After the match, when Kasparov and I spoke at Olga Capablanca’s party, he was extremely blunt about Gata: “He plays strong moves. Very professional moves. But he has no potential to be world champion. There are many strong grandmasters, but to be world champion you need that last component. I don’t think Kamsky has it.”
He reflected upon Gata’s singularity of purpose. “My life has been much wider,” he said. “I can’t live only with chess. If you love only your profession, it could damage you. If I didn’t spend time on politics and athletics and other things, I couldn’t be Kasparov.”
Gata Kamsky’s defeat by Kasparov did not slow his astonishing assault on the international chess world. After tying for first in a prestigious tournament in California, he and Rustam flew to the beautiful Spanish seaside resort of Palma de Majorca. Kamsky finished ahead of 152 grandmasters, tying for second place—perhaps the greatest tournament result ever achieved by a fifteen-year-old. In the New York Open, he again tied for second, defeating the legendary former world champion Mikhail Tal. Since then, young Kamsky has been at or near the top in some of the world’s strongest tournaments. At the age of sixteen, he tied for first place in the super-powerful round robin Interpolis tournament in Tilburg, Netherlands, to earn his GM title. In 1991, Gata placed first in the World Open, and a month later won the U.S. championship. At seventeen, he was the youngest player to accomplish that feat other than Bobby Fischer, who first won the title at the age of fourteen. By the end of 1992, Gata’s rating of 2655 placed him twelfth in the world.
But for virtually every Gata victory, there has been a scandal involving Rustam. In the crucial second-to-last round of the World Open, while Gata was playing against Patrick Wolff, Rustam boisterously accused Wolff’s trainer, Victor Frias, of signaling moves to his player. While Wolff struggled to concentrate, Rustam challenged Frias to walk outside and fight. In the U.S. championship, Gata was losing the decisive game to grandmaster Joel Benjamin, when Rustam claimed that grandmasters Patrick Wolff and John Fedorowicz and international master Ilya Gurevich were signaling Benjamin moves. Benjamin, clearly distracted by the row taking place a few feet away, soon blundered and lost the game and the championship. Perhaps he would have blundered without Rustam’s help. Nonetheless, Rustam and Gata demonstrated a kind of smooth razzle-dazzle teamwork never before seen in the chess world. While Rustam fumed and glared at opponents, made claims of cheating, and challenged players and coaches to fights, Gata played brilliantly, calmly, seemingly without distraction. Indeed, he seemed to gain strength and determination from his father’s histrionics and claims of dark conspiracies.
* * *
In retrospect Rustam partially attributed Gata’s loss to Kasparov in 1989 to a jealous American grandmaster, a supposed friend, who revealed to the world champion all of Gata’s opening secrets. As Rustam described the event, the tendons in his powerful neck bulged. He blazed with menace and ambition. It was Rustam, not Gata, who reminded me of Kasparov over the board. Gata, who was suffering with a cold, sat even more quietly than usual, his eyes glazed, perhaps a little happy that because he was sick he didn’t have to study. “Not only will Gata win,” Rustam said, looking forward to his son’s next encounter with Kasparov, “but he will crush him like a fly.”
Gata could never deliver a line like that.
“Bobby Fischer was lonely, and now Gata is going to have to be lonely,” said Rustam, recalling that during his career Fischer often feuded with world chess organizations. “He is going to have to go against the Chess Federation and everyone else on his own.”
Well, not exactly on his own. Gata has Rustam. Rustam has Gata. The father’s energy and appetite for battle have spurred his gifted and reserved son to victories that are already memorable in chess history. But what a lonely and confusing life this father has carved out for his son—so much early success stirring crazily with the envy and enmity of contemporaries and the institutions that they must depend upon, and Gata hearing all of it as from the bottom of a deep well as he monkishly studies chess positions. “You must ask my father; I am only the player,” he said.
