Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  “I recall a simultaneous interview given by Korchnoi and Karpov at the time of one of their matches,” said Mark Taimanov. “They were asked to name a favorite book and movie. Karpov named a communist propaganda novel. Korchnoi, a great French novel. Your favorite movie? Karpov, The Battle of Stalingrad. Korchnoi, Nights of Cabiria. Karpov was out to prove to communists that he was very reliable. He always stressed his patriotism and adherence to socialist ideals. Everyone knew how close he was to Brezhnev. For years there was a large portrait of Brezhnev embracing Karpov, which hung in the Moscow Central Chess Club. Then there was the question of Karpov’s fantastic wealth. There was an article in Der Spiegel magazine during the second match, which reported that he had made millions outside the country endorsing computers, and that this money had been deposited in the name of another man and had not been reported to the Central Committee so that he would not have to pay taxes. Karpov is certainly the greatest defensive player in chess history, and in this instance he made the most fantastic defense. He said to friends that he had never concealed the income. He explained that it was Brezhnev himself who allowed him to take the money without paying taxes. At this time Brezhnev had already died, so no one could know for sure.”

  For the past five weeks on Martha s Vineyard, Kasparov’s days had been more or less the same. Each morning he arose at nine-thirty or ten, had breakfast and then did physical training. On the beach in front of the house, he ran for two and a half miles and then swam for a half-hour in the cold ocean and rode a few waves on his boogie board. If the Atlantic was too rough for swimming, he played tennis with Kadzhar on a court nestled in the forest a couple of hundred yards north of the house. These two old friends were well-matched, big on hustle and short on style. Their beef stew tennis was peppered with taunts and side bets.

  After the morning of physical exertion, Kasparov slept for an hour and had lunch. Around four in the afternoon, he worked with his trainers for four or five hours. They analyzed Karpov’s games, particularly the most recent ones, looking for tendencies and weaknesses to exploit, and tried to develop an overall strategy for the match. Most of the time was devoted to opening preparation, coming up with new ideas to spring on Karpov. Often his four grandmaster trainers worked in pairs in separate rooms, checking specific variations at Kasparov’s direction. He walked from one room to the other, analyzing for a while, making comments, giving orders, occasionally walking to the mammoth alcove near the kitchen to ask Shakarov, who manned the computers, to find games in the large data base, called ChessBase, developed by Kasparov’s friend Fred Friedel, that were germane to the opening variations they were studying. In past matches, Kasparov had depended on his old trainer, Alexander Sergeyevich Nikitan, to direct the daily work of the team, but this time he had decided to do it himself.

  As much as finding new lines and moves, training for the world championship was about becoming mentally tough, preparing to concentrate for months on end by spending months of long hours exercising and concentrating. Short cuts were dangerous. It would be like a great marathon runner abandoning his distance training, and then attempting to maintain a near–world record pace for twenty-six miles. “You must be prepared not to lose the theme of the match, which is difficult because it goes on and on,” said Kasparov. “This is especially difficult if you have not been playing or studying for a long time. You can become bored by the games and that is very dangerous.”

  Prior to the events in Baku the previous January, it had been Kasparov’s intention to train for about a hundred days, more or less what he had devoted to other matches. As it turned out, he managed only a little more than half that amount.

  “Two months before the match, I was finally ready to start the serious preparation. Unbelievable.” For nearly ten years, he had had regular training sessions every three or four months, but except for a few weeks in Spain earlier in the summer, before coming to Martha’s Vineyard, he had not trained seriously for almost a year. Kasparov was out of practice and it was hard for him to begin. As he sat at the board during the first days, feeling bored and fidgety, Gorbachev, Baku, and political disputes in the chess world competed with chess variations for space in his thoughts. Klara sat at a desk nearby, reading a magazine or knitting. Her face was severe and sometimes fierce. She was willing Garry to stay in place, waiting for his love of chess to take hold. If the maid came into the room to dust, Klara drove her out. For his whole adult life, Klara had waited and worried while her son did his thinking. Klara was afraid of this match. She knew that Garry’s banter about crushing Karpov was empty, and it made her feel frantic. He had not studied enough.

