Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  “But it could not succeed. Not a chance. Although the reason was ignored by the CIA, by Western politicians and by the American media. The psychology of the Russian people had changed. A simple change. The entire communist system of power was based upon fear, but fear survives only if there is hope. For many years the population was afraid to lose jobs, afraid to be sent to labor camp; in the case of Soviet sportsmen, afraid to be barred from foreign competitions, to lose the opportunity to go abroad to earn hard currency. In the communist system there is terrible pressure not to lose something, even if it is a tiny privilege. If you have something in your life, you can lose it. The more you have, the more you are scared. During the years of perestroika, Gorbachev lost this critical control. With a little bit of freedom people could see. It was as if one morning people opened the windows and they saw the country was destroyed—its ecology was a disaster—Chernobyl. They can’t earn enough to live decently; the economy is ruined; children are unhappy to see that their parents are lying every day to survive; it is a moral disaster. The country is falling apart, and the West is flourishing. We are expelled from civilization. This country of ours is a toilet seat. For seventy-something years, the people had been living a lie. With this realization, there was a sense of a disappearing future and a loss of hope. When there is no hope, there is also no fear. And that’s the psychological reason that the coup failed. Hundreds of thousands were prepared to die. The military would have had to slaughter thousands, and they weren’t prepared to do this. The coup failed in two days because there was a feeling of hopelessness and a lack of fear.”

  Following the failure of the coup, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kasparov quietly changed his course, withdrew from the Russian political scene at a time when many thought he would become a leader. “Almost overnight there was no political life where I could find my place. I was not interested in fighting for positions, for a corner of power. To stay in politics I would be obliged to fight very miserable battles. And frankly, the Russian government under Yeltsin didn’t mean much to me. Too many compromises. I decided to wait.”

  But perhaps more importantly, Kasparov was facing a crisis in his chess life. He had become a beatable player. In May of ’91, two months after failing to win the Linares tournament, Garry embarrassed himself in the Euwe Memorial in Amsterdam, tying for third with Karpov behind Valery Salov and Nigel Short. After this second weak performance in a row, grandmasters were agreeing that Kasparov had lost the magic. “After Amsterdam, I realized that if I did not change my life I would become an ordinary player,” said Garry. “I did not have enough energy to live both of these lives. But before the election in Moscow, it was still impossible to focus on chess.” Following the coup attempt, there was a winning effort in Tilburg, but then Garry failed once again in the Immopar Trophée, losing to Timman in the final round. Next Garry played the Reggio Emilia tournament in northern Italy and performed miserably. “Four tournaments in one year that I didn’t win. At least I was making the other players happy. When I lost to Anand in Tilburg, Timman and Short were laughing. After Reggio Emilia, grandmasters were writing in chess magazines, ‘He’s just another player. It’s an old chess Kasparov is playing. The game has passed him by.’”

  But, despite the poor result in Reggio Emilia, Kasparov was once again feeling the game come alive within him. For the first time in two years, spurred by the glee of his peers, who had already committed him to history, Garry had begun studying systematically and craved chess combat. Garry’s next event was a simultaneous exhibition against the German national team of four respected grandmasters. The winner-take-all prize was a BMW. Chess aficionados gave Kasparov almost no chance to win this extravagant event. “Before the start of play, the Germans were figuring how they would sell the BMW and share the money,” remarked Garry. Charged by the craziness of the challenge, Garry had studied the games of the grandmasters for four days around the clock to unearth technical deficiencies and psychological weaknesses which he might exploit.

  The exhibition was played in front of 1500 spectators and was shown live on German television. The champion employed devilish tactics to make each of his opponents uneasy, ignoring one man as though he were contemptibly weak, while focusing like a laser on the other three. His moves probed the timidities and dark fears of each of them. Having decided that one player lacked courage, he cajoled him into accepting an early draw, which soured the mood of the German team. Switching from one game to the next, Kasparov created deep complexities, actually pressuring his august opponents on the clock, though each of them had four times as many minutes for thinking as he did. Garry outfoxed his opponents and then overwhelmed them with his power and speed. A stunning victory.

  Throughout 1992, Garry studied chess, played in the world’s toughest tournaments, and traveled almost monthly to the United States to help the organizer of the 1993 title defense, an American entrepreneur, Jim McKay, find sponsors for the event, which was to be held in Los Angeles. Garry believed that holding a world championship in California, with a year and a half to plan ancillary chess events and to arrange television coverage, would raise the sport to a new level, and he worked on the project with missionary zeal. When Apple showed strong interest in becoming the primary sponsor, he envisioned a great chess awakening in America.

  In 1992 Kasparov played some of the greatest chess of his career. He won the Linares tournament with an overwhelming score, showed dazzling power and inventiveness in the chess Olympiad, where he played first board for the winning Russian team, played equally well in the European championship, won the Immopar Trophée, and finished the year with an international rating of 2805, the highest in the history of chess. Focusing more or less exclusively on the game, Kasparov left his major competitors in the dust.

