Searching for Bobby Fischer (16 page)

When Joshua is playing well, the two of them seem to complete each other. The pupil brings his imagination and competitive spirit to bear upon the ideas that the teacher writes about in his articles and books. Hours of memorizing openings, of wrestling with problems and of endgame exercises translate into wins and a gradually maturing chess style. Soon after turning eight, Josh won twenty-six out of twenty-seven tournament games and placed first in tournament after tournament, including the New York City Primary Championship. Playing among his peers, he seemed unable to lose. In all likelihood he would be the number-one seed in the National Primary Championship in the spring.

Through Josh, Pandolfini was playing the game he had given up thirteen years before, but without the burden of having to endure either losses or wins tainted for him by the pain inflicted on the loser. For the most part Josh thrived on tournament play. He would wake up on Saturday mornings and ask excitedly, “Is my tournament today?” Unlike his teacher, he felt terrific when he won. When Josh did well, Bruce, like the teachers of other talented children, was undoubtedly spurred on by the hope that he was teaching a future champion.

*    *    *

ALTHOUGH PANDOLFINI WORKED
at presenting a pleasant, even exterior, his interest in Josh’s chess study rose and fell in relation to many factors, including the chaos or happiness in his life, his publishing commitments and how much sleep he was getting. Josh always noticed when Bruce had other things on his mind, and he rated his lessons in much the same way as his teacher judged him by awarding “master class” points, decorative stickers and colored stars. At the end of their lesson, while pasting dinosaur stickers in Joshua’s lesson book, Bruce might say, “You did some good work today, Tiger, but you were a wise guy. I’m only gonna give you twenty-one points.” After Pandolfini left, Josh might say, “Bruce seemed distracted today,” or “Bruce was very sharp.”

When Josh was feeling bored with chess, or too tired after school to concentrate, he was apt to feel irritated with Bruce. Then he would sit as far away as possible from his teacher, his hands covering his ears as if trying to shut out the street noise, but in fact trying his hardest to tune out his teacher. There were periods when he simply couldn’t bear the rigor of his lessons. Playing chess was one thing, but analyzing with Pandolfini was work. During weeks of trying to wake up his distracted student, Bruce’s softness and good humor would give way to prodding lectures that Joshua either didn’t understand or didn’t care to heed. Pandolfini’s attempts at politeness took on the sound of irritation, and Joshua’s little jokes, which during good times were grace notes to serious study, became examples of his lack of concentration. As though he himself were the reason for his pupil’s poor play, Pandolfini would complain at the start of a lesson that he had been working too hard and was tired. It must have occurred to him that all these hours of study might come to nothing, that this clever little boy might not really be a chess player after all. When Josh was playing poorly, Bruce looked frayed and was harder to reach on the phone. During these periods Josh would point out that his lessons weren’t as long as they used to be, that Bruce looked distracted and complained a lot, and that his teacher didn’t really like him anymore. Bonnie and I would assure him that this wasn’t so, but in fact there were periods, as in all marriages, when they weren’t fond of each other.

Pandolfini had become my friend as well as my son’s teacher, but I saw that when we got together frequently or spoke regularly on the phone, Josh tended to withdraw from Bruce and to be less interested in his lessons. At such times, without ever talking about it, Bruce and I called each other less often and rarely socialized. Joshua’s chess was more important to both of us than beer and good conversation.

FOR PANDOLFINI
,
AS
well as for other teachers, like Sunil Weeramantry, Svetozar Jovanovic and Bobby Fischer’s former teacher, John Collins, there is little or no irony about the endeavor of imparting large doses of arcane chess information to young children. Once, during Joshua’s first year of study with Bruce, I asked Collins, the dean of American chess teachers, how often a talented youngster ought to study with a chess master. He answered immediately, “Every day,” but then added sadly, “Of course it’s not possible.”

