Searching for Bobby Fischer (24 page)

An hour later two other fathers were arguing. One of them wanted to lodge an official protest because a child watching his son’s game had made a comment. “What did he say?” the other father inquired.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Your son won. It doesn’t sound as if you have anything to protest about.”

“Don’t you dare tell me when I should or shouldn’t lodge a protest.”

While we were killing time over coffee as our kids played an early round in the primary championship, Kalev Pehme, the father of a brilliant little player, said to me, “I don’t mind spending all my free time on Morgan’s chess. He has more talent for chess than I have for anything I do.” It was a disarming admission. “Did you notice that in the ratings he’s the number-one seven-year-old in the country?” Kalev went on. We are both writers, but whenever we get together our conversation invariably turns to scholastic chess, and we brag about the prowess of our seven- and nine-year-old sons like old men celebrating the professional accomplishments of their grown children.

Last year Josh won this tournament, which is generally considered the most important scholastic tournament besides the nationals. He had just turned eight, and for me this first major victory was filled with novelty, charm and promise. It was an event which somehow connected my cuddly baby boy to the young man he would someday be. Now, in 1985, he was one of the older children in the primary division and was seeded first. Parents and children expected him to win the championship a second time, and being the favorite seemed burdensome. “It’s much better not to be the number-one-rated player,” Josh said; he still had to sweat through his games to win, but the payoff would be less special. Although he was the highest-rated third-grade player in the country and was
playing well now, during the past year he had learned that other little kids could beat him and that he was likely to have ups and downs. Once when he was feeling depressed over a lost game I remarked that he was probably playing as well as Fischer had at eight, and he answered glumly, “Well, he must have gotten a lot better very fast.”

During the first day of the tournament, children who had finished would come by to watch Josh’s game. They would discuss his attacks and wonder how they stacked up against him. “Did you ever lose to a lower-rated player?” one little kid asked him as if he were addressing Dave Winfield.

After the first round, the father of Josh’s opponent came over and asked me timidly, “Did Josh say anything about how my son played?”

In passing Josh had mentioned that it had been an easy win. “He said your son played a terrific game,” I lied, watching the man hang on my words.

Joshua’s reputation had invested him with powers beyond his playing ability. Children were afraid of him; they blundered when playing against him or offered draws when they had strong positions. But only two months before he had wanted to stop playing, and despite his restored enthusiasm, Bonnie and I were keenly aware of his vulnerability.

GOING INTO THE
last round Joshua’s score was 4–1 and Morgan’s was 5–0. If Josh beat Morgan, they would tie for first place. During the last rounds parents were ordered to stay out of the playing room to eliminate accusations of cheating and to allow the kids to play without distraction.

We waited by the door. “You’re lucky that you don’t get nervous,” I joked with Kalev, whose face was white and trembling. Our friendship is one of co-conspirators. Kalev shamelessly plots and plans Morgan’s assaults on the chess world; his ambition has no boundaries, and the two of us trade fantasies about how great our kids are going to be. But sometimes Kalev’s fantasies make me nervous, because if Morgan, who is younger, were to win everything in sight, there would be nothing left for Josh.

“Hey, Josh, you’re losing,” I heard one of the kids exclaim behind the closed door, and I could see Kalev try to restrain a smile.

At primary tournaments, little kids milling in and out of the playing room give news flashes to desperate parents: “Josh is worse through the opening,” “Josh is down two pawns” or “Josh has a positional advantage.” The rumors are intoxicating and unsettling. Often the parent is depending on the acumen of the weakest players, because the strongest play more complicated games, which take more time. Usually a player will glance at the top board as he leaves the tournament room. Often he counts the pieces wrong; more often he misses the attack and only counts the pieces. Still, a parent has nothing else to go on.

The door swings open and I glimpse Joshua’s expression. He looks upset, so I’m sure he’s losing. I see a blur of pieces and am instantly convinced that he has fewer on the board. He must have lost his queen; that’s why his blur looks smaller than the other kid’s. How could he lose his queen to that fish? Irrationality over-whelms me, and even if the tournament director were to come out and report the position as one favorable to my son, I would still feel the defeat in my bones.

