To the surprise of spectators and the other players, the boy won his first three two-game rounds against highly regarded grandmasters, including Roman Dzindzichashvili, the 1989 United States national co-champion, considered by many the most talented player in America. From the point of view of this bystander, there was an inevitability about Kamsky’s victories. The boy’s more seasoned and learned opponents moved their bishops and knights with trembling fingers, spooked by his age, by his almost unearthly calm, by his ability to defend delicate positions quickly and accurately. They lost with a grimace, shaking their heads. While Gata played with detachment, Rustam, the father, paced around the periphery of the room, his war-torn prizefighter’s face—he had been a boxer in the Soviet Union—showing first sadness, and then inexplicable fury. A child’s prodigious chess talent can be both a joy and a trap for his parents, who sometimes become so intoxicated by the child’s magical accomplishments, so overwrought during games, that little else seems important.
After each win the boy barely smiled, although his accomplishment that day in November might be compared to knocking out heavyweight contenders one after another to win the chance to step into the ring with the world champion.
In the fourth and final elimination round at the Manhattan Chess Club, Gata, wearing the drab pants, skimpy sweater and close-cropped haircut of an Eastern European schoolboy and possessing only limited knowledge of English, faced Alexander Ivanov, then thirty-three, also Russian-born and one of the highest-rated players in the United States. To win the right to represent America against Kasparov, one of them needed either two victories or a victory and a draw.
The first game was a draw, so the winner of the second game would face the champion. Ivanov played creatively in the opening moves and won the boy’s knight, a decisive advantage. However, Gata defended with great resourcefulness and tenacity.
Most chess prodigies are distinguished by their daring and sometimes injudicious piece sacrifices, by sparkling attacks; but Kamsky had gained a reputation for his staunch defense and intricate counterattacks. His conservative style was often compared to that of Anatoly Karpov.
While Ivanov squirmed in his chair, trying to capitalize on his advantage, Rustam glared at his son across the room, as though he were projecting the will to win. The older player was becoming frustrated, pressing too hard, making little mistakes. Ivanov’s tiny errors had become windows of opportunity. Gata’s defending pieces were suddenly poised for attack; and after barely holding on by a thread, the game was suddenly his.
Then a chilling moment. The older player extended his hand, no eye contact, his face twisted unhappily. The room was silent. No one clapped or cheered or raced forward to embrace the young winner of an event that would be written about in chess periodicals around the world. Gata would be the youngest player in chess history to face a world champion in a formal match. He looked around furtively, as if wondering what he had done wrong.
A few minutes later, in the next room, masters chatted in small groups. “He’s not very good, just lucky,” said one American master. “I hate Russians,” said another.
During the last decade, the problems of American-born players had been compounded by the influx of highly-trained Soviet masters who emigrated for political reasons, often with the naive assumption that the wealth of America extended to its chess players, and who did, in fact, win a considerable share of the meager cash prizes available in our domestic tournaments. It’s a joke in the chess world that in international events our Russians often compete against their Russians.
“I am envious that Gata Kamsky gets so much attention and money,” admitted twenty-two-year-old Patrick Wolff, a loser in the third round of the tournament. “It makes me angry. It makes everyone here angry. In America, Kamsky is a more interesting prospect than an equally talented American.” At the time, Wolff, who became U.S. champion in 1992, was on a leave from Yale and was living on a stipend as the winner of the 1989 Sanford Fellowship, which provides the United States’ most promising player funds to study and play chess full-time. Many American-born masters complained that Soviet émigrés and defectors such as Kamsky were hired guns, lured to the United States by grant money not as readily available to our home-grown players, who competed against natives for coveted positions on teams traveling abroad and for cash prizes in tournaments.* “Passing over local talent to pour money into foreign players would be inadmissible in almost any other country in the world,” said Victor Frias, Wolff’s trainer.
“I understand the resentment of American professionals,” said Allen Kaufman, whose American Chess Foundation to a significant degree keeps the American chess world afloat by distributing three to four hundred thousand dollars a year to promote the game—less than one percent of what the Soviet Union spent on chess before the political upheaval of the summer of 1991. The ACF has frequently been criticized by American players for what they regard as preferential treatment given to Russian defectors and emigrés, and particularly for arranging temporary stipends for two famous Soviet masters, the grandmaster Boris Gulko, and more recently, Gata Kamsky. “There has to be resentment when a foreigner comes in here, and all of a sudden an American is one notch lower and earning hundreds or even thousands less,” said Kaufman. “But I have the responsibility of looking at the long term instead of the short term. And bringing someone like Kamsky into American chess is eventually going to strengthen it.” Alluding obliquely to Patrick Wolff’s criticism, Kaufman delicately pointed out that there was simply no native-born American who possessed Gata’s gift for chess. Kaufman believed that, given his talent and dedication to study, Gata had a good chance to become world champion.
The Kamskys lived in a three-room apartment in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. I visited them in November of 1989 in connection with the article I was writing for The New York Times Magazine, and soon after arriving I had an opportunity to speak with Gata alone while his father was out parking their car. Through his thick glasses, Gata was studying a game between two august grandmasters published in one of the many chess books that lined the walls of his sunny bedroom. I asked him if he ever thought about his mother, who had left the family when he was a little boy.
