“If Gorbachev has been doing such a good job, why is his country completely in shambles?” Garry asked me one night, gesturing towards an editorial in the Times which praised the Soviet leader. Kasparov considered the Gorbachev regime a corpse, and it seemed preposterous and immoral to him that the Bush government and the American media were trying so hard to revive it. “Gorbachev is the last Russian dictator and soon he will be out. But did you read Hedrick Smith’s cover article about the Soviet Union in The New York Times Magazine?” he asked, referring to a piece that had run on October 28, which was generally sympathetic to the Secretary General.
“Yes. His thesis seems to be that Gorbachev’s reform movement has been effectively stalemated by the character of the Russian people,” I answered.
“It is a lie. If a writer said the same about blacks in America, that their problems stem from a lack of ambition, laziness, and a tendency toward alcoholism, he would be branded a racist. My country was raped by communism. You should feel sorry about it. This nation saved Europe from fascism, and now it’s saving Europe from communism because the Soviet people are paying all dues. Eastern Europe is free now, almost free, and whatever happens, Russian people will fight for independence. Hedrick Smith’s article is an insult to the Russian people.”
One afternoon, during Kasparov’s last week in New York, Andrew Page received a phone call from grandmaster Ron Henley, who was one of Karpov’s trainers. According to Page, Henley said that he was calling from the office of the man who produced the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and that they had come up with an idea for a promotion that would involve Garry and Anatoly going down to Atlantic City, or possibly to Las Vegas, for a month. The two grandmasters would set up shop at one of the casinos and play all comers at speed chess for a thousand dollars a game. Presumably, they would win most if not all of the games, and the money would go into a big glass cage. At the end of the month, they would play a match for the money. “This idea was totally out of context. Completely frivolous,” recalls Page. After all, Garry was depressed and playing terribly, in danger of returning the world championship to Karpov. While Henley talked, Page was thinking, “This is a trap. Someone is taping this conversation. They are trying to sucker Garry into something preposterous while he is down.” It seemed to Page like a trick, an elaborate distraction. Karpov would have known that Garry would never agree to this stunt.
“I asked Henley, ‘Does Anatoly know about this?’ and he put Karpov on the line. He may actually have been on another extension the whole time. Karpov said that this was a great way to see America and make a lot of money, that he and Garry could go on tour together from casino to casino. It was mind-boggling that while Kasparov and Karpov were engaged in this grim struggle, with so much at stake, Karpov was proposing this . . . fluff. I said to him that I would give the idea consideration and hung up. I didn’t know what to think.” Maybe the former world champion truly believed that there was money to be made with this Ninja Turtle producer, Page calculated. For if it were some kind of trick, Karpov wouldn’t have gotten on the phone, he wouldn’t have wanted to get his fingers dirty.
“But how could Karpov bring himself to suggest such a thing?” I asked, recalling the years of bribes and dirty tricks and the bombing of Zurab Azmaiparashvili’s home. My incredulity amused Andrew. He explained that the rules of the game were different in the Soviet Union, where there was a Wild West mentality, and where chess had long been a tool of communism, tainted by the chicanery of the KGB. In his cheerful tone, Andrew suggested that perhaps Karpov was adapting to a new time and place—perhaps the enmity of these perennial warriors could be forgotten if the profits were high enough. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was putting me on. “When Karpov comes to America, he is looking to make money,” explained Andrew, as though the profit motive forgave all else. But, after one more phone call from Henley, the idea was never alluded to again.
In game 11, Kasparov once again played the black side of the King’s Indian defense. Early on, he sacrificed a rook for a bishop to weaken White’s center and to get an attack on the dark squares. He used less than eleven minutes for his first eighteen moves. The rapidity of his play suggested that the line had been carefully plotted in advance by him and his team. Although some analysts, among them Yasser Seirawan, spoke of the courage and deep vision of Kasparov’s sacrifice, others suggested that Kasparov’s plan from the beginning was to draw the game, because only six moves later, the world champion forced a draw by perpetual check.
Many masters expected Kasparov to go all-out for a win with the white pieces in the last game of the New York half of the match. It was reasoned that with game 12 taking place on November 7th, the anniversary of the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917, Kasparov would have little difficulty finding his fire and resolve. So much for prognostications. Game 12 was the very embodiment of Kasparov’s frustration throughout the New York half of the match. Once again, sharp opening play on the white side of a Ruy Lopez earned him a powerful middlegame position. On the twenty-seventh move of the game, Kasparov jimmied his queen deep into the heart of Karpov’s kingside. It appeared to be the start of a kingside onslaught. On the following move, Karpov attacked Kasparov’s queen with his knight, a predictable response, but then instead of repositioning his queen to the rook file to continue the attack, the champion reversed engines and retreated her, which made little sense. Kasparov was seeing phantoms. With this retreat, his promising game had fizzled into a more or less equal position, and ten moves later he offered Karpov a draw. Karpov did not accept immediately. Objectively, Karpov was no better than even, but he took his time. It was as though he sensed that Kasparov’s knees were wobbling, and the challenger was deciding if this was the moment to put him down.
