Searching for Bobby Fischer (23 page)

IT
’
S PAINFUL FOR
the parent of an eleven- or twelve-year-old to deal with the challenge of a younger player. It’s as if his child were being personally attacked, or as if the parent himself were being displaced. Despite the steady improvement of a talented child, there is always someone catching up, someone a little smarter, a little better. The parents of the strongest players live nervously with a sense of the irremediable ticking of the clock. When people refer to a six-year-old as a prodigy, it seems to imply that he or she is the only one in the world with this gift. That there may be other little kids with even greater aptitude is a fact that parents
tend to resist. But by the time a player is twelve and has been studying for four or five years, he is no longer evaluated by what he might be but by his results and his rating. Unless the child is truly a genius, it is difficult for him and his parents to continue to believe that he will be the next Fischer or Kasparov, both of whom were playing at master strength in early adolescence. Almost overnight, the magic and charm, the admiration and compliments, the seemingly open-ended potential are replaced by limitations and fast-receding possibilities. The little genius is suddenly referred to as a solid player but without the creative imagination or exceptional memory needed to reach the top echelon of the adult chess world. It is always hard to say exactly why his game didn’t evolve. Perhaps his early success was more the result of an excellent chess education than of exceptional talent—to a certain extent, a parent can manufacture a top young player by sending him to good teachers and forcing him to study—or perhaps the child simply lost his drive.

“
HOW
’
S YOUR WORK
?” I asked the parent of the older boy, trying to steer the conversation away from chess.

“It’s a bad time for me,” he answered with a frankness that surprised me. “Things are frantic. I’ve been working on a project for the last two years. It was on the back burner, but all of a sudden there’s been a flurry of interest and money has become available to do it.”

“That sounds great.”

The way he nodded indicated that it ought to be but wasn’t. “My boy’s in the sixth grade,” he said. “This is his last year to win the nationals. I can’t walk away from him now. What choice do I have? The deal is gonna have to wait.”

For both of us the winter and early spring would be shadowed by the approach of this event so filled with portent. To chess parents, winning the nationals is the gold at the end of the rainbow, the payoff for all the hard work. It is glory, pictures in newspapers, the adulation of children and parents, tangible evidence to nonchess friends that you may not be completely crazy; even more, to yourself it is concrete proof that your child’s ability is something significantly more than your own wild hopes and projected dreams.

But for the parent of the sixth grader, the nationals also represented an enormous relief, a finish line. After coaching and suffering through six years of scholastic tournaments, he intended to back away from chess after the nationals. He was emotionally exhausted and worried that weekend after weekend of tension might be ruining his health. After years of allowing his young son’s chess life to intrude on his own priorities, it was time to put his house in order, he said. But maybe he also welcomed the end of the tournament grind because in his heart of hearts he knew that his son would never be another Bobby Fischer. Or perhaps he was simply kidding himself; the drug would prove to be too potent, and after the nerve-racking event in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’d tousle his kid’s short black hair and start planning for the next tournament.

WHEN A PARENT
first learns that his child has chess talent he revels in it. The earliest games are more a form of children’s art than a contest with a winner and a loser. While the child is discovering the game, the parents delight in his precocious concentration, in his rapture over complexities, in his naïve ingenuities. His first attacks are like little poems. “Look what he’s done,” they say to each other; “Look what
we’ve
done” is what they may be feeling. One father of a seven-year-old told me that the first time his son played eight or nine moves blindfolded he began to cry; it was like beholding a miracle.

Over the years, the parents of all gifted players witness little miracles. One evening when Josh was nine we walked through Washington Square Park on our way home, licking ice-cream cones. It was a cool spring evening and every chess table was occupied except for one, where an out-of-town master sat with his pieces set up, waiting for an opponent. Josh wanted to play, but the chess master was clearly put off by the challenge of a young boy and said disdainfully that he never played for less than two dollars a game. I am against Josh’s playing for money, but this time I agreed. Perhaps because of the fragrant spring air or the supercilious expression with which the man moved his pieces, Josh had an unusual composure and power that evening. He was able to focus
all his knowledge and will into a force that was almost palpable. He was playing the game the way he would play it someday, and the dozen chess players watching nodded quietly, seeming to know from the start that he would win. Josh knew it also and was smiling broadly over his decisive combination long before the master knocked over his king and disgustedly tossed two crumpled bills out of his pocket.

One would think that an eight- or nine-year-old could no more defeat a master than beat an NBA player in a game of one-on-one. But it is an unexplained and wondrous phenomenon that in chess, as well as in music and mathematics, a gifted child is capable of the creativity and genius of an exceptional adult. The parent of one gifted little boy said that when her son played brilliantly she felt as though she were the mother of Jesus.

THE PARENTS
’
JOY
in their child’s precocious play is compromised by nervousness over competition with other kids and by fear of failure. In a children’s tournament one can always tell the winners from the losers. Those who have been defeated come out of the playing room with pasty faces; they have trouble speaking, and some of them cry uncontrollably. Winners smile broadly and walk with bounce. At their first tournaments fathers and mothers find themselves emotionally skewered. It doesn’t seem appropriate to be rooting for the heartrending sadness of another little kid, but there is really little choice; a parent doesn’t want his own child to feel bereft. Hearts harden, and soon the parent of a good player revels in his child’s wins against other children.

Other parents, after watching their son’s or daughter’s painful defeats, remove their child from tournament chess, deciding it isn’t worth it. One talented and enthusiastic seven-year-old cried bitterly for twenty minutes whenever he lost a tournament game. His mother, a psychologist, patiently explained to her son that these games weren’t important enough to get upset about. “Chess isn’t about living and dying,” she said, and she urged him to put his life in perspective. Soon the child stopped crying, but he began to lose more regularly; then he stopped playing altogether. Apparently, if one is to be a good chess player one’s body and soul
must resist any notion of defeat; a player must despise losing in order to struggle for the win. Great players feel traumatized when they lose, and perhaps as a consequence rarely do so.