“No,” he said, moving the chess pieces. I inquired about whether he had made friends with any of the Russian-speaking boys in the neighborhood. “No.” I asked if he had friends back in Leningrad, and Gata answered that boys there had been envious of him. At the age of fifteen, Gata apparently had never had a friend.
I inquired about the things in his life that made him happy, and about his dreams for the future. With a slightly bewildered expression, he looked up from the game and answered in his halting English. “I dream about chess.”
When he was not traveling around the world to tournaments, Gata spent twelve hours a day in his room studying games in books or on his computer—the specifics of his training regimen were classified information. Gata ate some of his meals as he studied. He never watched television or read anything other than chess books. He didn’t play sports with other boys, but he jogged for thirty-five minutes in the evening, which his father said was good for chess endurance. He didn’t go to school—he had the equivalent of a high-school education in the Soviet Union by the age of thirteen, his father said, although various people who had known them in the Soviet Union, as well as administrators in the school he had attended, said that he had left school without finishing his studies. At the time, Gata didn’t seem to want an American education, but added that his father would not allow it.
Gata giggled a little.
“What?”
“It’s very funny,” he said, pointing to a highly technical endgame position in front of him.
As I thought about Gata’s short, detached, but provocative answers, I felt the austerity of his childhood and his isolation; but I also felt jealous. Like Gata, Joshua was a chess master, to be sure a much weaker master than Gata, but nonetheless, at thirteen, a scholastic national champion. For me, it wa
s very strange entering into the world of Gata and Rustam, for with different details and textures their life had been my wicked fantasy. Like the parents of other chess-talented American children, I often wondered how well Josh would play if he studied chess for five or six hours a day, like the top Eastern European kids, instead of attending a very demanding school, playing sports in the afternoon and pursuing an active social life. Like Rustam, I had also fantasized about my kid winning the world championship, and it frustrated me that in our middle-class life there wasn’t room to make a proper run at it. The American ideal of the well-rounded child stood in opposition to the idea of bold sacrifices for excellence.
Gata did not study chess for five or six hours a day, however—he studied virtually all the time. After our lunch, Gata lingered for a few minutes, but his father gestured sharply with a finger: Back to the books. There was hardly a moment I was with Gata that he wasn’t going through chess books, pondering or smiling over ingenious moves, memorizing variations. He seemed more complete, more content with the pieces beneath his hand, and stiff, somehow fragmented without them.
“The life you are leading is highly unusual,” I said to Gata. “Probably there is not another fifteen-year-old in the world living like this. Don’t you sometimes wish you could play on a soccer team or go out with a girl?”
A flicker of a smile at the mention of girls.
“On his own, he would never have managed this,” answered Gata’s father. “Not any child in the world could, unless he had someone by his side all the time.”
I addressed my questions to Gata, but except for the few minutes when we were alone, his father almost always answered, in the manner of a lecture to mankind. Indeed, Rustam, who did not have a job, referred to himself vaguely as his new wife’s teacher and as Gata’s teacher (I took that to mean “of all things”) and chess coach, although his own knowledge of chess was far less sophisticated than his son’s. Rustam gave his lengthy answers in Russian, his voice often baleful, and my translator provided the English. “Gata didn’t become interested in chess,” Rustam said pridefully. “At eight years old, I made him play. I am the person that deserves the credit for my son being a champion. It is not Gata’s doing. Talent is not important. Any child can become a world champion. He has to work a lot and someone has to work with him. The coach has to put his soul into it. To give up his social life. Not watch television, no theater, no beach. The coach must completely forget about himself. There are few people like that.”
“Do you believe that?” the boy was asked. “That anyone can become world champion by working hard with the right coach?”
“Sure.”
“Good, good,” Rustam answered impatiently. “I work twelve hours a day helping Gata, trying to make every second count. He has bad eyesight, so I read to him for hours and hours.”
While his father talked, Gata sat in front of the chess set, moving the pieces. Occasionally he smiled a little. When I asked him why, he answered, “Because I listen to my father, and he is right.”
“In the Soviet Union, I was paid as a coach,” said Rustam. “Here I am not paid anything. Often I eat only once every two days, because we need the money for Gata to eat three times a day. We are treated like two hungry dogs,” he pontificated, as if they were living in a gulag instead of an apartment in Brooklyn, supported comfortably by a wealthy financier. At the time, the Kamskys were given a living allowance of $35,000 a year by chess lover James Cayne, president of the investment-banking firm of Bear, Stearns. Several months later, Cayne withdrew his support, apparently due to reservations about Rustam’s character and the nature of his relationship with Gata.
Rustam complained incessantly about money, and spoke of himself and Gata as global free agents. In the fall of 1989, he was lobbying for someone to pay him a coach’s salary on top of the stipend from Cayne. If he was not paid what he wanted, Rustam threatened to leave the United States and win the world championship for another country.