  Kasparov became inspired during his last month on the island. “We had a fantastic session,” he said. The sea air and ocean sounds had softened the urgency of Soviet politics. “I had phone calls from Moscow every day, but the advantage of being on this island thousands of miles away was that I was not obliged to react. I knew that life was going on, but I wasn’t anymore an active player.” Running on the soft sand at the water’s edge had made him physically strong. He had lost a few pounds that had been gathering around his middle, and his chest looked as hard as a wrestler’s. Kasparov had come up with some sharp ideas, particularly with the white pieces, and for the first time in a year was beginning to feel his strength as a player.

  But after the day’s work was over, the island evoked moments of sadness. “The view from my window is almost exactly the same as from my training camp at Baku overlooking the Caspian Sea,” he said. “The angle of the house to the ocean is almost the same. The sound of the waves . . . maybe it was a little softer there. It is very strange, because this island gives me a feeling of stability but also there is much sadness. At dinner my mother and I look out at the ocean and listen to the surf. We remember everything that we lost.”

  September 28: On this day the routine of training was broken. When I arrived at the house for breakfast, Garry was on the phone with the assistant to the organizer of the match. He was shouting, and his face was red. “No. I have made my decision. I will not change my mind.”

  Several weeks before, Kasparov had resolved to use the match as a public forum to demonstrate his solidarity with freedom fighters in his country. He had decided not to play under the communist flag, but instead under the prerevolutionary flag of the Russian Republic, which during recent months had come to be a symbol of protest against Gorbachev’s regime. But the organizer of the New York half of the championship, who had invested millions of dollars to host the first twelve games, was upset with Garry’s decision, as were his public relations people. They were convinced that politicizing the match would confuse and ultimately turn off an American public that liked to take its sports straight up, Frank Gifford–style.

  “Here, speak to Andrew.” Page took the phone and began mollifying, while looking up to Garry for clues. “No, Andrew. No,” said Kasparov from across the room. Kasparov expected Page to smooth things over, to present his positions more palatably than he did himself, but at the same time he found it irritating—it was a dance they did. “No, Andrew, the match isn’t worth it to me,” he said irritably, while Page spoke into the phone in his soothing voice.

  “I’m sorry, but Garry doesn’t sound like he is going to change his mind,” said Andrew cheerfully. “But, yes, I will talk to him.”

  The phone had been ringing all morning. A lawyer representing the organizer called from Paris to say that if Karpov protested Kasparov’s use of an unofficial flag, they would probably be forced to go along with the challenger. What then? Would Kasparov refuse to play at all? The advertising agency hired to promote the match had called four times that morning, urging Kasparov to forget about his protest or, at the very least, to delay it. They were afraid that Karpov might refuse to play. A friend from Europe had called Garry to say that such a public affront to Gorbachev might be dangerous. Andrew fretted that as usual Garry wasn’t thinking about chess.

  Garry and I walked on the beach. He wanted me to read a
draft of a statement that he would fax later that day to the wire services. “How could I play under the red flag at this point?” he said while we walked. “Now when there are just a few months left, I don’t want to be represented by a red flag.” It was easy to understand the organizer’s dismay. Beside politicizing the match in the newspapers, which would relegate chess itself to a sidebar, Kasparov might come across as a political extremist kook, rather than as a cerebral sports hero. In the fall of 1990, there were no serious political pundits in the United States, liberal or conservative, predicting the immediate dismantling of the Soviet Union.

  I read the statement. He had written it in Russian, and Masha had done the translation. It was passionate and also repetitious and in places awkward. He asked me to work on it with him. We walked back to the house. Kasparov began looking at a chess position, while I sat beside him, cleaning up the paragraphs. It was clear that his heart wasn’t in chess. Every five minutes or so, he would think of something to add or ask me to read a few sentences. “Karpov will be shocked,” Kasparov said, without trying to hide his glee. “He can make a protest. But he cannot attack too much, because he also knows that in one year the country is finished.” He laughed like a child who had played a good trick.