One afternoon at the Manhattan Chess Club before his weekly lesson with Pandolfini, Josh, who was then six, paused to watch seventeen-year-old Maxim Dlugy, the strongest player for his age in the country, take his lesson with a Russian emigré, Vitaly Zaltzman, who is one of our few master-level trainers. With his customary baby brashness my son offered a few suggestions to Dlugy and Zaltzman. They spoke in Russian and for the most part analyzed without paying any attention to him, but later Zaltzman came over to me and asked, “What is his rating?” When I explained that Josh, who at that time was sitting on a telephone book to see the pieces, had never played in a tournament, Zaltzman looked at me quizzically. Why not?

IN THE PRIMARY
grades of the Dalton School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, children learn reading, writing and arithmetic within a carefree environment of playacting, backyard archaeological expeditions, musical productions and museum and farm visits, all administered by good-natured and tolerant teachers. But in the chess class, Svetozar Jovanovic, a Yugoslavian emigré, lectures to his six-to-nine-year-olds with the ceremony and dry sobriety of a no-nonsense college professor. Dalton’s chess program, designed
and run by Jovanovic, is the most ambitious and successful primary and secondary school chess program in the United States. Following the Soviet and Eastern European example, all children at Dalton are introduced to the game, and those with talent are encouraged to pursue advanced studies in an after-school program. The results are extraordinary. For the past several years, out of the top fifty chess players eight and under in the United States, nearly 30 percent went to Dalton, a medium-sized private school.
*

Like no one else I have ever met, Svetozar Jovanovic has the ability to communicate the sublime importance of chess. At the start of a class, he looks at his giggly group of children poking and kicking one another, their mouths smeared with after-school snacks from the newsstand on Lexington Avenue. Sternly he takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger as if to say, Why am I wasting my time on you guys? Soon the children become quiet and attentive. Jovanovic places a basket of beat-up pieces in front of each player, the kind of basket used to serve hamburgers and greasy fries at diners. His manner and conviction invest these chipped little armies with enormous power and tradition, as if the class were about to participate in an ancient rite. He begins by describing a game played a hundred years ago, his English heavily accented and laden with Russian chess jargon, and his eyes sparkle while he speaks about traps and combinations.

Many of his students, the children of millionaires, professionals, politicians, actors and rock musicians, wear designer labels. Jovanovic’s suits are disheveled, and he bemoans the privations of the chess teacher in America, but against all worldly logic he has these little kids believing that nothing is more important than this game—neither violin or tennis lessons nor weekends in the country. Chess is the real thing; it is sport, art and philosophy rolled into one. In his Yugoslavian accent, the names Alekhine and Botvinnik take on the religious significance of Moses or Jesus.

Jovanovic tells parents that it is important for the children to be
well-rounded and that schoolwork comes before chess, but during the one hour he spends with their kids each week, the game is larger than anything else, and he tolerates little fooling around. Again and again he sternly reminds the kids that if they don’t concentrate here, they won’t be able to attend to business during tournaments. He teaches them Russian so that they will be able to study Russian chess material. He drills them in problems and frequently explains that talent is no substitute for hard work. With pomp and circumstance he rates his players against the great Yugoslavian youth teams of the fifties. Jovanovic knows by heart thousands of games that talented children have played over the past thirty years, and when one of his students blunders into a trap, he can recall a similar disaster that happened seventeen years ago to an eleven-year-old in Yugoslavia.

Once, after Joshua had been accepted at Dalton, he lost a game in a local tournament to a ten-year-old. Jovanovic called later in the evening to inquire if our son was in bed yet; he wanted to talk about the game. While riding the subway back from the tournament to his apartment in Washington Heights, he had been analyzing Josh’s game in his head and had found a forced win for him on the seventeenth move. They played through the moves and quickly agreed on the pity of it: a forced win if only Josh had seen it. Perhaps someday Jovanovic will be lecturing a seven-year-old about moving too quickly and will bring up the example of Josh Waitzkin’s horrible oversight in 1986 against Vaughn Sandman.

