Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  When I asked him if he had trained for this fantastic tournament, Kasparov answered dryly, “Yeah, I trained. I trained giving political speeches.” But, I thought, this was just the situation that he relished: Things were going badly. The other players were beginning to count him out. The press was focused on Ivanchuk. And then summoning his rage and determination, the world champion would elbow through the pack like Achilles to win. “I’m in a bad mood,” Garry repeated a few times before the Karpov game, which made me think that he was primed for his charge.

  Driving south from Madrid, Josh and I had watched Linares arise unexpectedly from a sleepy green countryside of rocky foothills, grazing sheep and olive trees. Had we traveled here from the south, we would have passed fighting bull–breeding ranches. “The strongest tournament in the history of chess played in the middle of nowhere,” said Garry, as though this explained his poor performance. But Linares was a town rich in traditions. On the twenty-eighth of August, 1947, the incomparable Manolete had died from a horn in the heart in the Linares bullring, which was only a few blocks from the small but commodious Hotel Anibal. There, each year D. Louis Rentero Suarez, a local businessman who had amassed a fortune building a chain of grocery stores, held what he endeavored to make the strongest and bloodiest chess tournament in the world.

  Rentero, a lifelong aficionado of the corrida de toros, had been an ardent chess impresario since 1978, and it would seem that he had borrowed from his first love to enhance the second. In Spanish bullfighting, if the bull does not fight bravely, he is hissed and booed by fans, and killed quickly by the matador. Grandmasters who accepted Rentero’s hefty appearance fees to come to Linares, even ones who had a reputation for drawing many of their games, understood that they had been invited here to fight. If a grandmaster did not have the stomach for battle, and accepted a quick, peaceful draw, he risked a severe tongue-lashing from Rentero, and the likelihood of never being invited back. Rentero was known to reward players with envelopes containing big bills, following victories with hair-raising sacrifices. In large part because of Rentero’s strong hand, this annual event produced a higher percentage of decisive games than most grandmaster tournaments. His identification of a common beauty and brutality in chess and in the corrida had taken root in the town, where local folk had become crazy for the royal game. Along the streets of Linares, there were colorful bullfight posters advertising upcoming events here and in neighboring Baeza, and beside them the elegant poster of jousting knights proclaiming this year’s Linares International to be the strongest tournament in the history of chess. The young children of Linares grew up daydreaming of becoming either bullfighters or matadors of the mind.

  Local kids were delighted to meet my son, who at the time was a fourteen-year-old chess master. Each evening, after the games, Linares teenagers lined up in the lobby of the hotel to play blitz against Josh, who found it eye-opening that chess was so valued here. At an age that Garry described as half-child, half-man, Josh lived a relatively normal teenage life. He was a good student. He looked forward to school dances and was a starting guard on the Dalton eighth-grade basketball team. Up until now, with only a modest amount of his time devoted to study, his chess life had flourished, along with his jump shot. Since the age of nine, he had more often than not been the highest-rated player for his age in the United States. He had won four scholastic national championships and, soon after returning to the States from Linares, he would win two more, the high school national championship and the U.S. cadet, or under-16, championship.

  But Josh knew that, relative to the grandmasters in this tournament of tournaments, he was a raw beginner. Much more than an amateur, a chess master could appreciate how very hard it was to become as good as the worst player in Linares. It was not unlike a star high school basketball player gauging the distance between his game and that of an NBA all-star. The young ball player who could hit the jump shot from fifteen feet had yet to prove that he could learn to do it from twenty feet, with bigger and stronger players draped all over him. A world-class grandmaster-in-progress must come equipped with the imagination to create unexpected and resonant ideas, along with a powerful calculating brain. But there were hundreds of talented young chess players around the world, much as there were eager kids in every city seemingly born with beautiful moves to the hoop and a tremendous vertical leap.