“Don’t believe him. Josh will pull it out,” Kalev said in response to the latest rumor flashing past on its way to the Coke machine. Kalev always says this when Josh is losing; it’s like knocking on wood. Even when my son is playing children other than Morgan, Kalev is conflicted. He wants Josh to win because we are friends, but he also roots for him to lose; he would like Morgan to have the higher rating. I feel similarly ambivalent when his son plays.

“No, he’s down material, he’s gonna lose,” I said, using the same tactic against him. I’ve held a crying Morgan on my knee, kissed his salty face and at the same time felt relieved that he lost. It would be agonizing for Josh to have his younger friend leapfrog ahead of him on the rating list.

After our kids had been playing for about thirty minutes, Morgan had to go to the bathroom. He waited for a few minutes outside the door with his father but someone was inside. A tiny, cherubic child who at that time could have passed for five, Morgan was
becoming upset; his clock was ticking. Finally Bonnie took him by the hand to a bathroom on the next floor.

A few minutes after they returned, a woman, a regular at the Manhattan Chess Club, came over and whispered in my ear. “Fred, did you watch Morgan when he went to the bathroom?”

“Why would I? Of course not.”

“You have to be careful,” she said in a singsong voice. “One of the fathers told me that Kalev will take any opportunity to give moves to Morgan.” I was too nervous and abstracted to focus on this remark until afterward. I knew that Kalev would never cheat against Joshua or anyone else. Some parents routinely start rumors about cheating by children and parents as a tactic. At the very least, such an accusation compromises the win or the spirit of one because it is difficult to disprove. Or perhaps it is not a tactic, but merely the raw manifestation of a parent’s conviction that his child simply cannot be bettered by another kid.

Eventually Joshua won the game, but Morgan won the city championship on a tiebreak, meaning that his opponents in the earlier rounds had better results in the tournament than Joshua’s.

DURING SEVERAL TOURNAMENTS
in 1985, I observed one father, who was about six foot six and had the overweight build of a retired defensive lineman, stationing himself squarely in front of his son’s opponent and staring at him throughout the game like Vladimir Zoukhar, the Russian parapsychologist who used to glare at opponents for Anatoly Karpov. His son, a year older than Joshua, was an exceptionally good player and would have won most of his games regardless of where his father stood. The man was devoted to his son’s chess, took him to the best teachers and traveled with him on weekends to tournaments. It was his dream that his boy would win the Aspis Award for the best player in the country under thirteen.

During the lunch break in one tournament that fall, Joshua was still playing, and this zealous father came over to Bonnie and offered to bring back a sandwich for him. Bonnie gladly accepted; unfortunately, in her preoccupation with the game, she forgot to pay the man. That afternoon, when our two children began to play
each other, he stormed over to her and demanded his money, and later, when his son’s position deteriorated, he walked from parent to parent, describing how Bonnie had tried to avoid paying him for Joshua’s lunch.

That tunafish sandwich was the beginning of a big problem for my family. A few months later our kids played again in a tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club, and the father began impugning our family character to anyone who would listen by describing the tunafish sandwich episode. It was a long, tough game. Bruce happened to be working in his office, and at one point he walked into the tournament room for a few minutes to check the positions of the more interesting games. That evening I received many phone calls from parents and officials at the club who relayed the assertion by this father that Pandolfini had signaled the winning moves to Josh by an elaborate system of ear-pulls and winks. For weeks he insisted to people that Joshua could not have beaten his son without Pandolfini’s covert assistance, and again recounted the sandwich incident as proof of the corrupt moral fiber of the Waitzkin family. I recalled Russian grandmaster Boris Gulko’s helpless rage when former world champion Tigran Petrosian claimed in
Izvestia
that Gulko’s exceptional results in 1975 must have been the result of cheating by his friends.

My relationship with this parent continued to deteriorate. The next time our kids played he grabbed me by the arm, pushed me against the wall and said that we should go outside and fight. By now Josh had become reluctant to play his son, fearing what would happen to me during the game. That winter, many parents and tournament directors were confronted by this father. During one tournament he spat at the well-mannered mother of a strong sixth grader, a rival of his son for the Aspis Award. From his behavior, one might conclude that this man is deranged; yet I’ve been told by several people who know him outside the chess environment that he is a decent and civilized human being.