  Throughout the year, Karpov continued to struggle, most importantly eliminating himself from the ’93 world championship by losing to Nigel Short in the semifinals of the candidates matches. For the first time in his career, Kasparov would be playing the world championship against someone other than Karpov. Following Ivanchuk’s memorable victory over Kasparov in Linares, Vassily played up-and-down chess, his great talent hampered by bad nerves. Gelfand lost rating points, and although Anand and Kamsky continued to improve, by year’s end even Kasparov’s detractors were forced to acknowledge that the champion was in a class by himself.

  But this lofty distinction brought its own problems. Apple eventually decided against sponsoring the world championship, and over the ensuing months, while Timman and Short prepared for the final candidates match, there was little interest among American corporations in sponsoring a big-money event in California between Kasparov and some foreign grandmaster who had little chance to make the match competitive. “No one cares about this championship match,” said Garry, growing more frustrated with each trip to the States. “Nigel Short or Jan Timman, it’s like no opponent. I find myself in the position of hustling around trying to raise this money, and people are thinking, what are you doing, raising this money for yourself?” Indeed, when Anand heard that Kasparov’s challenger in ’93 would be either Nigel Short or Jan Timman, each with a woeful record against the world champion, Anand commented dryly that such a match would be unfair and that Kasparov should play them simultaneously to keep the title. “This would be an interesting match,” Garry said, his spirits lifted momentarily by the fantasy of an event that might generate some interest. “I think I could beat them both if the match were kept to ten games or less. After this they would wear me down.” By the summer it was clinched that no major sponsor would finance a glitzy chess mismatch in California in 1993. As Bruce Pandolfini had predicted at the end of the last world championship, Karpov’s fall from power had become a grave problem for Kasparov.

  The next possibility unearthed by Jim McKay was to hold the match in Hamilton, Ontario; sponsored by the Canadian government. As Kasparov came to terms with this off-the-beaten-track venue, a diminished prize fund, and the likelihood that che
ss would not displace baseball as our national pastime in the fall of 1993, Bobby Fischer was suddenly back on the front pages of newspapers and on the nightly television news.

  The Fischer-Spassky rematch, referred to as “The World Chess Championship,” at Fischer’s insistence, was held in the fall of ’92 in the war-torn remains of Yugoslavia and was won by Fischer by a 10–5 score. Hundreds of journalists made their way to the island of Sveti Stefan, where the match began, and then camped in Belgrade for its conclusion. At Fischer’s direction, the games were played behind a glass shield, and fans could barely see the moves. Photographers were, for the most part, not allowed to take pictures, and journalists who approached Fischer were sometimes harassed by armed thugs. This bizarre chess spectacle was organized by Jezdimir Vasiljevic, a banker and known war profiteer closely associated with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.

  During Fischer’s nine press conferences, he referred to himself as “the world champion,” and called Kasparov a pathological liar, alleging that Kasparov had fixed all of his games with Karpov. He railed against Jews and spat upon State Department documents warning him of the penalties for violating sanctions by playing this match in Serbia. But for the majority of chess lovers around the world, the reemergence of Bobby Fischer eclipsed his off-color rhetoric and the disquieting juxtaposition of chess and genocide on nightly television newscasts. The Great One had wakened from a twenty-year sleep to reclaim his kingdom. This was Bobby’s greatest chess trick since disappearing. Chess players were delirious to see the innovations he had conceived during his long respite, and they resisted the Hyde side of Bobby. One frail old Jewish lady with thinning hair, a longtime member of the Manhattan Chess Club, became enraged when I mentioned that Bobby was saying terrible things about Jews. “Why are you spreading these disgusting lies?” she asked me bitterly. “What do you have against him?”

  Spassky proved to be a very weak opponent, and the quality of the games was so uneven that top chess minds are still uncertain of Fischer’s playing strength, but in the excitement of the first weeks of the match Fischer fans tended to ignore Bobby’s blunders and doted on his brilliancies. Players in Washington Square wanted to believe that Bobby was stronger than Garry, and they demonstrated Fischer’s finest moments against Spassky as proof. In his commentaries, Seirawan extolled Bobby’s play and pointed out that Fischer taunted Kasparov by playing improvements in lines favored by Garry.

  But the real Fischer magic was his effect upon the general public. Overnight, people were interested in chess. All the television news shows carried stories about Bobby Fischer, and his games were analyzed on the news pages of the tabloids. One evening I took a taxi uptown, and the driver asked me what had happened in today’s chess game. The guy who makes sandwiches at my neighborhood deli wanted to talk Fischer while he built my ham and cheese.

  During the first weeks of the match, Garry tried to sound matter-of-fact about Bobby, but you could tell that Fischer was leaning on him heavily. “Bobby is playing okay, nothing more,” he said to me, with a drawn face. “Maybe his strength is 2600 or 2650. It wouldn’t be close between us. In fact, Bobby would lose a match against any of the top grandmasters today. If he were to try to play in a high-level tournament like Linares, one top player after the next gunning for him with the modern ideas, Bobby would die before the end of the event. It wouldn’t be a question of winning or losing. Sometime before the end of the tournament, Bobby would die.”