  At fourteen, Josh was aware that the next big jump in chess would come not so much as the result of talent as from greater commitment and training. During the past year or two, Josh had noticed that his appetite for study had steadily increased as he had gained a deeper understanding of the game. But my son was still far from sure that he wanted to spend a full working week studying chess. And perhaps forty or fifty hours a week would not be enough. Gata Kamsky studied twelve hours a day. When Valery Salov, another grandmaster competing in Linares, was in deep training, he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. There was no cultural precedent for an American youth to lean upon to make this kind of commitment. If an American boy were to study chess twelve hours a day, he would be considered misguided or crazy. I suspected that this trip to Linares might make Joshua’s life more complicated. Before coming here, the chess tournaments he knew were inelegant events in the States. In Linares, and a handful of other elite tournaments around the world, players were catered to like royalty, and the worst player would earn several thousand dollars a week. While Josh watched this altogether different chess experience, I knew that he would be measuring his potential and deciding if he wanted this life for himself.

  In the Hotel Anibal, the fourteen grandmasters played on a modestly-raised stage at the end of a large room. About a hundred paying fans followed the action on computerized displays that were located behind each of the games and showed the current position, along with the remaining time on each player’s clock. At the beginning of games, there was a jaunty, almost relaxed atmosphere on the stage, with players smiling at friends in the audience, while a waiter served them coffee, tea or soda. After thinking and making a move, a player might stand up from his board and begin to pace in an alley between the tables and the computerized display boards. There were often four or five players pacing at once, and for the most part they seemed oblivious to one another, but occasionally a few of them would stop to chat or joke around. As the games became tense and complicated, the pacing grew more intense, with grandmasters furrowing into their positions as they walked. One or two of the grandmasters were in the habit of picking up the pace after coming upon a promising idea. This was infectious, and quickly, four or five of the men, calculating deeply with eyes staring faraway or even rolled toward the ceiling, raced the length of the stage, then wheeled sharply and dashed back the other way. Kasparov was the best pacer. He was the fastest, but more, his gait had a relentless, biting quality, and he wagged his head, sneering at games as he passed them. It was a fast and angry walk, and more than once I noticed a player skip out of Kasparov’s way.

  At the start of the eighth round, Gata Kamsky’s father, Rustam, approached the elderly lady assistant to Mr. Rentero, complaining of chest pains. They soon left for the hospital, leaving onlookers in the lobby concerned, although some of the players were skeptical. Gata was playing very poorly in this tournament, losing game after game, and for each defeat, the father and son precipitated a controversy. Early on, Rustam had ordered Gata not to drink from the large opened bottles of mineral water, because, according to one of the players, Rustam believed that Kasparov’s assistant, Alexander Shakarov, was looking for an opportunity to poison Gata. Each round, there was a big argument about Gata’s score sheet. In the Linares tournament, it was a rule that at the conclusion of the game, each player must turn in his signed score sheet, but the Kamskys had decided that the rule was unprincipled and they refused. Some players said that Gata and his father were getting fifty dollars from a collector in New York for each score sheet. But others believed that Rustam was just making trouble. Gata wrote formal letters to Rentero, claiming that
he was being harassed during games about this rule, and Rentero was furious. “If they don’t produce them, they won’t get their money,” he said before the eighth round, but he had decided not to tell the Kamskys this until the end of the tournament, for fear that they would drop out before the end. “I’m not going to allow this sixteen-year-old kid and his father to ruin my tournament.”

  Apparently, creating controversy was Rustam’s double-edged tactic to wake up Gata, who was quiet and placid by nature, and to distract Gata’s opponents. But in Linares, despite Rustam’s imaginative diversions and his evil-eye stare at his son’s hated opponents, Gata continued to lose and was mired in last place. At the hospital, the doctor had found nothing wrong with Rustam, and when he was asked to pay for his examination, he became enraged, claiming that he had been forced to come to the hospital against his will by Mr. Rentero’s assistant. An hour after the start of the eighth round, Rustam was back in the hotel and once again complaining that the score sheet harassment had ruined Gata’s chances in the tournament. He returned to the playing hall in time to watch Gata blunder his eighth-round game against Jonathan Speelman.