After they agreed to the draw, Garry admitted that ghosts were playing havoc with his game. “It was only game twelve, but with the break coming, it felt like the last game,” he said, trying to make sense of his indecisiveness. “And you tend to think, c’mon, it’s the last game. Don’t take too much risk. But it’s not the last game. Game twelve is not game twenty-four. You want to forget this voice of caution, but you cannot. That’s what happened. I was pressing him. My plan was to bring my queen to the kingside. Karpov’s pieces were on the queenside, but the king was’ on the kingside. The plan was so obvious. Kasparov in any kind of form would play the moves without hesitation. After I played Qf5, Karpov thought for eight or nine minutes, and during this time I began to second-guess myself. Then when he attacked my queen [with his knight], I retreated her for no good reason. I started thinking too much. So I retreated my queen when Qh5 was the obvious decision. There was no need even to calculate—just make the move. There are some moves that should be played by instinct. A chess player must trust himself, in the same way that a pianist believes in his fingers.”
* * *
When I next visited Garry at the Regency, there were half-packed cartons, piles of books and magazines, and miscellaneous knickknacks strewn around the floor of the sitting room. Garry was slumped on a sofa. “I feel awful,” he said. He kicked at some junk near his feet. The room was oppressive with failure and the chaos of leaving. Masha and Klara were noisily packing things in boxes in a room across the hall, and none of the other members of the team were around. Soon they would all be flying to Lyon. “It’s a pity, a pity,” he said. “So many mistakes. It’s incredible, really, so many mistakes in a world championship match, and most of them by me.” Earlier that day, the match organizers had held a press conference, which Kasparov had not attended. He had not wanted Karpov to see him in this beaten condition. “I do not want to help Karpov. You understand?” Garry had trouble all through him. He was confused. He felt as though he had let his friends down. When I asked him a question about the match, he put up his hand to say, let’s not speak about it, but then he couldn’t help himself. “That blunder was like a wound,” he said referring to game 7. “It was bleeding, working somewhere inside for the rest of the games. W
hen you are psychologically unstable, it [a blunder like this] kills you. For me, every game since the end of game six was painful.”
After ten minutes or so, Garry walked across the hall to a room where he often played practice games against his trainers. After a few minutes, I looked in. He was sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair and his shoulders were stooped. Klara was looming over him, chiding or counseling, I couldn’t tell. He looked up at her and then turned away. His face was flushed.
The last two or three times I had visited, I had brought with me an autographed copy of grandmaster Pal Benko’s endgame book, a volume that Benko had published himself and which he had asked me to give Kasparov. I believe there were a hundred copies or so in this new edition. Each time I came, I forgot to give it to Garry, or his mood was so bad that I thought that he wouldn’t notice it. And then when I returned home, I felt guilty. Benko had been one of the top eight players in the world in the fifties. He had played many great wars against Bobby Fischer, had beaten Fischer three times, and often showed me other games where he had had Bobby on the ropes but then allowed him to escape.
Now, as a sixty-year-old, Benko was still thin and fit, and though he was a most congenial man, he often wore a fierce preoccupied expression, to go along with his jet-black hair and bushy eyebrows. If you didn’t know him, you might think Benko was a little dangerous. In his small Jersey City house, Benko slept for much of the day, and each night he analyzed games and composed beautiful but nearly unsolvable endgame problems in which the pieces did magical things: Knights had the power of rooks and two pawns might well be more powerful than five. But at sixty, Benko felt bad that he no longer received invitations to attend regal tournaments in Europe and that he rarely had inquiries from new students. It seemed stupid to Pal that once a man gets a little old, people assume he is no longer any good. He smoldered at the thought that recent Russian emigrés were getting all the top students. Why was it that if you were Russian, he wondered, people automatically assumed you were a great player or had deep wisdom for teaching? Perhaps with a sense for the passing of time, Pal drove himself to compose problems ever more elegant and deeply plotted, and occasionally he showed one of them to a hot-shot Russian trainer, and Pal would stand by impatiently, his face tight with annoyance and barely-concealed scorn, while the guy couldn’t begin to solve it. Benko spent six months a year in Hungary working with the three Polgar sisters, and when he was in the New York area, he sometimes taught my son Josh, but often he remained in the little house in New Jersey that he had inherited from his father.
When Garry came back in the room to sit among the boxes, I handed him Benko’s self-published book, half-expecting him to drop it at his feet. But instead, he started reading. “This is very important,” he said, as he slowly turned a page. Garry’s face softened. He moved his lips and smiled as he calculated a witty move. For the next hour or so, he lost himself in Benko’s book, which contained interesting and instructive endings culled from numerous games, along with Benko’s sharp analysis. Garry was enjoying chess for the first time since the start of the match. But there was one troubled moment when he looked up from the book and said, “I wonder if there are any of my endgames here.” He turned quickly through the pages and then double-checked. “I’ve played some good endings.” There were none, and he was disappointed. This was something of a sore point, because many grandmasters considered Karpov stronger than Garry in the endgame; maybe Garry even thought so himself, but he never told me this. After a minute, Garry had settled back into the book and was calculating a variation and biting his nails a little. “This is very important,” he repeated.
