Searching for Bobby Fischer (2 page)

Long before he turned eight Josh knew that he was in a different class than his old man and in our games he stopped trying. While I carefully appraised the possibilities for each piece, he thumbed through books, looked out the window, chewed gum, chatted with his mother, cracked jokes, tapped his foot, sighed. Usually when he played in this indifferent manner he lost. I took his neglected knights and bishops. He yawned when I snatched his unprotected queen: so what, big deal. It made me furious. With a chess player’s reasoning and guile he pointed out that he was allowed to lose to me; he was only seven. Sometimes, after he’d carelessly lost a piece, I’d get impatient with him and sweep the chessmen from the board. I yearned to be beaten, but Josh would have no part of it. Once, after a particularly frustrating encounter, my wife, who frequently reminded us that there is life after chess, said, “Don’t you understand? He really doesn’t want to beat his daddy.” The remark stopped me in my tracks. In the heat of our competitions it had never occurred to me that my son might feel uncomfortable snuffing out his old man like an ant.

After that, Josh and I rarely played chess. Instead, I watched
his chess lessons or took him to play stronger opponents in Washington Square Park and in tournaments. In my new role as chess coach and fan I’ve come to feel compassion, if not grudging respect, for John McEnroe’s father and for other fathers and mothers like us, a beleaguered fraternity of watchers and worriers who have been unexpectedly sucked into a world in which we are not proficient.

Josh is a rough-and-tumble kid, handsome, with thick brown hair, his mother’s brown eyes and a sturdy body. Since the age of three he has called me Fred, though I would have preferred Daddy, and has waited impatiently for me to finish work in the evenings, as if my raison d’être were to throw him passes beneath the street-lights in front of our apartment building. After dinner he badgers me to wrestle with him on the living-room floor and argues to the last instant about how much more time remains before bed. To his schoolmates he is a basketball and football kid, a big eater, a good math student, but more conspicuously a cutup in class, often testing his teachers’ patience with tardy or sloppy homework and boisterous practical jokes. They know him as a vicious kickball player, a teaser, a candy maniac, crazy about the Hardy Boys but a scaredy-cat about horror and kung fu movies. To them his chess playing is a vague activity which results in big trophies. One afternoon during a conference with his second-grade teacher, Bonnie and I tried to explain that Josh had a special talent for the game. As we spoke the woman tapped her foot, as if we were describing a different boy from the one who couldn’t sit still in his chair and was struggling with reading and writing. We urged her to come to the park to watch him play; he just doesn’t seem like a chess player until you see him settle in front of the board, his body stiffening a little, his face becoming serene and ageless, the little boy taking leave for a time while Josh muses over ancient, difficult ideas.

OUTSIDE CHESS CIRCLES
, my involvement with Joshua’s chess is often perceived as a kind of quirky self-indulgence. I watch the parents of his friends make harsh, silent judgments when I try to explain that he is living a well-rounded life, but that there is simply no time for Little League. “What’re you doing with that boy? Chess? He should be taking piano and tennis lessons, playing stick-ball,
going to more Yankee games. And what about his religious education? You mean you’re keeping him out of Hebrew school because of tournaments?” Such disapproving messages confuse me and make me feel guilty. Perhaps Josh doesn’t really like chess, I tell myself. Maybe I’m forcing it on him. When I ask him how he feels about the game he shrugs in a way that suggests he likes video games more. Then I have to wonder if you can really trust what an eight-year-old says he likes. I’m the parent;
I
must decide what’s best for him. But what
is
best? Many afternoons Josh sits at the chessboard shielding his ears from the siren song of little boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk below our window. When I was seven, I’d have cried if my father had made such a demand. But my father didn’t make a little John McEnroe.

ONCE OR TWICE
a week, Joshua’s chess teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, arrives at our apartment at six-thirty in the morning, and our son stumbles out of bed in pj’s wearing a face as dreamy as his infant sister’s. But within a few seconds he has assumed the position—two hands under his chin—and is staring bullets at the chessboard. My little Karpov. Watching him sit at the board concentrating like a miniature master has become more exciting to me than watching Michael Jordan whirl 360 degrees and jam. But maybe Josh will hate me when he grows up. Will he spend years talking to a psychiatrist about the trip I laid on him at seven, when he stopped concentrating during a speed game with his eight-year-old friend Nicky Silvers?