  I recalled another afternoon in Lyon in the spring. He had come to select from a number of possible venues for the second half of the match and also to choose a training site for the work period in August—he had not yet decided upon Martha’s Vineyard. We looked at the most wonderful villas, one placed on a hill with a breathtaking view of the city. It had every possible convenience. “Fred, what do you think?” He appeared to be weighing, musing—was this the very best place to study for Karpov?—but he also knew how ridiculous it was. In Moscow he lived with his in-laws in a claustrophobic three-room flat with laundry hanging in the bathroom. He looked up at the ceiling of the villa, some little imperfection. He wrinkled his nose—not just right.

  An assistant to the mayor of Lyon brought us to a number of possible playing sites. “What do you think of this, Fred?” Garry asked.

  “Garry, it doesn’t feel right. It’s too big. Too impersonal.”

  “I think you’re right.” There was amusement around his eyes. He had drawn me into it. Two kids pretending to rule the land. Which villa to choose? Which fantastic stadium? The boy from Baku pretending to be King Kasparov. Do you see how I live? Can you believe it?

  The mayor’s assistant drove Garry, Andrew and me in a matching fleet of Renault sedans from one possible playing site to the next, and responded gravely and immediately to each small sign of Kasparov’s displeasure. He drove us to one that appeared to be the ruins of a Roman amphitheater which the city was willing to enclose at a considerable cost. I whispered to Garry that I could see him and Karpov rushing on stage each night dressed in leathers and holding tridents. Garry tried to hide his smile.

  The mayor’s assistant was a nervous wreck. Karpov had been here the week before making his choices. The assistant told me that trying to satisfy both men was nearly impossible. He was fearful, for example, that if Kasparov were to catch wind of the fact that Karpov favored the Roman amphitheater, it would be rejected out of hand. When we traveled back to Paris that evening in the train, I couldn’t resist and said to Kasparov that I had learned that Karpov’s preference was the outdoor amphitheater.

  “I know Karpov a little,” Kasparov said, his voice devoid of the playfulness of the afternoon. “He doesn’t like the Roman amphitheater at all, but assumes that I will discover this preference and automatically choose another—possibly the one he secretly wants.” Karpov had a sobering effect on Kasparov. His hair wouldn’t be gray if it weren’t for Karpov.

  “You see, in a way, he is trapped,” Kasparov mused, as I edited his statement. Karpov was likely to protest. If he didn’t, and he sat in his custom-made, leather-cushioned chair playing chess beside a little red flag, while Kasparov sat beside the flag of revolution and democracy, that would tell a story to many people. Karpov might win his protest—Kasparov was demanding to represent a country that did not legally exist—but this victory would be pyrrhic. “He knows that if he attacks me too strongly it will blow up in his face.” The match was suddenly in a state of absolute chaos—it wasn’t entirely certain that there would be a match, but Kasparov was feeling pleased. He had devised a way to politicize the games, but just as importantly he had come upon a tactic with which to inspire himself. At this stage in his life, chess alone had become an unreliable stimulant. He needed bigger stakes. He needed to make chess bigger than chess. “The match against Karpov will have black-and-white symbolism—old versus new, communist versus anticommunist.”

  “This is a matter of conscience to me, more important than a chess match,” he said, but at the same time, Kasparov was admiring his own foreplay. When Karpov read the statement in The New York Times, he would be shocked and off-balance as he saw himself cast anew in the role of old-time communist in opposition to Kasparov’s anticommunism. At the moment, Kasparov had seized the advantage in the games that these two played, even before the games began. “Tell him that it is impossible, Andrew,” Kasparov called to Page, who was holding the phone. Someone from the organizer’s office was pleading for Kasparov to hold off his announcement until after the first game or two. “I already have my statement,” he said, as though these paragraphs we had been crafting were engraved in stone.

