Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  With game 6 all but lost, Karpov had pratically no time to come up with a last-ditch plan. His jaw was tight and his sallow face squeezed bloodless from grim pressure. His hands grasped his forearms, while his legs twined around one another beneath the table. Wrapped up this way, his whole body jerked, a spasm of indecision; maybe he had glimpsed disaster six moves ahead, needed another variation quick. His head bobbed up and down as he calculated. As the seconds ticked off, the muscles in his face swam this way and that, and he took on a greenish cast, as though he were about to become sick.

  Karpov is such a compelling villain when he is down and out. Time pressure washes aside the cool inscrutable Karpov. He wins over fans with extraterrestrial suffering. The shadings of his diaphanous skin suggest weakness, mutability, a frantically beating heart. With seconds left, he found time to wipe his sweaty stringy hair away from his eyes. Forget his decade of dirty tricks, his supposed bribes and blackmail. It’s hard not to feel for him when he opens his mouth straining for a deep breath, his teeth so little, like baby teeth. How can you not pull for him, with an avenging Kasparov dug in and poised to flatten the little guy like a linebacker?

  Karpov shot his hand out finally, and moved his queen to e7. An ugly move, blocking in his bishop, but it was a defense no one else had thought of. Maybe it would hold. There was not enough time left for anyone in the theater to calculate. Karpov played his next four or five moves without pausing more than a second or two. Once again, he had rolled his fear and strain into an intriguing defense. His king was attempting to walk away from Kasparov’s mating net. But it didn’t quite work. Karpov had made things tough, but Kasparov still held a winning position.

  Then, on the forty-first move, after both players had made time control, those familiar with the world champion’s habits expected Kasparov to walk away from the board, relax for a minute or two, and then take his time to find the winning plan. They expected that, after thinking for ten or fifteen minutes, he would seal the killer move, and after analyzing through the night, he would finish off Karpov the following afternoon. It is often an advantage to be the one to seal the move before the adjournment, because then your opponent must guess what you have chosen, and has to divide his time studying a number of possibilities.

  But Garry couldn’t restrain himself and moved immediately. Maybe he had become caught up in the pace and desperation of Karpov’s time trouble. Maybe he was strutting for his fans. Whatever the reason, Kasparov’s move was a blunder. He blocked the very square that his queen needed to pursue the mating attack, which gave Karpov time to organize his defense. It was an error that would cost him more than this game. Throughout his career, in such situations, he had taken his time and then sealed the move. Why hadn’t he done it this time? he thought after offering Karpov a draw. He was disgusted with himself. He had thrown away the win.

  Game 7 began in the fashion of the prior two. Kasparov’s opening play was passive, and he gave Karpov an advantage without a fight. But Karpov seemed to be uncomfortable with the early initiative and his middlegame play was diffuse. It was as if each of them had been asked to play the other’s role, but neither could do it very well. The two players were in something of a muddle, when Kasparov seemed to rouse himself and lashed out with his queen. Fans came to attention—Kasparov was on the attack. But no sooner had he taken his hand off the piece than Kasparov clutched his head as if something were wrong. Then he walked quickly off the stage. The news spread like fire, Kasparov had blundered horribly. Karpov considered the position for half an hour before responding.

  It was the kind of mistake that beginners make. One move, and the world champion’s position was dead lost. “That’s incredible, a blunder of this magnitude,” said grandmaster Larry Christiansen. On stage, Garry squinted at the position, looking at it from different angles with bombastic profundity, as though he were considering great winning plans. I have often watched children do this when they have losing positions and are desperately trying to pretend that they are winning. Garry moved and blundered again, giving away a pawn for nothing. He had gone chess-blind and shook his head incredulously.

  “I can’t recall Kasparov being in such a position.” said Bruce Pandolfini, shortly before the end. “He doesn’t have a useful move.”

  When Garry resigned, Klara shook her head, no, no, and then hid her face in her hands. On the big screen, there was a close-up of her suffering. She twisted in her chair to avoid the camera. Masha tried to help her stand, but Klara was weak-kneed. One might have thought the mother had just lost her son. “This is terrible. This is unfair,” said Masha, and gestured angrily to the cameraman to stop taking their picture. But this inspired him to zoom in closer.

  Karpov didn’t want to leave the stage. He looked out at the audience, drinking deeply of the moment. They were cheering for him. Karpov was winning them over with his grit. It must have reminded him of Moscow in 1984, when he had been the reigning world champion crushing Kasparov while fans standing outside the majestic Hall of Columns chanted, “Tolya, Tolya.”

  The loss of game 7 was a defining moment for other grandmasters in the theater. Kasparov had suddenly become beatable—three large blunders in two games. For young grandmasters, the world championship seemed a little more accessible than before.

  “Garry played yesterday’s game as if he wanted to lose,” said Andrew Page, when he called me from London the following morning. Though he was upset, his voice was ringed with dry amusement, and I could imagine a little ironical smile. I think of Andrew as a gentle anarchist. He often speaks without monitoring himself and enjoys toppling the status quo. He had been worried about this match from the beginning and had said so, while Garry was telling all of their friends that he would crush Karpov. Page had believed that Garry would pay a price for not training properly and that his bragging belied a lack of confidence. “If he keeps throwing away wins, at least one good thing might come out of it,” he said. “Maybe I can get away from chess and get serious about my life.”

