Searching for Bobby Fischer (5 page)

In the first twenty minutes of his visit to a tournament, half a dozen players are likely to ask Pandolfini favors:

“Bruce, can you get me any students?”

“Bruce, can you help me find a publisher for my collected games?”

“Pandolfini, would you see if you could get me a discount on the new Fidelity chess computer?”

“Bruce, my last published rating in
Chess Life
was eight points too low. How could they do that to me? Would you check with the Federation?”

His brown eyes soft with regal beneficence, Pandolfini says yes to everyone. He has every intention of coming through and feels glad to have been asked, but in many cases he forgets. His forgetfulness is entirely democratic: he neglects to return the phone calls of grandmasters and patzers alike. He is as likely to come late to the lesson of a movie star as to that of a telephone operator. It is a quirk of nature that this man, who can play ten simultaneous chess games blindfolded and has total recall of tens of thousands of chess positions, has such difficulty remembering appointments, publication dates and the departure times of airline flights.

Pandolfini’s students are in love with him and gladly put up with late or broken appointments and midnight lessons in a cafeteria, on a bench in the park or on a sofa at the New School. When a lesson is going well, Bruce sometimes continues for hours, oblivious to who or what is scheduled next.

Students who manage to get his home number call Pandolfini day and night, as if it were their right. He is polite, even if he was asleep. For several months, one little brunette who cut and curled her hair to look like his called him four or five times a day. She was a bulldog, and whether he was sleeping, giving a lesson or presiding over a board of directors meeting at the Manhattan Chess Club, she refused to hang up until he gave her a jewel of chess insight.

Since the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972, when he appeared daily as a master analyst on Shelby Lyman’s televised coverage, Pandolfini’s reputation as a chess teacher has grown steadily. Even when most chess teachers are starving for work, prospective students contact him regularly. He has no time, but he can’t bear to say no. Instead he matches disappointment with heartfelt regret: “I’ll call you as soon as I have an opening. Don’t worry, it will work out.” If there is a hint of irritation or unhappiness on the other end he keeps talking. Only when he senses that his caller is appeased will Bruce hang up and peacefully forget. He is by nature a great confidence builder—one aspect of his gift for teaching.

*    *    *

PANDOLFINI WAS THE
manager of the Manhattan Chess Club from 1983 to 1986, and one afternoon while Josh played chess for a couple of hours before his lesson, I watched him perform his managerial duties. He came through the door three quarters of an hour late with a guilty smile that coaxed forgiveness (I knew it well), long arms swinging like Ichabod Crane’s. In passing, he gave a crisp executive “Good afternoon” to half a dozen club regulars while moving to the phone in his office, which had been ringing for some time. “Hello, Bruce Pandolfini, Manhattan Chess Club.” It was a journalist from
Newsweek
demanding to know where Bobby Fischer was hiding out; he had been calling every day for the past week. “I can’t speak about this right now,” Bruce said conspiratorially, as if Fischer’s sister were standing next to him. “Can you get back to me?” The phone rang again. It was U.S. Champion Grandmaster Lev Alburt calling to discuss a lecture series he and Pandolfini were planning to give on the upcoming Karpov-Kasparov championship match in Moscow. “I’ll have to get back to you,” Bruce said officiously, sipping his coffee and shuffling through his mail. He was in full stride now but had forgotten to take off his scarf, which made him appear disheveled and daft. The phone rang again while two club regulars stood outside the door to his office, cursing one another at the top of their lungs. “Keep it down out there,” Bruce called, which only fanned their fury. The caller represented a Hadassah chapter in Staten Island and wanted Bruce to give a lecture on the history of chess and the psychology of the chess player, followed by an exhibition of blindfold play. “We’re willing to pay you thirty dollars,” the man on the phone said as if he were making an unusually attractive offer.

“You’re a liar,” one of the men outside the door was bellowing, his face purple with rage.

“You took your hand off the piece,” said the other, who had been having arguments at the club nearly every afternoon for the past eighteen years.

“I did not take my hand off the piece.”

“You’re trying to steal the game! I had a won game!”