I was thinking about Garry Kasparov’s harsh assessment of Gata’s play, that a component of greatness was missing. Of course, saying that Gata doesn’t have it may have been the damning prophecy of a world champion who hears footsteps. But if Kasparov is right, and some in the chess world say that he is, one must appraise the coach’s game plan, to shut out the world and study harder than anyone. Maybe there has to be air and outside experiences, as Kasparov suggests, for a creative mind to reach its full potential. Maybe a girlfriend and a soccer game make for a better chess player.
“It is hard to believe that someone of that mentality could ever become world champion,” said the young grandmaster Patrick Wolff, who has absorbed more than his share of pummeling from the Kamsky team. “As much as I envy him, you couldn’t pay me enough to trade places with him.”
“We’ve gone to England, France, Germany, Spain, and we have not seen anything really,” said Rustam with fire and pride. “No sightseeing. When Gata is not playing, he is studying.”
“Studying, playing, sleeping. That’s it?” I asked him.
“Da.”
Much of the above was published in The New York Times Sunday magazine in May, 1990, while I was in France with Kasparov. About a month later, the Kamskys’ business agent urged me to be careful for my life. She spoke of Rustam’s violent nature, and when I pressed her for examples, she recalled that earlier in the spring he had badly beaten up a visiting Russian player after some dispute. Dumbadze continued to represent the Kamskys, she said, because she was frightened that Rustam might harm her if she quit, and also because she cared for the boy.
Following this, I went with my lawyer to the police, and was subsequently told that the Kamskys received warnings from Kaufman, from the police and then from an FBI agent who had been instrumental in arranging details relating to their defection one year earlier. I suspect that the agent told Rustam that, even in crime-weary New York City, a man was likely to get more than a few weeks for premeditated murder.
I had virtually no contact with the Kamskys for the next nine months, until I traveled to Spain with my son for the Linares tournament—which I will write about later—where Kasparov next met young Gata over the board. During the intervening months, indeed to this day, Gata’s uncomfortable expression continues to adorn the covers of our chess magazines, and some of our top players, chess administrators and ardent fans argue that he is a boon for American chess. It does not seem to offend his fans that the father produces forged documents and physically intimidates Gata’s opponents. In the chess world the great moves of geniuses have always eclipsed any weaknesses of character or even the most reprehensible behavior. When Bobby Fischer was making his immortal moves against Spassky in Reykjavik, the chess world ignored his affection for Adolf Hitler. I asked one American grandmaster why the Kamskys were tolerated here, and the man answered simply, “He may be the next world champion.”
*Competition from Soviet-trained chess professionals has increased since the collapse of the Soviet Union because so many players have been lured to the States by the prospect of the good life. Under communism, chess professionals were among the most privileged and highly-paid, but today top chess trainers and players in the former Soviet republics are paid virtually nothing, and travel to the West to earn hard currencies for the support of their families.
6
MIND GAMES
September, 1990—I was lost in the woods, somewhere on the south side of Martha’s Vineyard Island. I was trying to find Kasparov’s training camp and I felt absolutely ridiculous. I had been coming to this island off the coast of Massachusetts for thirty years. Garry had decided to train here at my suggestion and Andrew Page and I had selected the enormous beachhouse he had rented eight weeks earlier. But where was it? Clearly, I had taken a wrong turn and had no idea which way to head. I recalled that it was a couple of miles from the South Ro
ad to the house—actually there were a few houses on the property, providing privacy for Garry, his wife and mother, and a half-dozen trainers. I should have gone back to the South Road and started again, but after driving winding dirt roads for fifteen minutes in the moonless night, I had no idea which way to turn to get back. Everywhere I looked, there were more oak trees. I had called to say that I would be right over. It was already past eight o’clock at night, and Kasparov, whom I had not seen for some weeks, was waiting for me for dinner. He would be angry, drumming his fingers on the table. I would feel silly explaining that I got lost: Don’t I know this island like the back of my hand? On his face would be a mixture of amusement and disdain, or perhaps only disinterest.