When chess parents talk about their kids, they try to be offhand about it. As if Jimmy’s gift were a delicate flower to enjoy, they try to recapture the spirit of those first moments when defeat and their own emotional investment had yet to become factors and little Jimmy was Magellan first navigating the sixty-four squares. With their friends they may talk about the aesthetics of the game or about the advantages of learning logical thinking as justification for the amount of effort they expend, but for the parents of the top players, all too often winning becomes the dominant motivation. If the child wins he is happy; if he loses he feels miserable or even inadequate as a human being. If he is a highly rated player he worries about his reputation, and his parents may worry about it even more. Troubling though it may be, in time they discover that it has become
their
reputation as well. If he wins a lot they are credited both inside and outside the chess world as being parents of “that brilliant child”; if he begins to do poorly they may feel loss, anger or even shame.

Losing often takes the form of denial. A parent will rarely attribute his son’s loss to a brilliant combination played by his opponent. Rather, his kid made a simple oversight or was confronted by an opening he had never seen before, or the tournament director gave him unfair pairings, or he was tired or sick. He wasn’t really beaten; he merely slipped up or had bad breaks. This allows the parent to continue to plot his child’s future relatively unencumbered by limitations.

CHESS PLAYERS OF
all ages are interested in comparing themselves with other players. First- and second-grade children compare their numbers—900 or 1000 or 1050—against one another, and also against Kasparov’s and Fischer’s numbers: 2740 and 2780. The difference doesn’t seem so great. When you’re six or seven, becoming a grandmaster doesn’t appear to be hard; it’s only a matter of playing a little better and getting a higher number. No matter how good or bad they are, the littlest kids are convinced they’ll
win the next game, and even after they have lost several and have no chance to win a trophy, they play on as if first place were in reach. They all believe that someday they’ll be great players. At scholastic tournaments their naïveté and optimism are infectious and lighten the dreary stairwells and hallways where they wait with their parents for the next round. But when fathers and mothers compare the ratings of their children, this activity takes on an importance that goes far beyond chess ability and technique. Parents glow when talking about their kid’s recent wins and fast-ascending rating. It is as if numbers on a bimonthly rating sheet reflected the very essence and value of the child.

“The reason why parents put so much into chess has to do with its myth as an intellectual game,” says Sunil Weeramantry, who has coached more scholastic national champions during the past six years than any other teacher in the United States. “In this country there is no payoff for chess talent, as there is for, say, tennis, but some parents are still willing to go to extremes to support the play of their kids. They do it because they’re in love with the idea that they’ve spawned a genius. But in point of fact chess aptitude does not necessarily translate into general intelligence.” Indeed, there have been grandmasters who were illiterate, and many masters have no more than average intelligence. There are examples of learning-disabled and even retarded people who play chess proficiently. Both Weeramantry and Bruce Pandolfini assert that any adult with normal intelligence can become a chess master over time with regular study. Still, in our culture interest and proficiency in chess connote superior intelligence, and the parents of enthusiastic little players are infatuated with this idea.

Some parents of scholastic champions insist that their kids do little studying on their own. Their kids are well-rounded and busy, they say; the child simply doesn’t have much time to practice or take lessons; it’s just that he or she has such a knack for the game that it doesn’t seem to matter. They would have you believe that their child was born with a precise understanding of rook-and-pawn endgame technique and an encyclopedic knowledge of the openings. Conversely, those children with a reputation for study are denigrated for their lack of raw aptitude, although all the top
players take regular lessons and study a great deal. For all his genius, Bobby Fischer probably studied chess harder than any other player who ever lived.

In this small and intense world, the breakdown of boundaries between parent and child is almost inevitable. An eight- or nine-year-old needs his parents at the tournament to make sure he eats lunch and knows how to set the clock, to see that he’s not pestered or intimidated by other parents who are looking for an edge, and to ensure that he is not taken advantage of by a careless tournament director. The parent is more than a fan; while he roots as if each tournament were the finals at Wimbledon, he is also defending the child’s interests and attending to details. But in the emotional tumult of wins and losses, a parent may misperceive his importance or be too heavy-handed. Some parents don’t believe that their kids can win a game if they are not in attendance. One mother who hasn’t the slightest idea of how to play stands by the door of the tournament room with her eyes closed, her lips moving and her fists clenched. For hours she incants a secret mantra that will give her son the strength and concentration to win. After his important victories, she is convinced that she was the difference, and after his losses she blames herself for not trying hard enough. One father, a surgeon, quivers as he agonizes over his son’s games. If you speak to him while the child is calculating a move, the man’s voice cracks into falsetto, his face white with strain. Part of him strives to be casual and civil, but his body language says, How can you speak to me while my son is thinking?

As a pregame ritual, some parents hassle tournament directors and other parents about every detail. For example, they may argue with all the force and dignity of their professional personae that their child’s chess clock should be used for the game instead of his opponent’s identical clock, or that their kid’s chess pieces should be the ones selected. A few parents become violent under the pressure, and when things don’t go their way or when their kids lose, they curse and challenge other parents or tournament directors to fight.

AT THE END
of the first round of the 1985 New York City Primary Championship, held at the Manhattan Chess Club, the mother of
a seven-year-old was crying. She said that the father of her son’s first-grade opponent had whispered moves to his son. Every time her boy took a piece, this father became red in the face and smacked the table with his fist. Her son won the game anyway, but afterward the other boy’s mother glared at her with hatred and she didn’t know how to respond.