  Later that afternoon, while Garry was taking his nap, Klara received a phone call from Moscow. It was the grandmaster Zurab Azmaiparashvili, a trainer of Kasparov’s who had worked with Garry in Spain earlier in the summer and had been resting in Moscow for a few weeks before coming to New York for the match. Klara spoke in Russian in a raised voice, very upset, while Andrew stood nearby with a troubled expression. “Zurab was offered a hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to turn over Garry’s opening novelties,” Andrew said a few minutes later. Andrew and Klara tried to figure out what to do. Should they tell Garry? He would be upset, nervous. They decided that they had to tell him. He would begin the match on this disquieting note. Advantage to Karpov.

  At the time, Page knew few details about the Azmaiparashvili incident in Moscow or how it was likely to be resolved. I spoke with the world-class grandmaster from Georgia some time later. “A neighbor of mine in Moscow told me that a man had been looking for me,” began Azmaiparashvili. “This man said to my neighbor that he wanted to talk to me about the possibility of participating in a joint [business] venture with some French people, and he identified himself as a close friend of grandmaster Iosif Dorfman, a member of the Kasparov training team in the past. I was busy, preparing to leave for New York, and forgot about it. Then, this man called on the phone. He said he wanted to take me and my family to dinner at the Hotel Continental, where we would meet these potential French partners. We were picked up and driven to the hotel in a limousine. The driver said that my family should walk around while I talked to the man. The guy was nice enough, tall and blond, with a relaxed manner, but from the start, things looked strange. We were the only ones in the restaurant, no Frenchmen. ‘We need some chess information from you,’ he said. He spoke Russian with a Baltic accent. Immediately, I knew what he was getting at and I told him that I couldn’t help him.

  “‘Maybe you misunderstand me. I need some specific information relating to the match.’ He wanted information about Kasparov’s openings. Now, I wanted to get out of there. I stood up to shake his hand. But he kept talking, ‘Look, everyone plays games. Karpov plays them and Kasparov plays them. It is beneficial to us for Karpov to win this match. We need your help. . . . Zurab, how much do you make in a year?’

  “I told him that I make about twenty thousand dollars, which is more than enough in the USSR. The man said, ‘We’re offering you a hundred thousand dollars if Karpov wins and half if he doesn’t. You only have to give us the information.’

  “When he could see that I wasn’t going to go along, he began threatening me. ‘You know, you have a
family.’ This made me frightened, because they weren’t in the restaurant. Maybe someone had them.

  “I said to the man, ‘Look, I won’t help either side. That’s all I can do.’ I was very frightened. I was prepared to remain neutral in the match if he would leave me alone. But this didn’t satisfy the guy. He said, ‘Take this seven thousand. It’s a deposit. We’ll talk again. Take the money and think about it.’ I couldn’t take the money. Maybe he was a KGB agent. I could have been arrested on the spot.

  “For the next two nights, I couldn’t sleep. I was terrified. Then two days later someone threw a bomb or Molotov cocktail at my house in Georgia. I had sent my family there to be safe. My aunt’s hair caught on fire trying to put it out. That’s when I called Martha’s Vineyard and spoke to Klara. She told me to call the Russian Chess Federation for protection. I called them and another agency as well. I recalled some of the numbers on the license plate of the limousine and told them. But no one would do anything. They were holding their hands behind their backs. It seemed clear to me that this bribe was either the work of Karpov or the KGB. It is well known in my country that Karpov’s guys are very friendly with the KGB.”

  Bombs, bribes, and chess. Probably the most unnerving part of this for me was how matter-of-factly Page and Kasparov took in this turn of events—some disgusted expressions, nothing to be done about it. Masha and Klara packed mounds of books, clothes and knicknacks in suitcases and boxes. Klara was irritable. Garry read the Times, didn’t want to talk. Kadzhar cooked steaks and lamb chops and didn’t make any jokes. I didn’t understand. Nothing like this happens before the Bulls play the Lakers. “These things always happen when we play Karpov,” said Page, the evening before we left Martha’s Vineyard for New York for the start of the match.