Such bad timing. Tonight I had planned to describe the book that I wanted to write about him. While I pulled into the driveway of a darkened house—not his, much too small—and then struggled to back out without hitting a tree, I imagined Kasparov’s face when I asked him what he thought about my book idea. When people make demands upon his time, Garry’s eyes narrow and one can almost hear him thinking, Why should I do it? Am I being taken advantage of? Or, can’t you see that I’m too tired for this? To write the book I wanted to write, Garry had to agree to have private dinners with me once or twice a week while he played against Karpov. I would need to talk with him about the strategy of the match while it was unfolding. We would need to take long walks and talk about what he had been feeling while he played the night before. I would have to be with him after the wins, and particularly after the losses. I would need to talk with his trainers about what he was like to work for.
I wanted to watch the games sitting next to his fretting mother and his nervous wife. I wanted to sit in the kitchen with Klara while she cooked for Garry and worried about the game coming up in three hours, to talk to her about how we rooted and suffered for our children while they played their games, to gauge if the suffering of the mother of the world champion was any different from mine. Garry would have to convince his mother to allow me into their camp, their home. Klara would be suspicious. She would fear treachery. For a chess champion, our relationship would be virtually without precedent. During all the lengthy championship matches in the past, the world champions—both players, for that matter—kept themselves largely unavailable to the press, living hermetic, clandestine lives. They worried about spies divulging secrets. For months, they played, trained and saved their energy for the games.
I dreaded asking him about the book, fielding his suspicion and possibly his anger: “Fred, this is absurd—to play against Karpov while living in a fishbowl. How can you ask me?” It was hard for me to ask him. In truth, I wanted him to like me almost more than I wanted to write the book. I was like a kid who wants to be friends with Michael Jordan. That’s only part of it.
An inspiration: I turned off the engine, got out of the car and listened for the ocean. I could hear the surf. I turned the car around to head that way. For the past few weeks, I had been thinking about why I was drawn to Garry. At times he was like my father. The idea made me uneasy and also a little giddy—Garry was twenty years younger than I! My father could be intimidating without saying a word, anger pouring from his green eyes while he contemplated the world’s injustice. His weathered face naturally assumed attitudes of revenge, but grew soft when we talked together; he was unashamed of his affection for friends and family, he could cry in front of me—such shifts of mood, confusing but intoxicating for a son. My father was a sickly man, and it often fell to me to take care of him when he was ill. Kasparov, to be sure, was a physical powerhouse, but I think those who know him well sense that his life is dominated by his frailties. When he talked to me of his own father, tears rolled down his cheeks and he put his head on my shoulder. When I was with Garry, I felt the responsibility of shoring him up.
I walked onto the beach and looked east and west. About a quarter mile to the east, I spotted the lights of a cluster of houses—it looked like a small village. Garry’s training camp. My father, who would spend his last dollars eating in a fancy restaurant or renting the most expensive motel room in town, would have loved this place that Page and I had selected: ten or twelve outsized rooms in the main house, towering windows offering the grandest views of sunsets and fishing boats plying the Atlantic, a fireplace the size of a van, twenty-foot ceilings, a state-of-the-art kitchen the size of half a basketball court—a house for little chess players big enough for a family of Wilt Chamberlains. Thirty thousand a month in the off season. Next door to it was a Ping-Pong and game house the size of most middle-class homes. It was the newest, most sumptuous, and, some would say, the gaudiest estate on this lovely island. Andrew knew that Garry would love it (even while he urbanely commented on its ungainliness). The boy from Baku would train for Karpov feeling rich and special, a winner. The following summer in Malibu, to train for a tournament in Europe, Andrew would select the enormous house where Madonna had gotten married to Sean Penn, at a cost of forty thousand for the month, considerably more than Kasparov would get for winning the tournament.
I looked through a window and could see Garry inside, leaning over a chessboard and writing in a notebook. He looked much younger than he had in Europe. His hair was long and bushy, his face set in naive purpose, like my son’s when he writes his chess ideas in little notebooks, studiously preparing to become a great player like Garry. I watched him for a few minutes. His face was clear, no anger, no suspicion. Almost a schoolboy. Now I wondered if it was some resemblance to Josh that drew me to Garry. Like any superstar, Kasparov is a repository for a fan’s dreams and projections. Even for friends, it is hard to know him truly for all the daydreams and opportunities for secondary gain. This probably makes Garry lonely.