WHENEVER JOSH IS
about to play in a tournament I’m haunted by the possibility that he isn’t any good, that his supposed talent is a house of cards manufactured by a father who thrives on fantasy. I bring a book or the Sunday
Times
to read while he plays his games. Hours pass with the paper on my knee but I haven’t read a paragraph. I’m preoccupied with his game. The last time I looked he was down a pawn. Did he get it back? Is he concentrating? Has he had too little to eat? Too much Coca-Cola? Other parents also pretend to read the Sunday paper while they worry. The kids sit monkishly in front of their chessboards, a roomful of miniature Erasmuses assiduously inscribing moves on score sheets. When
the games end, they offer their hands in congratulation like courtly gentlemen. But for the parents the tension is often too great and the veneer of nonchalance cracks. Mothers and fathers wring their hands, feel nauseous and shake. Veins in their foreheads pulse with tension. Sometimes they snap at one another or at the tournament director.

When he was eight, in the final round of the 1984 New York City Primary Championship, my son played against a boy also named Josh. A group of fifteen or twenty parents and children crowded around the game, which would decide the city championship for kids between the ages of six and nine. I was too nervous to watch and stood in the stairwell of the Manhattan Chess Club with a couple of mothers who were nursing babies. Someone asked me why I wasn’t watching. “I don’t want to make him nervous,” I lied. “The position is dead even,” someone called hastily from the door. “Josh is using too much time.” Which Josh?

At one point I caught the eye of the other Josh’s father, an intelligent, gentle man, and we nodded at one another, a little sad that it had come down to this: both of us rooting for an eight-year-old kid named Josh to crack under the tension and make a heart-breaking blunder. This father had been a star running back in college, and it occurred to me that he had probably never felt more pressure on the football field than he did right now, all of those bone-crunching games toughening him up for an afternoon like this, watching his son trying to outthink another kid.

“Josh is running out of time,” someone whispered loudly. “Josh is crying,” another boy said. Which Josh?

Finally I couldn’t bear the stairwell and went outside to walk around the block. When I returned twenty minutes later, it was all over. The awards ceremony was finished, and my Josh was joking and playing speed chess with another boy. They were having a good time, in between moves making plans to get together. The tournament was old news. When Josh caught my eye and lifted up the big first-place trophy, I made a gaudy high five from across the room. My son was a little embarrassed, but it was impossible for me to be casual. At such a moment, a parent is truly the child, giddy and dancing like a fool with fantasies of glory and immortality that he will carry to his grave.

2

FISCHER’S LEGACY

A
s a young man, I thought of chess as cerebral and boring, and I had no interest in learning to play. But on many summer afternoons in 1972, when Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky for the world championship, I found myself sitting in front of a television set with a few friends, rooting and even screaming at an outsized chessboard as if it were a basketball court rather than the evolving chess positions of two men sitting motionless thousands of miles away. At the beginning of the match I didn’t even know how the pieces moved, and yet these slow-moving esoteric battles filled me with passion and a yearning that at first I didn’t understand. I imagined the pressure the champion and the challenger must have felt as they tried to outwit each other, searching for the most intricate and subtle nuances of advantage while millions looked over their shoulders and second-guessed them. It must have been like trying to compose a sonnet with a guillotine blade poised to fall if the verse didn’t come up to Shakespeare’s. Each man bore the responsibility for his country’s national honor. Spassky would be Russia’s greatest hero if he won, and would fall into disgrace and lose his privileges if he didn’t. Fischer wanted to annihilate the Russians, whom he had hated since he had decided as a teenager that they cheated in international tournaments. If he won he would instantly become a legend; if he lost he would be dismissed by many people as a crackpot. Henry Kissinger gave his moral support to Fischer, and Brezhnev nervously awaited the results of each game. For many viewers, communism
and capitalism were fighting it out on afternoon television. Fischer’s precise style of chess was charged with innuendos of violence and irrationality; like a Rambo of the mind he talked of crushing his opponent’s ego. Spassky, on the other hand, was urbane, ironic, intellectual, an aesthete and an exquisite foil for Fischer’s crude excesses. That summer of 1972, chess became monumental, a game unlike any other, and everyone wanted to play.

