Fathers & Sons & Sports (31 page)

A year after Jackson’s big night, my father took me to Fenway Park for a one-game playoff between the Red Sox and the Yankees. I was too young to sit in the press box, so he asked some players if anyone had spare tickets. “Sure,” said Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent. “You can have mine.” That’s how we came to be sitting in Bucky Dent’s seats when he hit the game-winning three-run home run that Boston fans still cry over.

I was privileged to spend those moments with my father, to tag along at Super Bowls, Olympics and World Series. But the moments I remember best were the quieter ones watching him at work. For me, my father is a sound: the steady click of his fingers on the keyboard, a cadence I remember awakening to from earliest childhood.

There was always something that had to be written, usually at six in the morning. A book, a television script, a magazine article, a theater review, a radio or TV commentary. He loved writing. My father often said that when you love your job as much as he did, it isn’t work. That’s why I wanted to be a sports reporter—I wanted to have as much fun as he had.

I would love to go with him to one more game at Lambeau Field or Madison Square Garden. But what I’d really like is to wake up once more to that sound, the clack-clack of the key-board—the soundtrack of his life.

fter my parents separated in 1968, when I was twelve, I lived a kind of double life. Until I went to college, I usually spent weekdays with my mother in Westport, Connecticut, a quiet, Cheeveresque suburb an hour’s train ride from New York City, and weekends with my father in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. My classmates in Westport were jealous of my regular trips to the city. Their dads were doctors and lawyers and advertising executives who came
home every evening for dinner. My father was a James Joyce devotee who wrote celebrity profiles under female pseudonyms for movie magazines and never ate a single meal in his apartment. He was also a poker player, a billiards and Ping-Pong hustler, a three-card monte shill, and an erudite part-time literature professor at the New School for Social Research, whose specialty was what he proudly called “the grotesque and perverse” in twentieth-century American and Anglo-Irish fiction. He ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Village Den, Joe’s Dinette, the White Horse and Cedar Taverns, and other watering holes that were central to bohemian culture in the late 1960s, and he took me along. A few of my dad’s friends smoked dope in front of their children and swapped wives. My high school buddies in Connecticut who didn’t know me well imagined that I was rocking out at the Bottom Line and getting high at poetry readings, but in truth I never saw a single band, did drugs, or heard Patti Smith speak verse. Instead I spent my weekends playing chess.

Although I had learned how to move the pieces when I was five, I only became fully immersed in the game when my parents’ marriage was falling apart: chess offered a tidy black-and-white sanctuary from the turmoil in the rest of my life. The Village was a chess mecca, with its many chess cafes and clubs, and my father lived only a ten-minute walk from its epicenter, Washington Square Park. My dad accompanied me to these places and when he wasn’t watching me play, passed the time reading novels and
preparing his New School lectures. In the southwest corner of the park stood nineteen stone chess tables; these were occupied by all breeds of chess addict, from complete beginners who set their queen up on the wrong square to world-class players eager to demonstrate their command of double-rook endings and the Nimzo-Indian Defense. In those days the park didn’t have a curfew, and people played chess at all hours. Cops on horseback gathered near the tables, and on slow nights, when they weren’t breaking up couples having sex or escorting acid freaks to St. Vincent’s Hospital, they’d look down from their high mounts and critique the moves on the boards—a time-honored tradition in chess known as kibitzing. When it was cold or raining, the park habitués retreated to three smoky chess parlors on Thompson and Sullivan, where they rented boards for pennies an hour to continue their games.

One autumn evening in the early 1970s, my dad and I ended up in the chess shop owned by Nicholas Rossolimo, a Russian émigré who had been the champion of France in 1948 and had gone on in the 1950s to compete successfully in the United States. Rossolimo was a grandmaster—an exalted ranking in chess that is exceeded only by the title of world champion.

There were just ninety grandmasters in 1970, one-third of whom lived in the Soviet Union. Being a grandmaster in America was rare enough, but even within this exclusive club Rossolimo had the special distinction of being immortalized in the chess literature for the “Rossolimo Variation,” a particular
sequence of moves characterized by an early light-squared bishop sortie by White.

Very few grandmasters are able to earn a living on the tournament circuit, though, and by 1970, when Rossolimo turned sixty, his championship days were long behind him. He drove a yellow cab, gave the occasional chess lesson, and babysat the woodpushers in his small chess salon. Rossolimo was also an old-school romantic whose pursuit of beauty at the chessboard sometimes blinded him to the impending brutality of his opponent’s provocations. He was like the dreamy architecture student who sprains his ankle in a huge pothole in the sidewalk because his gaze is fixed on the gargoyles and cornices above.

On the evening of our visit, my father and I were greeted by the smell of garlic. Rossolimo was steaming a large pot of mussels on a hot plate balanced atop a wooden chessboard. My father and I stepped over a broken bottle in the entranceway and took our places at another board. Rossolimo was happy to see us—we were the only people there. He motioned to our board with an expansive gesture and urged us to play. My father declined, explaining that I was too good. Rossolimo laughed.