I knocked on the kitchen door and Klara greeted me with a hug, “Ah, Fred Waitzkin,” she said in her deep, emotional voice. I soon found out that everything about Klara rang with implication, portent and often dread, even my name. A full-bodied woman with a sensuous Sophia Loren face, she made most of the decisions relating to Garry’s training—for that matter, many of the decisions relating to other facets of his life. Almost instantly, one could perceive that she was guided mainly by her intuitions. As she held my hand, she was deciding about me.
Garry walked into the kitchen to greet me. As he shook my hand, asked about New York, inquired about Josh, he leaned back toward the living room and his work, some chess variation tugging at him. Of course I was not late for dinner at all. This was Kasparov time. We would eat after he finished working and then finished relaxing.
“Are you going to leave it this way?” I asked, about his long hair.
“Do you like it?” A broad warm smile.
“It looks great long.”
“No, I will cut it. My mother thinks that when it is short I look fierce. She wants me to be fierce for Karpov.” He pursed his mouth: what can you do, my mother?
After a minute of two, he made a little gesture with his hand, a gesture which said, Will you forgive me? I have to study for a while longer. Garry’s wife, Maria—friends and family call her “Masha”—led me into the living room. She was thin, pale and lovely, with the carriage of a ballerina. We sat in two rocking chairs and began to get acquainted. Garry was sitting on a leather couch a few feet away, leaning over a chessboard, pausing every two or three minutes to write in his notebook. The television played, and although the volume was turned up, he appeared to be entirely engrossed in his study. I have argued with Josh that he cannot do his best work with the TV on. Could I have been wrong about that?
Masha pointed to an article on the front page of The New York Times, and we began to talk about the predicament of blacks living in the inner cities of the Northeast, of kids trapped in a cycle of poverty and crime. She flushed with pain for the children. I mentioned that Josh and a number of his friends had been repeatedly mugged, one friend badly hurt, by roving bands of black and Hispanic teenagers who came to the Upper East Side of New York City to prey on privileged white
kids after school. “When your kid has been beaten by one of these gangs, it tends to put a dent in your idealism,” I said. She nodded. I was half making these points for Garry, thinking it was a subject that would interest him, but I couldn’t tell if he was listening. He didn’t look up.
It was Masha’s first visit to the States, but she seemed to know a great deal about the country, our books, movies, current events. She spoke English with delicacy and near-perfect diction. Within minutes we were speaking intimately, as if we were old friends. At twenty-six, she worried about what she should do with her life. She had studied English in Moscow and for a time she thought she would be a translator, but years had passed and she no longer felt confident enough to do this professionally. I asked about her options, and she shook her head. She didn’t know what to do. Her brow wrinkled with concern. She looked very beautiful this way. She said that doing nothing except helping Garry be world champion would not be satisfying. Over time she would feel empty.
Discussing these questions with Garry sitting within earshot was titillating. I had a sense that Masha was teasing Garry a little. Within minutes I had a crush on her. Without saying a word, we were both playing a game, getting to know each other and trying to get Garry to notice. “So far I have chosen to be with him, to help him. Maybe in the future I will find something for myself.” I thought Garry knew about our game and used it for leverage, to push deeper into his ideas; for the next hour or so he never took his eyes from the chessboard, except to write in the notebook.
Then, when Garry looked up from his work, he was in mid-thought. “Fred, do you know that the USSR had a thousand advisors in Iraq? I hope you don’t believe that Gorbachev supports Bush in Iraq because he is a good guy. Gorbachev goes along with the U.S. because he has no other choice. He barely holds onto power today and only because he has the full support of the West, because he demonstrates his close relations with Bush. But soon he will be gone.”
Mortal Games Page 11