“Touch move! Touch move!”

“I know the kind of guy you are. You’re the kind of guy when you were a kid you stole from your mother’s wallet. I’m not going to let you get away with it.”

“Bruce! Bruce!” By now everyone in the club was roaring at the two men to shut up, and Pandolfini was on the phone again.

Later he scrubbed the toilet, one of the manager’s jobs at the Manhattan Chess Club. Then he did the books, cleaned the ashtrays and filled the Coke machine. These days he was especially careful not to forget the Coke machine because at the last board meeting the president of the club had been outraged that Coke sales were down four hundred dollars from the previous fiscal year.

Beside running the Manhattan Chess Club, teaching private lessons until twelve or one in the morning and writing for
Chess Life
, Pandolfini lectured at the New School and ran the chess programs at Trinity, Browning and the Little Red School House. He had recently signed a contract with Simon and Schuster to write a comprehensive series of instructional chess books, which in all likelihood will make him the most widely read American chess writer of the twentieth century. By 1989 he will have written eleven full-length chess books in four years.

But teaching chess to children is what Pandolfini considers his art form. He leads his kids laughing through deserts of tedium. He’ll spice up a technical rook-and-pawn endgame exercise with basketball analogies, dares, popcorn, cupcakes and soft threats. He carries a briefcase full of superhero and dinosaur stickers to reward discovered checks and passed pawns, and when his little students win a tournament or discover a mate in five they earn mysteriously powerful master-class points. If they achieve enough master-class points in a month they are ceremoniously rewarded with a master-class certificate that has the authoritative look of the Declaration of Independence. His little kids think Pandolfini’s magical rewards are far more significant than weak squares and maintaining the opposition; these concepts they learn almost in passing.

DURING THEIR FIRST
lessons, Josh refused to accept instruction from Pandolfini. When he was six, his chess ideas were like pieces of his body and he could not give them up. For example, he simply could not cope with being told not to bring out his queen early in
the game. Why shouldn’t he? In games against his father or in Washington Square he had often won with an early attack using his bishop and queen. Why was this suddenly wrong? Bruce seemed to understand immediately and declared that Joshua’s obstinacy was an aspect of his talent and passion for the game. Their first lessons consisted of scores of riotous clock-banging speed games during which Bruce joked with him, and at the same time nudged his pupil in the direction of time-honored fundamentals by dint of repeated good-natured beatings and the awarding of dinosaur stickers and master-class points when Josh experimented with a “master-class move.” He chased our son’s brazenly forward queen with pawns and knights until she learned to stay on the back rank waiting for a more prudent time to attack. Gradually Josh learned more orthodox openings and maneuvers without fully realizing that they weren’t entirely of his own design.

PANDOLFINI IS CONTENT
playing the pied piper, but when he emerges again into the adult world he often feels pressured and frantic. “I’m doing terribly,” he will answer frequently to a friend’s question. He is frazzled by too much work and too little sleep and nagged by guilt and confusion about his life choices. “Certainly in the traditional sense I’m a failure,” he said one harried afternoon at the Manhattan Chess Club. “In our society a chess teacher is not considered in the same league as a professor of chemistry or mathematics. I could have made a lot more money in the commercial world. My mother still asks me when I’m going to get a serious job. The worst time is holiday dinners with the family, when I have to explain that I’m still giving chess lessons.” He gestured out the door toward rows of club regulars who were eating cheap Danish, snapping time clocks and bickering. “Let’s face it, we’re not exactly saving humanity up here at the Manhattan Chess Club,” he said wryly.

OVER THE YEARS
, the parents of some of Pandolfini’s most gifted young students have guided them away from chess. This is true for other teachers as well. It’s hard to blame the parents. In our culture there is virtually no respect or payoff for chess players. Sometimes at a scholastic tournament a couple of teachers of children
shake their heads and talk nostalgically about the great ones who are now long retired. It is like Red Holzman and Red Auerbach remembering Cousy, Guerin, Pettit and Arizin—except that the chess teachers are talking about players who retired at nine or ten years of age. Today some of these brilliant kids, who left the game at the top of the rating list years ago, are completing Ivy League educations, and others are already making big salaries in conventional careers, but from the point of view of their impoverished chess teachers, it is a tragic loss.