  For years, Page had been coming to matches and tournaments, fretting over games that he did not understand, but that were central to his life and livelihood. Were Kasparov to lose the match, Page would be devastated financially, and he would grieve for Garry, whom he loves like a brother. But at the same time Garry’s loss of the world championship was an intriguing possibility for this eclectic forty-five-year-old who by disposition craved new horizons, and at different points in his life had been a student of political science at Oxford, a race car driver, an actor, an inventor of games, a writer, and a businessman. As Andrew traveled from London halfway around the world to meet Garry at a chess tournament or a business meeting, he sometimes mused that his side of their complicated relationship—friend, manager, business partner—ultimately typecast him in the role of super-valet. For all the glamour and financial potential of living the Kasparov life, Andrew was still not sure what he wanted to do with himself. He wondered if he should be a novelist or screenwriter. He wasn’t at all sure that making millions would make him happy. Andrew had spent many of his most creative hours chasing Garry’s dreams, and like the champion’s world-class grandmaster-trainers, he wondered if his association with Garry prevented him from coming into his own.

  “The problem with being on Garry’s team is that there is little time for anything else in life,” he said. “I should be spending more time on the business and less time chasing around the globe packing his bags and getting his chess stuff for him. But when I leave him on his own, look what happens. Garry has been getting bad publicity lately. At least in part, I think it is because a couple of years ago I was traveling with him everywhere. Back then, I would arrive before a tournament, and the publicity was terrific because I would talk to the press and smooth over things if he had been misunderstood. I would force Garry to be nice to a few players. The chess world quite liked him at the time. Now, with no one there to do these things, he is getting enemies.”

  Page and Kasparov began their complex a
ssociation in 1983, when Page was in charge of the European operation for a chess computer company and approached the young grandmaster for an endorsement. Andrew says that, six months later, he felt guilty about the financial arrangement his company had offered Garry, and visited a Kasparov exhibition on the continent to renegotiate. “Garry’s face fell,” recalls Page. “He thought I was going to take away his money, and I said, ‘No, I’m going to give you more money.’ And that was a start of a long friendship.”

  To date, their business deals have been numerous, extremely ambitious and frequently without profit. In 1984, they started a management company, which initially focused upon tapping the financial potential of Kasparov’s chess life. But soon they were both thinking about a variety of far-ranging ideas. In 1987, Andrew traveled with Garry to Azerbaijan and met many people. They laid plans for the export of apples and pomegranates. They negotiated to build fruit juice concentrate plants and a brick factory. They looked into the secondary extraction of oil. “I was flying around the country in helicopters, meeting with high-level politicians. We did a great deal of work there. The potential was in the billions. Just when we had everything ready to roll, the Sumgait massacres took place, and we had to get out,” he said, putting an ironical spin on the Armenian tragedy.

  Then, Page, Kasparov and some friends began a joint venture in Moscow, and in August, 1990, Garry instituted the first private shareholding company since the Russian Revolution, which included a number of high-profile Moscow anticommunists, such as the eminent historian Yuri Afanasev. To greater and often lesser degrees of success, Page, Kasparov and his friends worked on a variety of projects: a motor car distributorship, the export of Russian sculptures, renting hotel rooms at reduced rates to airlines for their flight crews, the purchase of Moscow’s GUM, which is the largest department store in the world, the financial management of Soviet athletes who wanted to make a living in the West, the purchase of a radio station with which Garry intended to spread the gospel of anticommunism and Andrew imagined to be a commercial radio station.

  Andrew Page pointed out that, perhaps more than the idea of making money, Garry enjoyed the sport of bending and breaking communist rules and being a business pioneer, one of Moscow’s first capitalists. In the first months after the fall of communism, with Moscow reeling from unemployment Kasparov was planning to open factories to manufacture arrestingly attractive chess sets for young children. While Kasparov explained to American businessmen the urgent need to find work for Moscow’s unemployed, it was not at all clear that there was any market in the United States for these chess sets. Andrew said that Garry always looked to incorporate politics and business. “And it never bloody worked. Garry has proposed many big ideas, but the political angle always obscured the commercial one. Frankly speaking, doing business is not his forte. He enjoys it as an intellectual exercise. He goes off in wild enthusiasm for one of his projects and then he thinks that because he has been interested for a few minutes, something will happen. He leaves it to the others to follow up and do the nitty-gritty. But in Russia, everyone is as inexperienced as Garry. By the time he is on the seventeenth idea, they’ve dropped the first fifteen, so nothing happens and our cash flow is terrible. And then Garry doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, so he has an important meeting and won’t go and say, listen, chum, you owe me a favor, so do this. He’ll go and have a nice political conversation. In the most impressive way, he’ll describe the current situation in Russia and forget to say at the end, listen, we want to put on a rock concert.”