“
THIS IS DRIVING
me nuts,” Josh said to Pandolfini during his lesson. He had been staring at the same position for nearly an hour, and wanted to turn on the Bill Cosby show, or to run outside and play football—anything to get away from this maze of chessmen, which he had rearranged in his head a hundred times. But after nearly three years of studying, there was another part of Josh that couldn’t bear to let it go like this. If Bruce were to say, “Okay, let’s forget about it, Tiger,” the position would nag at him for the rest of the evening. While Pandolfini rocked back in his chair and waited, it occurred to me that I had never studied anything this intensely before I was a college senior studying for comprehensive
exams. As a student, I was rebellious and looked for shortcuts; nevertheless, I have little patience for Joshua’s laziness and his lapses of concentration. It has become one of my greatest joys to watch my son work through difficult chess ideas, solving problems I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

Bruce knew his pupil very well. If he’d told him to look back at the board and try again, Josh would have argued or changed the subject. Pandolfini waited. In a few seconds Josh had worked through his resistance and was biting his shirt and mumbling, “Take, take, take, take, take, take.” Then, suddenly, “Oh! It’s so simple,” and he banged his head with his hand. Both of them were smiling. Pointing at squares and pieces and talking excitedly in a garble of algebraic notation, Josh demonstrated his lengthy plan while Bruce looked a little bored.

During these sessions the two of them were working on process more than on problems. Josh was learning to look further into a position, to restrain his first impulse in order to consider it from different perspectives. During their first year, Bruce had asked him always to consider at least two plans. Then he began asking for three or four plans. When Josh complained that he couldn’t look deeply enough without moving the pieces, or couldn’t hold the position in his head long enough to find the answer, Bruce urged him on like a physical therapist of the mind. At times when my son was thinking, I could see the strain of it on his face, as if he were stretching his brain like a muscle. Finally he would say something like “I forgot that pawn was there. It’s so simple. What an idiot I am.”

At the end of a tense lesson, the two of them sometimes played a few speed games, with Bruce giving Josh five-to-two time odds. Occasionally Josh won one of these games. Bruce would giggle and look embarrassed at the winning move, but whenever this happened Josh was never sure if Bruce had played his hardest or had merely allowed him to capitalize on a preconceived weakness to emphasize the lesson of the week.

For a young student, the teacher has mythic powers; he is the inventor of chess and the final word. At the age of eight, Josh furiously defended Pandolfini’s ideas against amused grandmasters;
he considered the notion of being able to defeat Pandolfini in a serious game impossible. Yet within several years he would probably become as strong a player as his teacher, Bruce remarked matter-of-factly, and then he would need to study with someone else, in all likelihood a grandmaster. Generally speaking, young chess talents develop quickly if they work at it.

OCCASIONALLY PANDOLFINI AND
I met for dinner, and inevitably our conversations turned to what he and Josh had been doing in their lessons. One night he explained that for the last few months they had been working on positional ideas. After a pause he added, “There has been great progress, but now we have to return to chess tactics. Then we’ll do more positional work, then more tactics.” I nodded; apparently it was like tacking a sailboat, and it made perfect sense. After a couple of beers Bruce spoke of Steinitz’s pawn formations and his theory of building a crushing attack by gaining advantages so small that they were almost impossible to perceive. My understanding of grandmaster-level chess is impressionistic. I will never be able to strangle my opponent positionally, but I love the idea. When Pandolfini is in top form, I feel as if I’m playing the game myself. He drank more beer and described Alekhine’s great battle with Capablanca in 1938, and what it was like to analyze games with Fischer in the sixties. During these dinners it seemed as if Josh and I had embarked on a thrilling adventure; we were tracking the greatest players who ever lived.

At other times Joshua’s chess work struck me as ludicrous. Perhaps he had been playing poorly or apathetically, or I was in a bad mood and all serious endeavor seemed pointless. In this frame of mind, my son’s chess education mortified me. I recalled the description of Victor Frias, an international master, of the life of the American chess master as “a vale of tears,” and felt chagrined with myself for encouraging this dead-end preoccupation. At that time Frias, one of the best players in the country, was driving a cab all night to eke out a living. Once, years before Josh became a player, I rode from the airport in a taxi with a driver who told me that he was a grandmaster. He described the places he had been and the people he’d beaten. I decided that he was a liar, but perhaps I was
wrong. Probably some of Frias’s fares have decided that he was lying when he mentioned his games against Korchnoi, Yusupov, Belyavsky and Larsen.