced to defend very carefully on the queenside to hold the game to another draw. For two games in a row, Kasparov had been back on his heels, just holding on. This had rarely happened to him before.
In these games, Korchnoi had played very aggressively, but when a grandmaster plays wide-open chess, he leaves himself vulnerable to counterattack. Grandmasters in the audience speculated that if he hadn’t been rusty, Kasparov would have punished Korchnoi for his boldness.
Since the score was tied, the match would be decided by a single blitz game. Each man would be given only five minutes on his clock for all his moves. For those unaccustomed to blitz, attacks and parries follow so quickly that there is hardly a moment to evaluate the position or anticipate the outcome. Pieces come on and off the board at sleight-of-hand speed, and yet grandmasters can play at this pace with remarkable precision. It was Kasparov’s choice to play the white pieces, and by the rules of this tournament, the player with white needed to win the game to win the match. To take the tiebreaker—and the match—Korchnoi, playing black, only needed to draw.
We watched close-ups of Korchnoi and Kasparov on the huge television screens as they fidgeted with the pieces until they were centered on their squares. Their faces were wet and strained. Kasparov’s hands were shaking. Later he would tell me that he kept seeing mistakes the moment he played them. The world champion no longer played with the helpmate of intimidation. Korchnoi had faced down the KGB and had no fear of Kasparov. Still, blitz is a young man’s game. Rusty or not, Kasparov was still the favorite to win.
But again the older man played sharply. This time, the world champion did not back off, and soon the position was double-edged. There were threats all over, and no time to calculate them. Both men were visibly shaking. Neither was sure who had the edge. Then they began trading pieces. The tension came out of the position like air from a balloon. Kasparov looked desperate. Trading was a mistake on his part. There was no winning endgame here. He should have kept attacking, avoided exchanges, but now there were few pieces on the board, and the ones left were faced off against one another symmetrically. There was little time left on each man’s clock, maybe twenty seconds. Kasparov tried pressing ahead, but his army was too small, and each diagonal and file was blocked by Korchnoi’s crafty defense. The older grandmaster was playing for a draw. He had created a fortresslike position. Each man had no more than six or seven seconds on his clock. Maybe Kasparov had a second or two less.
Then an incredible thing happened: Korchnoi inadvertently knocked one of Kasparov’s pieces off the board. Kasparov replaced it at the cost of a second or two. Moved. Then Korchnoi moved a piece, only a couple of seconds left, and, with his arm shaking, he belted the clock so hard that it flew off the table, while it clicked off the last of Kasparov’s seconds. Close-up of Kasparov’s incredulous face. The game was over. Fans were bewildered. Kasparov’s face was now red and furious. The arbiter quickly decided that the position was technically drawn: Kasparov would not have been able to win it even if he had had the last of his time. Victor Korchnoi won the match. Kasparov had lost. He had actually lost. He stormed off the stage and immediately left the theater.
Again and again, instant replays showed the two men playing the last moves with arms flailing and shaking, Victor Korchnoi knocking Kasparov’s piece off the table, then belting the clock, which tumbled to the floor. Then Kasparov’s bewildered face, trying to win with no way to stop his clock from running out of time at his feet. With all of this high-tech paraphernalia, the match had ended on a note of absurdity and incompetence. No one had thought to anchor the clock.
The old warrior, Victor Korchnoi, would play the Englishman, Nigel Short, for the title. Grandmasters in the audience seemed pleased that the older man was getting a chance, and also that Kasparov had been beaten. In that moment, perhaps, the world championship felt more attainable for them than it had a few hours before.
Then, after a thirty-minute delay, there was an announcement. On further review, the arbiter had decided to change his decision. He reasoned that the world champion had been deprived of his chance to win when Korchnoi had knocked the clock onto the floor. The men would play two more blitz games to decide the winner.
A big furor immediately erupted, with fans booing and hissing. Some said that Korchnoi had been robbed once again. His whole life he had been robbed. Some grandmasters, among then Lautier from France, said that the decision was just, but most pronounced it unfair, or worse. “The world champion can do anything he wants,” said one of them. “It was a totally unjustified decision,” said Jonathan Speelman, who muttered something about the power of Kasparov. “How could he do that to Korchnoi?” said Olivier Renet of France, who had lost to Korchnoi in the first round. “It’s a disgrace. It smells like a payoff.”
After walking off the stage, Garry Kasparov had left the theater, followed by Bob Burkett, an associate of Ted Field, the producer of the New York half of the upcoming Karpov match. According to Burkett, Kasparov had been angry and dejected. He had felt that Korchnoi might have blundered or lost on time if not for the clock fiasco, but while they had walked the half-hour back to the St. James Club, Kasparov had come to terms with the decision, and the two of them had talked about where they would go for dinner that evening. When they arrived at the hotel, both men were surprised to find a message from Dan-Antoine, saying that they must come back immediately to the theater, the arbiter had reversed his ruling.