Sometimes I think that Garry’s earnestness and moral tone inspire the dark side of Andrew Page. Before leaving New York, with Garry bereft over his poor play, with the entire team in gloomy spirits, Andrew placated himself and brought cheer to the camp by playing a little dirty trick. Throughout the history of Karpov and Kasparov’s championship matches, there have been numerous examples of one team or the other accusing the organizer of favoring the opposition. For example, in the past Karpov has claimed that Kasparov received better living accommodations, and Kasparov has made similar complaints. Andrew’s trick played upon Karpov’s ongoing suspicion that Garry received preferential treatment. According to Page, the French organizer provided first-class tickets to Lyon for Karpov and Kasparov, and in addition each team received economy-class tickets for the trainers. But before leaving New York, Page arranged with Air France for Masha also to sit in first class, and paid the extra fare himself for Garry’s grandmaster trainers to sit in business class. Andrew knew that, to Karpov and his group, it would appear as though the organizer had given Kasparov preferential treatment, and that later, when the organizer denied it, Karpov still wouldn’t know for certain. “When we walked on the plane, Karpov’s group filed to the back, muttering,” said Andrew, relishing the memory. “It was a nice dirty trick. It made our guys feel good.”
*Each of the sixty-four squares on the chessboard has a name consisting of a letter and a number. From the perspective of White’s side of the board, vertical files from left to right are lettered “a” through “h.” Horizontal rows or “ranks” from bottom to top are numbered one through eight.
*Anatoly Karpov, Karpov on Karpov, New York, 1991, p. 215.
8
LYON
When New York Newsday reporter Manny Topol arrived in Lyon to cover the second half of the match, he was eager to get started. It was unusual for the paper to send a reporter abroad on a lengthy sports assignment. Before unpacking his bags, Manny went to the playing site, the Palais des Congrès, to set up in the pressroom. Topol, at fifty-five, was short and slightly overweight, with a bad leg that dragged a little when he walked. His dress, “disheveled fifties,” fit well with his sympathetic but slightly needy expression.
Manny went directly up the broad, winding staircase to the press-room to arrange to have a private phone line installed at his desk, so that he could contact his office in New York. He took a look around and set up his computer. The room was big enough for two hundred reporters, but there weren’t more than fifteen or eighteen in the room. He walked around to say hello, but hardly anyone spoke English. There were only a couple of familiar faces from the Macklowe pressroom, and no one was here covering the games for The New York Times or, to the best that he could tell, from any of the wire services. Manny concluded that he was the only journalist from the United States covering the match on a daily basis. He scratched his head. This was a surprise. In New York, there had been seven hundred reporters, including a slew from metropolitan papers. Manny had told his editor that Lyon would be a media circus. “This is really big,” he had said, explaining that Kasparov was in danger of losing the title, which might put the world champion in danger back home. Manny’s editor and some of the guys in the sports department and on the crime beat with whom he had worked for years may have wondered why he was pressing so hard to go to Lyon to write about chess, but Manny was a top reporter, and there was no doubt that he would deliver good stories.
Sitting beside a drafty window, Manny could feel the frigid wind gusting across the snow-covered Parc de la Tête d’Or which bordered the Palais des Congrès. While Karpov and Kasparov shook hands on a television monitor, Manny looked around the cold and nearly empty pressroom, feeling uneasy. Working the crime beat, Topol had learned that there was power in numbers; if you stuck with the other reporters, you would never miss something crucial to the story. When he had been a rookie covering front-page homicide cases, this had been an essential fact of life, but, over time, Manny had learned homicide like the back of his hand and didn’t need anyone’s help. He had written many prize-winning stories and had covered all the big ones. Manny particularly favored stories in which murder was driven by lust. He knew how to build these stories.
A few veteran chess writers, bundled in overcoats and scarves, watched the opening moves, while in a corner of the room, unlikely though it seemed, a
man with a professional salon chair was giving free haircuts to the scant group. Many of the world’s top masters, who would normally camp out in the press room providing reporters with analysis, anecdotes and a player’s feel, were away representing their countries at the chess Olympiad in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. Manny loved the locker-room camaraderie of reporters at a large event, such as the New York half of this match or the Super Bowl. He never missed going to the Super Bowl and the grande affaire the league threw each year for its football writers. But there was no big party of journalists in Lyon. Manny was the party. He dialed his editor on the phone. “It’s terrific here,” he said. “The place is jammed with reporters. You could cut the tension with a knife.”
The reason there weren’t more international journalists in Lyon was not a deep mystery. In addition to the normal attrition that takes place during your average three- or four-month sports event, with the Persian Gulf War about to explode, newspapers were sending correspondents to the Middle East and trying to save money in other areas. Wire services and major newspapers assumed they could pick up the story about the world championship from one another. Circumstances had conspired to make Manny the primary, if not the exclusive, pipeline to the United States. In addition to his million-plus readers at Newsday, the Los Angeles Times news service would pick up his stories and pass them on to another 100 or 150 newspapers around the country, an opportunity that any journalist would relish.
Mortal Games Page 21