I HAVE ALWAYS
loved sports even though I was never exceptionally good at them. But in 1972, along with millions of other Americans, I discovered the sport of thinking. It seemed tailor-made for me. I have patience and good reasoning ability and am happy sitting for hours working on a paragraph or turning over an idea. In the flush of Bobby’s winning, I decided that chess might be my sport. During the course of the match I learned the moves and a few simple tactics. I bought elegant wooden pieces and began to play games against my friends. I watched how slowly the moves came in from Reykjavik, Iceland, and at least to that extent I patterned my games after those of the championship contenders. I thought about each move for a long time, sometimes for half an hour, like Fischer and Spassky, which drove my friends to distraction. They urged me to move faster, made fun of me, threatened to quit, but I tried to ignore their ill humor and to concentrate on the position. I recalled what Bobby had said: “I don’t think about the man, only about good moves.”

Each game I listened attentively to National Master Shelby Lyman and to Bruce Pandolfini, another master who appeared regularly on the show, and tried to guess the next move from Reykjavik. Spassky might have played your move, Lyman suggested hundreds of times, he might have played mine, but he chose something else, not necessarily stronger. Sometimes I was smugly convinced that my idea was better than the one selected by the grandmaster. Lyman was young and charming, with a gift for democratizing chess, for clouding distinctions between ability and ineptitude. Riding the coattails of Bobby’s charisma, he became a celebrity overnight, the Johnny Appleseed of chess. Without actually saying so, he was persuading the United States that chess
genius was within reach of all of us; it was a tour de force of showmanship. By the end of the match, I still understood virtually nothing about the game, but I could feel it welling up in me like a calling.

When Lyman went off the air, I decided that it was time to get serious. I bought chess books and memorized a few openings. I went over the game that thirteen-year-old Fischer had played against Donald Byrne, in which he had sacrificed his queen to win twenty-four moves later, and I wondered how many more weeks it would take before I would be making such moves. I pestered my friends to play, and to my delight, I won more than I lost. My style was the waiting game. I took a long time to move and never attacked, always looking for safe, protected harbors for my pieces. The longer I took to make my passive decisions, the faster my friends responded, as if to say, “Look, you’re killing the game and boring me to death; play faster.” Usually, moving quickly and petulantly, they blundered, and slowly I would grind out a win. Despite my meager experience, when friends who had played the game since high school decided they didn’t want to play me anymore, I concluded that I must be too good.

ONE DAY IN
1972 I discovered the chess coffee shop on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, where years later on winter afternoons I would take Josh to play. On that first occasion, I played against a pimply adolescent who after twenty minutes caught on to my methodical bob-and-weave style and began to read a newspaper. I was annoyed by his lack of concern, then astounded when he mated me, barely looking away from his reading.

During the second game, he read from the beginning, but this time it lasted longer. After a couple of hours I was muddled. The more I looked, the less I saw. All of his pieces were attacking, and soon I was out of safe hiding squares. I was sweating and feeling humiliated while he read and glanced at other games. I would have to engage, but I knew I’d be crushed. I moved a piece ahead, half-expecting him to laugh in my face; instead, he put down the paper, stared at the position with concern and then knocked over his king and put out his hand. Even after he left the table and I had studied
the position, I could see no possible reason why he should have resigned. Finally I asked another player, who briskly demonstrated that I had forced mate in three. He had to show it to me twice before I could follow the moves.

After this victory I walked home, packed my Staunton pieces in their wooden box and shoved it to the back of a shelf, where it remained without interruption for the next ten years until six-year-old Josh begged me to take it down. That day in the chess shop I had realized that just as surely as I lacked the running and leaping ability for professional basketball, I didn’t have what it takes to be a good chess player.