  As for Kasparov and Karpov, they played one another as though their fighting hearts were somewhere else, perhaps still back in Lyon in their three-month struggle. Neither player was willing to take any chances and their game was a lackluster draw, the 113th played between these world champions. Within seconds of the handshake, they were both smiling, walking quickly off the stage to go to the analysis area. With grandmasters and journalists jammed around their table, Karpov and Kasparov moved the pieces and spoke softly to one another. Karpov giggled. Garry smiled handsomely, sitting erect at the board, as though a photographer were taking cover shots.

  The postmortem is a venerable tradition. It is an opportunity for players who have been guarding the most exquisitely-crafted secrets to share them, to learn how closely the opposing mind had shadowed the decisive plan and the scores of other plans that had been rejected. It is a time to learn from mistakes, and for the loser of a game it is a form of catharsis. Working through interesting ideas begins to make the loser feel whole again.

  But for Karpov and Kasparov, it was a larger occasion. Dialectically, each had shut the other out of his life. The number one and two in the world could never be friends, but the postmortem was a singular opportunity to explore one another, apart from the statements they had made in anger and for political effect, and apart from the hype of journalists. Garry was a virtuoso in this hour-long analysis session. He pointed his forefinger at a thousand squares, dismissed deep possibilities with a raised eyebrow. But occasionally Karpov demonstrated a powerful move and Garry nodded without argument. I said to one of the grandmasters that Garry seemed to see much more than Karpov, and the man answered, “Yes, but it is Garry’s manner to tell everything that he sees. Karpov will only tell a little.” Although twenty people surrounded them, the two world champions acted as though they were alone. During one stretch, grandmaster Ljubomir Ljubojevic, a loquacious man and a bold attacking player, kept interrupting with plans that he couldn’t keep to himself. Finally, Karpov said. “Yes, we know,” in his most imperial and dismissive voice.

  After this session, Josh and I went with Garry to his room. He and Josh looked at chess for an hour before Garry’s meeting with Bessel Kok. Bessel was in Linares for a GMA meeting to be held the following day, and was coming to Kasparov’s room to give him a briefing. I was not sure what Garry expected from the GMA meeting, but the prospect of talking with Bessel had an uplifting effect. Although Bessel had become an adversary, it was clear that Garry retained some attachment for the older man. On another occasion, I had been visiting Kasparov in Moscow before he left for Spain to participate in a symposium with Kok and several others. One morning while we were in the office, Garry had received a fax saying that Bessel was canceling his appearance. Garry had made no attempt to hide his disappointment. While Garry sorely wanted to defeat Bessel in their political fights, he nonetheless enjoyed having Bessel in the game. Bessel’s was one of a half-dozen friendships with successful, middle-aged businessmen Garry had cultivated in the West. Perhaps because Garry, in his own words, “doesn’t have the right character for business,” he was drawn to men who did.

  Bessel came with a briefcase of disturbing news. In the meeting tomorrow, the GMA would consider a proposal by Gata Kamsky to require the world champion to play in the candidates cycle—to compete in the elimination event to determine the final contenders to play for the world championship—instead of simply defending his title against the winner of the candidates, as was the current practice. In addition, they would probably vote to do away with adjournments in the 1993 championship, a rule change Kasparov opposed. And finally, they would almost surely vote against offering the world champion any appearance money to play in future GMA tournaments.

  During dinner, Garry brooded over this news. To force the world champion to play in the candidates cycle was sheer lunacy. It would mortally compromise the mystique and prestige of the institution of world champion. The world title event, as presently constituted, was the only bankable commodity in the chess world. If an organizer could no longer count upon a reigning king, the best chess mind in all the world, to defend in three years, how would he ever entice sponsors to put up millions? Needless to say, Kasparov would never acquiesce to such an arrangement, and most likely the GMA would vote the plan down, but the fact that it was being seriously considered was a slap in the face to Garry, and an indication of the widening gulf between him and much of the world’s chess elite. Also, by telling Garry that they were not going to pay him an appearance fee to attend GMA tournaments, the organization that he had created was saying, in effect, we don’t want you and we don’t need you.