In the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Victor Korchnoi came on stage to say that he agreed with the arbiter’s decision—it was fair—but fans and players continued to speculate that Kasparov had spent the last half-hour sitting in a backroom lambasting the poor arbiter. “You never know what they agreed to behind closed doors,” said the grandmas
ter Boris Gulko, who had been eliminated earlier. “One thing for sure. This was good for French television.”
As the men prepared to play their last two games, journalists, fans and players were talking scandal and rooting wildly for Korchnoi. Garry looked yellow, and there was an expression on his face: What can I do? What can I do? He appeared to be a man in crisis.
The last two games were very different from the first three. The world champion did not play in the style of Kasparov. He was no longer the wide-open attacking world champion, pieces coming forward like Marines. Kasparov recognized that Korchnoi had studied his most recently published opening ideas and was jumping all over them. He had to change his style. So he played his last two games as if he were Karpov. He played quietly, calmly, apparently trying to hold the position rather than win it. He gave Korchnoi the attack, almost indifferently. He absorbed the energy of the older man’s moves by defending ingeniously, frustrating Korchnoi by anticipating threats before the older man thought of them. He allowed Korchnoi his attack, but in doing so recognized that if he could survive it, Korchnoi would have to play the endgame with a weakened pawn structure and misplaced pieces. The world champion was playing prophylactically—defending, luring Korchnoi ahead, all the while strengthening his own position little by little. Kasparov drew the fourth game, though he stood better at the end. Then, milking a tiny endgame advantage, he won the fifth. Korchnoi had lost again.
At the end of the match, Kasparov looked sick. Perhaps he did not like playing this way, in the beguiling, defensive style of his nemesis, Karpov. Perhaps he simply couldn’t bear the hissing, and the chanting of “Victor, Victor,” even when Kasparov had won and was trying to smile as he shook Korchnoi’s hand.
The final match against Nigel Short was something of an anticlimax. Kasparov played grimly, like a survivor. He seemed punch-drunk from too much chess. Short sensed Kasparov’s vulnerability; everyone in the theater sensed it. Short attacked, and Kasparov tried to hold him off, but both men were making mistakes. Short erred in the first game, and Kasparov won. In the second game, Kasparov had the superior ending, but somehow lost the thread of it and lost. He shook his head no, no, what’s wrong with you, Kasparov? And then it came down to a blitz game for the title. Eighteen thousand dollars, not to mention the prestige, coming down to one five-minute game. With lightning moves, Short completely outplayed the world champion, gained a winning position—and then blundered horribly at the end and lost.
Kasparov had survived, barely, but he looked terrible, defeated. The crowd cheered. He had won some of them back, perhaps because they had seen him bleed and felt his depletion and misery. The theater was again drowned in devouring, prurient music, and the huge screens played close-ups of Kasparov’s petulant expressions, which in the moment seemed ludicrous.
A few minutes later, he was standing backstage, enveloped in a crowd of two hundred admiring fans, a few dozen of them wiggling programs and pens in front of him.
My plane was leaving in a couple of hours, and I needed to speak to him. We walked together to the back of the theater and escaped into a dark storage room with plaster falling from the walls and electrical wires dangling. “I feel devastated,” said Garry. The crowd began pressing against the door, and Dan-Antoine was calling “Garry, Garry.”
“I could see my mistakes, but somehow I couldn’t prevent them. I kept making bad moves.” Kasparov had won the tournament, but he had nearly lost a half-dozen times. He was mortified. He was also worried. This would be the last tournament before Karpov-Kasparov V, and Kasparov in this form would lose the title.
Then Dan-Antoine managed to push the door open a couple of inches. He was annoyed, he couldn’t figure out what Kasparov was doing in the back room. There were postmortem interviews to come. “And, Garry, I want to remind you that we have a press conference scheduled for nine-thirty tomorrow morning,” he said.
Kasparov seemed dumbfounded. “I can’t,” he said, with an unusual shrillness.
“Please, Garry. We’ve set it up. I told you yesterday. All the top papers. Television crews are coming.”
“Don’t you understand, I can’t. I can’t.”