  Andrew Page arrived in New York City a couple of days after game 7. Since the beginning of the match, he had been commuting back and forth to London. He had a lot to discuss with Garry, but he knew that their business discussions might not happen. Sometimes he would arrive in New York and Garry would not be in the mood to talk about problems in the Muscovy Company. This was particularly the case when Garry was playing badly. Recently, Page had discovered that some of Garry’s Russian partners were less than reliable, and he had been getting a cold shoulder from airlines that he and Garry had counted on to fill their subleased rooms in Moscow’s Cosmos Hotel. Now, difficulties in the match made the business problems seem worse. Their financial setup was shaky, and it depended upon Garry’s retaining the world championship. Top political figures in Moscow and CEOs in the States were always pleased to have a working lunch with the world champion—even a world champion who was sometimes reluctant to talk about business deals.

  It also struck Page that, if Garry lost this match, he would have little to show for being world champion for most of the past decade. In the past four encounters with Karpov, Garry had been forced to pay most of his winner’s purse to the Soviet Sports Committee. This time, Garry was refusing to pay and it would be the first of the matches from which he would see any substantial money. By nature, both Garry and Andrew were attracted to new ideas and lacked patience for detail work. But if the Englishman didn’t make sure the contracts were drawn properly, spread sheets were scrutinized and the like, they would both lose their shirts. Perhaps it was because of this compromise to his nature that Andrew felt impatient when Garry refused to talk about business deals, regardless of the tragedy of their cash flow. Sometimes it seemed absurd to Andrew that so much in their lives hinged upon Garry’s winning a chess game, or in this case, losing. He knew that he might have to fly back to Europe and do some stalling, until Garry won a game or two and his spirits improved. Better than anyone, Andrew knew the futility of trying to buck Garry’s state of mind.

  I was nervous about going to see Garry after the loss of game 7. I had heard from Masha and members of the coaching team that it was better not to be around him while Kasparov was digesting defeat. I had called to suggest visiting another night, but he asked me to come. Garry was so pleased to be visited; he walked quickly across the room to shake my hand. He looked at me with the guilty smirk of a little boy: What can I do? I was bad. Do you still think things will turn out okay? I rubbed the back of his head, as though he were Josh. “Yesterday was a bad time for me. It was the worst blunder of my career.” He shook his head slowly. “Fred, I was in a black hole. A black hole.” He was still in a black hole. Things had gone wrong and he didn’t have the answers. Garry seemed physically diminished. His shoulders were stooped. His body felt soft. He was like a puppy. You could tell him to sit or stand, suggest turning on the television or taking a walk, and he would do it without question. He had broken trust with his sense of timing. “I feel shattered,” he said. Chess masters know that life tips on edge after a crucial loss. The game itself—the sixty-four squares, the little men, years spent memorizing variations, planning elaborate tricks—feels idiotic, absurd, useless. Particularly when a player has been feeling immortal, as if he cannot lose, defeat can throw him into a state of chaos and blackness.

  I must admit that there was something wonderful about seeing Kasparov cut back this way. He was entirely without pomp or pretense and not at all embarrassed about his condition; this was part of him, as well, like a gimpy leg. In his body English and bedraggled expression, Garry said, I am shit. Kasparov hated losing more than anyone I had ever known, but when he lost he wanted to feel it all through him, to embrace it—perhaps this was the only way he had learned to get defeat out of his system. But also, it seemed to me fair for the champ to take his turn on the mat. He had crushed so many egos over the board, and I found myself thinking of instances when I had seen him wither men with a remark or a disgusted expression. When I suggested that there was something just about his having a taste of this side of life, Garry seemed to glimpse it for a moment, but then he sighed and said, “I hate losing.”

  “Fred, I couldn’t sleep for four days before this game,” said Klara. Garry’s mother always feared the worst. Danger was everywhere. “There were little things in his earlier games,” she said. “I could see it building. After enough little things go wrong, something big will go wrong.” Klara was always looking to read the future. She examine
d all clues: the color of the fruit on the table, the expression on her son’s face an hour before the game. And then when he was playing, she engaged in war alongside him. “When Garry plays, I repeat the whole time, danger, danger, bad, bad, bad, danger. I try to warn him. It is like we are soldiers together in the ditches. When the enemy attacks, you cannot raise your head for even a minute. If you raise the head, you are killed. You must not relax. I must never relax and then he will not relax. Even when we are at a great distance, Garry and I can feel each other’s mood. One time in a game, I relaxed and said, ‘It is good,’ and Garry lost.”

  For Klara, Garry’s losing felt like a constriction of her chest, pain and weakness in her limbs. But more, her universe had suddenly become terribly bleak and although this had happened before, the horizon of doom appeared endless. All familiar references were askew; happiness and even the small pleasures of a day were impossible for her. Bright future plans seemed like nonsense. Camaraderie was alien. Friendly smiles made her feel hysterical or humiliated, and she could not quite hold the idea of Garry in her mind—it fragmented into defeat and malaise. After he lost, tomorrow was ominous. Tomorrow there was another game, and he could lose again. The only thing that would cheer Klara was for Garry to win. That would be salvation, even ecstasy, but then she would restrain her celebration, for fear that it might curse her son’s next effort.