THE VOYAGE OF
vicarious glory is a risky one for parents. “We have absolutely no social life,” said the hardworking parents of a brilliant young player, who travel to tournaments every weekend
and on most vacations with their talented son. Some of these events are three-day affairs, and these parents, who hardly know how to move the pieces, spend seventy-two hours holed up in a stuffy hotel. Everywhere there are games, the analysis of games, the tension of games, the anticipation of more games. There are games on every sofa and easy chair, games over hamburgers and french fries, games behind every pillar in the lobby. Such an event is hallucinogenic and relentless. While their child plays, the parents move listlessly, like fish in an aquarium, from table to table. They feel out of place and so tense that they can barely speak to each other. They are intelligent people, embarrassed about their avarice, but when their kid is winning, intoxication washes aside reservations. They’ve decided that it makes their son too nervous when they watch him play, so to pass the hours they look at the games of other talented kids, smiling supportively and feeling guilty about rooting against them.

If you ask these parents about their aspirations for their child, they answer swiftly, “Are you crazy? We don’t want him to grow up to be a chess player.” It is hard to believe them; why else are they devoting body and soul to his development? Yet their zealous support may ensure his choice of some other occupation. For some fathers and mothers, passion for their child’s success has become so gargantuan that the kid’s own predilections have been subsumed by their need. Some of the best young players go to tournaments with their wildly supportive parents to satisfy Mom and Dad rather than for love of the game, and as teenagers they will probably give it up when they discover other interests.

20

ROMAN

T
he day Grandmaster Roman Dzindzichashvili took up residence in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park everything seemed to change. Players walked differently—more stiffly or with a self-conscious shuffle or with a list in his direction. While appraising complicated positions, they assumed various affectations: a wink, a shrill laugh or a melancholic expression. One young player, a shy psychotic who spent much of his day mumbling quietly beneath the trees, began to flaunt his madness. Within eyeshot of the great grandmaster he would fall to his knees and make obscene sexual gestures at every woman who walked through the park. Another player, who for years had felt it necessary to incant the most vulgar language imaginable in order to play his best, suddenly assumed an attitude of understatement and urbane politeness; he moved his pawns with an uplifted pinky as if he were toasting royalty with an elegant wine. Some players stopped playing altogether, preferring to crowd around Dzindzi’s (pronounced Gin Gi’s) games. “For a glimpse of genius,” they would say, but perhaps their abstinence was more an act of shame, so that this grandmaster, recognized throughout the world for his brilliancies, would not notice their fumbling play and wasted lives in the park. But others were redeemed by Dzindzi’s presence; it was proof that their way of life was valid, even noble. One thin black man about forty, with knife scars crisscrossing his face, pronounced the name Roman with the familiarity of a dear, lifelong friend, but I don’t believe that they ever spoke.
He was a timid man and a weak player who lost most of his games. Year after year, during the outdoor months, he played with a brave little smile, though his game seemed to decline steadily. One afternoon, while Roman played blitz at an adjacent table, I asked the black man what he would do in the winter, when it was too cold to play in the park.

“I’ll stay in my room studying,” he answered with a fierce pride that I hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t have the money to go to the chess shop in the cold weather, so he would study in preparation for the following spring. In effect he was saying, “Bobby Fischer used to play here. Now Roman does, and so do I.”

AT THE TIME
, Roman Dzindzichashvili had the third- or fourth-highest rating in the United States, and most grandmasters would readily have admitted that he was the most talented active player in the country. Before emigrating to the United States in the late 1970s he had been a powerful grandmaster in the Soviet Union. Boris Gulko said that if Dzindzi had been born with the dedication to match his immense talent he might one day have challenged for the world championship. But now he was fed up with tournament chess in the United States, he would explain obliquely; others speculated that lately his gambling proclivities had made him unattractive to organizers, who may have stopped offering him accommodations or waiving his entrance fees in order to induce him to attend their tournaments. Whatever the reasons, in the summer of 1986 Dzindzi was a fixture of the chess corner of Washington Square, and every player was affected by his presence much in the same way that those in a small community are touched by that of a world-famous neighbor.