5
GATA AND RUSTAM—FOOTSTEPS
“Fred, I’ve been told that your life may be in danger,” said Allen Kaufman on the phone. It was about a month after I had returned from Paris. Kaufman, the executive director of the American Chess Foundation, was normally an unflappable man, but on this occasion he sounded agitated. He had received a phone call that morning from Eugenia Dumbadze, the business agent of Gata Kamsky, the fifteen-year-old chess prodigy, and his father, Rustam. She had said that Rustam was incensed by an article I had written about him and his son for The New York Times Sunday magazine. He had made threats. Kaufman told me that the woman sounded frightened, and he urged me to take precautions. I dialed Eugenia Dumbadze, a Russian emigré whom I had met and spoken to numerous times during the past half year, and she was indeed extremely upset. Rustam had told her he was coming to my apartment building and would wait for me outside and then stab me to death. Rustam wasn’t worried about going to jail, she said, because he had already spent a great deal of his life behind bars and believed that, given the American system of law, he would be sent away for only a few weeks.
* * *
I had first met Gata Kamsky and his father in the summer of 1988, in Timisoara, Rumania, where Gata was competing in the under-14 division of the youth world chess championship. “He is the most gifted chess prodigy of all time—the next world champion,” said a Rumanian journalist, who was shaking with excitement as he led me to a solemn boy with bangs and owl eyes, who moved the chess pieces against another great prodigy, Zsofia Polgar from Hungary. The lithe, porcelain-pretty Zsofia had been fighting off Gata’s attacking pieces for hours, and with a wounded expression that might melt any adolescent boy’s heart, she whispered her offer of a draw. Gata refused, and with only the slightest trace of a smile, he pushed his pawns ahead and snuffed out Zsofia’s championship dreams with endgame technique so punishing and precise that it gave me goosebumps.
That summer, Timisoara was swarming with prodigies and their pampering parents who craved the world championship as though it conferred immortality. I was one of those anxiety-ridden parents; Josh was playing for America in the under-12 division. Among the young international stars were the brilliant twelve-year-old Judit Polgar, Zsofia’s little sister; the cherubic Gabriel Schwartzman from Bucharest; and Ilya Gurevich from Worcester, Massachusetts, who withered his opponents in the under-18 section with a brutal glare while pummeling them with sharp tactics. Though just kids, all of these players had international reputations. Their careers were closely watched by chess lovers, who wondered which of them might someday grow powerful enough to threaten Garry Kasparov. But insiders said that Kamsky was the most gifted of all. As a twelve-year-old, Gata had won the Soviet under-18 championship, an astounding achievement matched only by Kasparov.
In the dining room of the players’ hotel, nationalistic rivalries were in the air. Over watery soup and inedible mystery meats, American parents and coaches complained that the Russians were always served first—somehow this was construed to be an edge. Each country was assigned a table, but Gata Kamsky and his father, Rustam, ate apart from the other Russians, a country unto themselves. Rustam believed that the Russian coaches were of little help to his son, as they were either not strong enough to give him sound advice or secretly conspiring against him. Gata never mingled with the other children, who played soccer and whiffleball in a nearby park and met each evening in the lobby to become friends despite language difficulties. Except for Rustam’s conversations with a few Americans, during which he conceived a plan to defect, the Kamskys kept to themselves, a picture of growing unhappiness. Rustam had expected his son to win the tournament and, as a consequence, to be invited to the prestigious New York Open, and then to stay. In spite of his win against Zsofia Polgar, Gata was not in top form, and each time he tipped his
king, Rustam yelled at him with unrestrained anger. “We all saw the awful expression on Gata’s face after he lost,” recalled the American coach, Victor Frias, an international master. “He knew what was coming during his training sessions with daddy.” On several nights in the Hotel International, players and parents heard the sound of furniture crashing against the wall and Gata’s weeping. In this championship quest, he had failed.
Nevertheless, eight months later, Gata Kamsky’s name was on the front page of The New York Times. Friends in the chess world had arranged an invitation to the New York Open, and he and his father had announced their defection at a news conference during the annual event. American players had grumbled that the newspaper articles had focused on this talented kid while hardly a word had been written about all the thrilling games played at this annual showpiece of American chess at the Penta Hotel; it was barely noticed that the international event had been won by an American grandmaster, John Fedorowicz.
The Kamskys settled into a sparsely-furnished apartment in Brooklyn, and methodically mounted an attack against the American chess elite. In tournament after tournament, Gata placed among the winners, who were usually decades older than he.
Still, I was taken aback in October, 1989, to find him a finalist in the sixteen-player elimination tournament to choose an American contender to face Garry Kasparov. It would be the first serious match against a reigning world champion on American soil since 1907.
Our country’s most distinguished players had been invited to participate in this historic event at the Manhattan Chess Club, then located in Carnegie Hall. Gata Kamsky had not been invited to play—his published rating of 2345 was not high enough to qualify (numerical ratings, such as Kasparov’s 2800, the highest in chess history, are estimates of skill based on tournament results), but at the last moment, when one of the players had failed to appear, Gata’s father had persuaded the organizer to give his son a chance.
Mortal Games Page 9