We watched him uncork a bottle of white, pour three glasses, and place one in front of each of us. I was fourteen or fifteen, and no one had ever offered me this much wine before. Had he failed to notice, I wondered, that I was conspicuously underage? Perhaps serving liquor to minors was a European custom. My father, who avoided alcohol because it aggravated his
stomach ulcers, pretended to drink. Rossolimo gulped down half of his glass. I raised mine, clinked it against my father’s, and sampled it cautiously. I announced that the wine was great. My father looked uneasy, but I knew he wouldn’t spoil our bonding moment with the grandmaster by objecting to my drinking.

Rossolimo told my father that I was a fine boy and he proposed playing me a game. My dad was afraid he was going to charge us, but Rossolimo waived his customary fee and told us we were his friends and drinking companions. He turned off the hot plate and scooped the mussels into a wooden salad bowl. They were shriveled and overcooked but he didn’t seem to notice.

I raised my glass to Rossolimo’s and offered a toast to the generosity of our host and the quality of the wine. My father watched helplessly as I took another sip. In fact, it tasted terrible, and I considered dumping a little out of my glass under the chess table so that it would look as if I’d consumed more than a tablespoon.

Rossolimo told me to take White and challenged me to show how good I was. After two moves apiece I found that we had stumbled into the precise position in which I could employ the Rossolimo Variation against him. Charmed by my youthful cheekiness in making him face his own patented weapon, the grandmaster complimented me on copying the best.

As is typical in many lines of the Rossolimo Variation, I exchanged the light-squared bishop for a knight in a way that
forced him to double his pawns, creating a structural weakness in which one of his foot soldiers blocked a comrade. Doubled pawns are not necessarily a great hindrance; if, however, the combat continues for many moves to the stage known as the endgame, in which most of the pieces have been exchanged, the immobility of the rear pawn can prove decisive—it’s like being a pawn down. Rossolimo didn’t seem perturbed. Mostly, he seemed to be moving reflexively as he entertained my father with a long boozy rant about Sartre and Nabokov. I was antsy because all of his chattering was making it hard to concentrate. I thought for a while whenever it was my turn to move—five minutes here, ten minutes there—but he always rattled me by responding instantly. Did he not need to think because he had seen this all before and had an ingenious grandmasterly plan to turn the game in his favor? Or was he truly being careless and was the endgame, in which the doubled pawns would put him at an increasing disadvantage, sneaking up on him? The latter proved to be the case.

When Rossolimo finally paused in his monologue about literature to look at the board, he immediately saw that he had a losing position: because of his formal, Soviet-style chess schooling, he knew the fine points of this kind of endgame infinitely better than I did. Rather than face the ignominy of a protracted defeat, he abruptly picked up his king and dropped it, crown first, into the bowl of garlicky broth. Mussel juice splattered across the table. Then he pushed the chess pieces into a heap in
the center of the board before I had a chance to enjoy the final position. Glancing at his watch, he stood up, berated us for staying past the closing time, and ushered us out the door.

I was certainly pleased that I had defeated a chess legend, but I wasn’t impudent about it. I don’t think I even said a word to my dad. I knew that heavy drinking had impaired Rossolimo’s play. I had never been close to drunk myself; indeed I had never taken more than the few sips of wine that I’d had that evening. But I had understood how disorienting alcohol could be from movies like
Dumbo
, in which the little elephant goes on a long hallucinatory bender, and
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, a
favorite of my mother’s because it made her marriage seem comparatively happy.

Even though I knew that Rossolimo had effectively defeated himself, my father made sure that I knew: he informed me that Rossolimo had consumed five bottles of wine during the course of the evening. I argued that that was impossible, that he’d have been lying on the floor, that he’d had only two, My dad claimed that I had I been too engrossed in the chessboard to notice what was happening. I found it unsettling that the game, which had started promisingly as a pleasant encounter over drinks, had degenerated into Rossolimo’s kicking us out and my father’s diminishing my victory.

I was always more direct than my father. As a child I usually said whatever I was thinking. I remember a couple who visited our home when I was three or four. They did not sit on the couch
together but sat as far apart as the furniture in our living room allowed. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Is your marriage in trouble?” There was self-conscious laughter—my intuition was correct. In time, of course, I learned to stifle observations that might unnecessarily hurt people. Now, as I watch my young son Alex struggle to understand what thoughts he should keep to him-self—“That woman is really fat, Dad”—I am nostalgic for the time in early childhood when I spoke freely and said whatever was on my mind.

For the Winter 1970 issue of
Lithopinion
, my father wrote an article called “Chess: Once the Game of Kings, Now the King of Games” about the passions that chess inspires. He didn’t tell me he was writing the piece. I learned about it by accident one afternoon in Washington Square Park when an artist with a large sketch pad sought my permission to draw me at the chessboard and publish the picture. I asked him where the illustration was going to appear and he said Lithopinion. I didn’t know if my father planned to conceal the article from me forever or intended to surprise me with my picture in the magazine. In any event, I made sure that I read the article when it came out.