  Of course, Kasparov felt jilted by the Fischer love-in, but more, he felt blindsided. While talking blasphemy, Fischer was, nonetheless, making millions of people curious about the game. Garry, on the other hand, was finding it impossible to interest a sponsor for the world championship. How could he not grind his teeth when he read that there were more million-dollar deals lined up for Bobby as soon as he finished off Spassky—millions to play against Judit Polgar, millions more to play against Anand? Journalists rarely asked Kasparov a question about his coming match against either Nigel Short or Jan Timman; they wanted his view on Bobby. He tried to be generous, but his public statements sounded stiff and ill-tempered. When asked about the quality of chess in the match, Kasparov said it was mediocre—in fact he considered it awful—two middle-aged has-beens playing bad chess for a five-million-dollar purse.

  When asked if he would play Bobby in a match, Garry answered that he would, under the right conditions, yes, but he felt uncomfortable giving Fischer a podium from which to propagate his neo-Nazism. Many chess fans considered Kasparov’s response querulous, and some took it to mean that he was afraid of Bobby. When Garry said that he had no doubt he would beat Bobby badly in a match, I believed him. But still, how could he not worry a little in the middle of the night? He would go into such a match burdened with the knowledge that pummeling fifty-year-old Bobby would not win him any more admirers than the Grinch who stole Christmas.

  In fact, for Garry, Fischer’s comeback was torture. At times he would speak of Bobby with a sneer on his face, “He’s a weak player, he’s a crazy man.” I didn’t want to hear these things from him. The jealousy of kings is very loud. Lest the game become trivial, Michael Jordan must not speak ill of Julius Erving.

  “Garry, don’t repeat the error of Spassky and Botvinnik,” I said.

  Garry smirked, and averted his face. “You know, I’m a pretty clever fellow. I know what to say,” he answered.

  “Forgive Bobby his craziness, and the weakening of his memory and tactics. You will be almost fifty soon enough. I know about being almost fifty.”

  “You are not old, Fred,” he answered. “You are not old. You are not old. Do you hear me?”

  “It’s a shame,” Garry said. “It’s a shame he came out of retirement. It ruined his invincibility. His reputation is tarnished.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Garry. Not badly.” The little Jewish lady at the Manhattan Chess Club still loves him. Bruce Pandolfini still loves him. You should see Bruce’s smile when he plays through Bobby’s combinations. Bobby is in our blood. Josh and I would not be living the chess life today were it not for Bobby.

  Garry knew this. He sighed. “What can I do, Fred?” He shook his head slowly, his mood softened.

  “Maybe we could play,” he said slowly. “I don’t care what Bobby says about me. His political opinions are not very serious, because he is not responsible for what he says. It could be ignored.”

  Garry had changed a great deal in the three years since we became friends. He listened much more closely. He was not so impatient. He had been humbled a little by losing and considered that okay. He would admit that losing has broadened him.

  * * *

  After Fischer beat Spassky, the U.S. State Department announced that Fischer would be prosecuted, and would face a fine and possible imprisonment for violating sanctions. After receiving this news, Bobby disappeared again, probably to somewhere in Serbia, from where he could not be extradited, where he has always been loved for his game and where his political views today seem no more outrageous than those of his Serbian hosts.

  Bobby Fischer brought Kasparov nothing but bad luck. By the end of November, the Canadian government had decided that it did not want to sponsor a world championship match. This decision made it nearly definite that there would be no world championship in North America in 1993. It was a stinging defeat for Garry. “A great failure and disappointment,” he said. “I spent a year and a half of my life trying to accomplish this. I paid a huge price to be disappointed. In December, I was quite depressed.”

  When I visited Garry in the beginning of January, 1993, at the St. Regis Hotel, I expected to find a gloomy world champion, but I was far from sure about this. Invariably, when I see him for the first time in two or three months, he surprises me, shakes my confidence in my most recent pages about him. He greeted me by picking me up off the ground with a hard sweet hug. “Look at this, Fred,” he said, making a muscle. “I am down to a hundred and seventy pounds. I am in training. Get Josh to come tomorrow morn
ing. We’ll see who can do more push-ups.” Garry was in such great spirits, full of new ideas. He had just returned from Las Vegas and was negotiating with MGM to put on a huge show in the desert in 1994 called “Man versus Machine.” Kasparov would play against the next generation chess computer, a monster machine, much more advanced than the current champion of computers, Deep Thought, which has defeated many strong grandmasters. “This event will lead to other events. It will interest huge companies.” In one hour, Garry had a meeting in the restaurant downstairs with four wealthy businessmen who were interested in chess promotions in the United States. “Before Man versus Machine, I will crush Nigel Short to keep my title,” he remembered to add. Short had just defeated Timman to become Garry’s official challenger in 1993. “Then I will challenge the American national team—four very strong grandmasters—Seirawan, Wolff, Christiansen, Benjamin. I wonder if Seirawan will swallow his pride and play on the team? . . . For money he will swallow his pride.” This would be by far the most difficult simultaneous match ever attempted, and Garry was confident he could win. “A very strong group, but I like my chances.”

  “Why such optimism, Garry?” I needled. “Mostly things have gone badly for you of late. You know, sometimes I think our moods are more chemical than anything.”