Later, Gata received a lucrative five-year grant from Immopar. Combined with his tournament winnings and appearance fees, young Kamsky was probably earning better than $150,000 a year, a dazzling sum for a chess player. Still, in interviews, Rustam, who continued to use the United States as his home base, complained about the family’s poverty. One area of frustration in particular was the failure of the American Chess Foundation to award Gata the Sanford Fellowship, which would give the family an additional $30,000 a year for two years. Rustam has made the point again and again that his young son is the highest-rated player in America, and that other Americans who have received it instead were lower-rated. One requirement for the Sanford fellowship, however, is that a player must first have completed his high-school education. As noted before, Rustam claims Gata did finish the Soviet equivalent of his high school education, and eventually, in the spring of 1991, he produced the long-awaited proof: Gata’s diploma. When the diploma was sent to the Soviet Union for verification, however, it was immediately identified as a forgery. Despite his lower rating, Ilya Gurevich won the 1991 fellowship.
“American players have been jealous of Gata from day one,” said Rustam, who often referred to Gata’s opponents as enemies, and who couldn’t find a teacher in the United States whom he trusted not to steal his son’s ideas. “The Russian players and the Americans conspire to beat him. They all hate Gata.”
A few months after arriving here, Gata took a lesson with a respected theoretician, the grandmaster Leonid Shamkovich. “He visited me for two hours,” recalled Shamkovich. “It was impossible teaching Gata with Rustam standing over us. He was trying to tell me things that he knew nothing about. Gata is a very passive person. He never ventures his own opinion. He always says, ‘You must ask my father.’ Having such a dictator for a father is not the best way for a chess player. No one would teach him in the Soviet Union because of his father.”
Trainers and chess journalists interviewed in the Soviet Union discussed the Kamskys as a single package, brilliant to be sure, but impossible to deal with, the father answering, complaining, pushing for his son. Some trainers turned Gata down as a student because of the reputation of Rustam, who had spent a considerable portion of his early adulthood in jail for petty crimes. Viacheslav Osnos, for years the trainer of grandmaster Victor Korchnoi, was one who refused to train Gata. “His father interfered in everything. Rustam would give advice that he was incompetent to give.”
During their first year here, numerous masters, including Shamkovich and another grandmaster, Maxim Dlugy, observed episodes of verbal abuse following the boy’s occasional defeats. When we were together, Rustam angrily showed me Soviet magazine articles accusing him of beating his son when he lost games, but Rustam said that they were lies spread by Soviet chess officials who were embarrassed by their defection. In the Soviet Union, many chess professionals said that the father’s abuse of his son was common knowledge. Gata denied that his father hit him, however; he said that after he lost “he might get angry like normal people. He might scream or yell.”
“The whole Soviet Union was against us,” said Rustam. He contended that coaches were always stealing Gata’s ideas and gave the boy “psychological poison.”
Most curious was Rustam’s belief that the world champion, Garry Kasparov, had been the single largest impediment in the development of his son’s career. Rustam accused Kasparov of having used his considerable influence to keep Gata out of the Soviet Union’s best chess schools and tournaments, so that the boy’s development would be stunted. “Kasparov has been conspiring for many years now [against Gata], that’s for sure. Gata is like a bone in his throat. Kasparov is afraid of Gata.”
In Rustam’s view, Kasparov’s power was global, insidious and lethal, like that of the old KGB, and the world champion was preoccupied with his son. It was Rustam’s belief—dismissed by all of the American and Soviet-born players whom I interviewed—that Kasparov had grandmaster cronies here, who somehow lobbied within the United States Chess Federation to
prevent Gata from getting his proper share of publicity and to keep his international rating lower than it should be by suppressing the results of his best tournaments.
“Gata, do you agree with your dad that Kasparov is afraid of you?”
“I think so. Why else does he try to prevent me?”
Late in October, 1989, Gata Kamsky played his two-game match against Garry Kasparov in the stately Bates Forum at the New York Public Library, in front of a standing-room crowd of chess lovers. Sitting across from Gata, Kasparov, in a stylish tweed jacket, scratched his curly black hair, twisted in his chair and appeared nervous. Gata, wearing the same boyish sweater and pants as in the elimination matches, seemed relaxed and oblivious to the photographers crowded around their table.
Kasparov, playing with the white pieces, immediately attacked. His face became bulldoggish with sneers and grimaces, and someone in the audience remarked, “He must hate the kid.” The world champion brooded and suffered over the board as he played, scratched his head and looked up to the heavens for inspiration. Each gesture seemed to have great weight. He won the first game easily.
In the second game, Kasparov, again attacking, rocked in his chair and tapped his teeth with his finger. He seemed to grow larger as his pawns moved relentlessly ahead, taking a stranglehold on Gata’s kingside. As in the first game, Kamsky made mistakes but methodically defended, never looking ruffled. Though he was nearly Kasparov’s size physically, he appeared to be a mere boy across from the champion, who leaned lustily over the position, almost physically pushing Gata back. When Kasparov’s advantage was overwhelming, the champion picked up a queen from the side of the table and shook it at the admiring crowd.
Mortal Games Page 10