  In the meeting the following afternoon, that attitude was made manifestly clear. The GMs voted down the Kamsky proposal, but the English grandmaster Nigel Short, a hero in his country since showing great chess promise as a young boy, was pudding-pleased to announce that the GMA would not be offering appearance money to Kasparov, because it would not be democratic. Nigel flashed a cherubic smile, while describing the wrongfulness of treating Kasparov differently from any other grandmaster. Bessel appeared pained. He knew that he was dead in the water in the chess management business without Kasparov. Without Garry’s charisma and ability to attract commercial sponsorship, GMA tournaments were destined to fail. Bessel came to Garry some hours after this meeting with an offer to pay him money under the table to play in GMA tournaments. Garry refused. Several months later, when Bessel resigned as chairman of the GMA, it was interpreted in the chess world as the effective end of the organization, but in fact, the GMA had committed suicide in Linares.

  Fred Friedel, the brains behind ChessBase, was close to Kasparov, as well as to many of the top grandmasters who disliked the champion. Friedel pointed out that the erosion of Garry’s popularity among the chess-playing elite predated his disputes within the GMA. “When Garry first won the title, he was a hero,” said Friedel. “Everyone loved him, and Karpov was universally hated. But after several years, the complaints began: Garry is trying to take control of everything. He will not allow dissidence. His behavior at tournaments is bad. He is completely egotistical. Top players have been remarkably blind to the money and prestige Garry has brought into chess. They don’t like him. They say he is a tyrant. Well, of course Garry does have a tyrannical side. He likes to have his way and he is an outrageously impatient man. His mind wanders if people beat around the bush. But he is also resented because of his worldliness. Chess is only a part of his life, and this is unusual for grandmasters, and they find it disturbing. One must have a sense for Garry’s day and the scope of his life. When he is visiting Germany, he often meets with fifty or more people in a day. For the first twenty, he is quite polite, but after this he is in a haze and it drives him crazy listening to a long prologue. His critics say that you cannot argue with him. But this is simply not true. We have argued about
many things. I tell him that he makes mistakes with the other players, allows himself to be misunderstood. At tournaments, he hangs out only with his friends. I tell him all the time to mingle with all the players, and he says this is like socializing with the enemy. They dislike him openly and he finds fraternizing hypocritical. Garry says, fine, you don’t like me, do without me.”

  The groupings and body English of the grandmasters in the players’ dining room at the Hotel Anibal were suggestive of Kasparov’s increasing isolation in the chess world. After the Karpov game, Garry sat at a table with Alexander Shakarov, Josh and myself. He rarely ate with other players. Three or four tables away was the English grandmaster Jonathan Speelman, joined on this night by grandmaster Nigel Short, who had visited Linares for the GMA meeting. They nodded and forced a smile our way. “They hate me,” commented Garry, while he chewed his swordfish. Spassky, also in Linares for the GMA meeting, did not say hello. At a nearby table, eating alone, grandmaster Salov nodded, and then for the next three courses avoided eye contact. At another table, Gata and Rustam Kamsky sat with Karpov, and eventually they were joined by Ivanchuk. The Kamsky-Karpov table radiated loathing, although Ivanchuk existed apart from it. During meals, Rustam, showing his gold front tooth, would glare for long malevolent minutes at Garry, while Gata stared at Josh. What to do at such moments? Smile urbanely? Try to ignore them? It felt awkward to eat Paella Valenciana while being murdered by a stare. One night, Josh tried to stare Gata down and failed miserably; after a half minute, his eyes fell back into his spaghetti and meatballs.

  Karpov and the Kamskys had become good friends, chatting after rounds and usually dining together. “They deserve one another,” said Garry glumly. Apparently, the friendship had begun a month earlier at the Reggio Emilia tournament in northern Italy. “It was like evil being drawn to evil,” recalled Mikhail Gurevich, who had also played there. “They were together all the time. It was there, I am certain, that Karpov hatched the plan to have Kamsky formally propose that Kasparov must enter the world championship cycle at the candidates level. Karpov knew that the idea would infuriate Garry, and perhaps throw off his chess. A sophisticated and clever idea. Rustam has a primitive mind and could never have come up with it on his own.”