It is upsetting to me when Pandolfini confesses his self-doubts. Why are we working so hard at chess? I wonder. Some of the men outside his door have given up families and careers to spend their afternoons and evenings pushing wood at the Manhattan Chess Club. What for? Why should it mean so much to me when Josh wins a children’s tournament or even a casual game? Why am I bringing my seven-year-old son for chess lessons twice a week and waiting in a rage when Pandolfini is late? Sometimes I think that Josh and I are on a thrilling, precipitous slide, with certain doom and failure at the bottom.

ONE AFTERNOON I
was leaving the club with Josh when an old woman, a club regular for almost fifty years, approached. I was prepared for a pat on Joshua’s head and a warm greeting from this woman, whose quaint smile and thinning gray hair reminded me of my grandmother. “So you’re here again with your seven-year-old son,” she said with a sad smile. “Dragging him in to this smoke-filled place to play chess. Don’t you know you’re making him an addict? You’re trying to make up for all the things you couldn’t do with your own life.”

SOMETIMES I WATCH
Joshua’s chess lesson. During the course of their hour and a half or two hours together, Pandolfini is upset or delighted with Joshua’s work, and my emotions trail along behind his. Later, thinking about the lesson, I realize that I haven’t been following what they’ve been talking about; I’ve been dreaming about championships—his, my own. They are the same. The old woman is right, of course.

5

THE GREATER NEW YORK OPEN

S
oon after Josh began to study chess I went to a tournament to see the professionals. The players in Washington Square directed me to a game room called Bar Point on the corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue, which was where most master-level chess tournaments in the New York area were held at that time.

I arrived at a shattered glass door, labeled “Bar Point: House of Backgammon,” that was flanked by a couple of reeling drunks. Inside were two flights of stairs, littered with cigarette butts and reeking of urine.

It was the weekend of the 1984 Greater New York Open, and the rooms inside were packed. The congregation of talent at this tournament made it one of the strongest in the United States that year, according to promoter Bill Goichberg, the Don King of chess. Scores of chess players were sitting across from one another at cafeteria tables, sighing, saying “Shhh,” moving a piece, pushing a time clock, writing on a score sheet, but mostly just sitting on hard plastic chairs and thinking. Beyond a door padded against slamming with wads of newspaper and silver duct tape, the best players were in a sorrowful front room over a pizza parlor, with discolored wall paneling, peeling paint, torn rugs and electrical wires dangling from holes in the ceiling. From time to time Goichberg’s voice boomed from the back room, “Keep it down!”

Most of the players with international titles—the stars—sat at a table near a row of curtained windows, closest to the din of buses,
trucks and ghetto blasters cruising up Sixth Avenue. Grandmaster Dmitry Gurevich, the tenth-ranked player in the country, was playing against Asa Hoffmann. Gurevich, a short, handsome man, had a finger jammed into each of his ears and flinched at noises as if he were being stung by wasps. Hoffmann, ranked ninetieth at the time, is a tall, thin man with black hair and a weary, acne-scarred face. He played more casually than Gurevich and didn’t take nearly as much time between moves; he didn’t seem to care as much.

Next to Hoffmann sat Joel Benjamin, twenty, who had just finished his junior year at Yale. Many in the chess world feel that Benjamin is the most talented young chess player in America, a potential world champion. While he studied the board, his pale boyish face was calm and cheerful, and he waved casually when he noticed a friend enter the room. He sat on folded legs as if he were doing yoga, but his fingers moved with a will of their own. They were in his mouth or wrapped around one another or quivering indecisively above a rook or a bishop.

For many minutes, sometimes for an hour or more, players analyzed the positions on their boards. At times they seemed to be meditating or daydreaming. In fact, as a player explained, “They’re boiling inside with attacks and counterattacks. Emotionally, it’s a battle of life and death. You enter into someone else’s head and battle against his ideas.”