Fathers & Sons & Sports (32 page)
Read Fathers & Sons & Sports Online
Authors: Mike Lupica
The piece began by recounting a joke:
Wherever chess nuts gather (and that’s almost anyplace, except Red China where the game is banned because it represents “Western decadence”), international grandmasters (the world’s best players), patzers …
woodpushers (mediocre players), and kibitzers (non-playing compulsive advice givers) swear the following dialogue actually once took place:
CHESS PLAYER NO
. 1: “My wife threatened to leave me if I don’t give up chess.”
CHESS PLAYER NO
. 2: “That’s terrible.”
CHESS PLAYER NO
. 1: “Yes, I shall miss her dreadfully.”
Yet, if you listen to the words of poet William Butler Yeats, it may be true that the game of kings (or the king of games) also binds lovers together—at least in an attempt to slow time’s steady erosion: “They know there was nothing that could save them,/ And so played chess as they had any night/For years …”
Whether it triggers apartness or engenders togetherness, chess is an obsession for many of the fifteen million Americans (conservative estimate) who play it more or less regularly … Edward Lasker, an American chess luminary, recalled that when Harry Nelson Pillsbury toured Europe in 1902 giving blindfold exhibitions daily he came to his (Lasker’s) hometown: “The men in charge of arrangements had permitted me to take a board, but my mother forbade me to go out in the evening to play chess. Little do mothers know what an all-consuming fire the passion
for chess can be. After brooding all day over the tragedy into which my mother was about to turn my life by preventing me from playing with the famous chess star. I ran away from home!”
The question, of course, is what is there about this “game in which thirty-two bits of ivory, horn, wood, metal, or (in stalags) sawdust stuck together with shoe polish are pushed on sixty-four alternately colored squares” (George Steiner’s description) that makes children leave home, men leave their wives, and women leave their senses.
I was pleased with my picture in
Lithopinion
, and I found my dad’s prose catchy and engaging but also glibly contrived. The opening joke was amusing, but I was bothered by the fact that I had never heard anyone in the chess world swear that the dialogue had actually taken place.
When I reread the article in college, seven years later, I debated in my mind the journalistic ethics of what he had done. I wondered why he couldn’t just tell the joke without embellishing the context. The way he wrote it, any knowledgeable reader who thought about his words would know his rendition couldn’t literally be true. Did he really expect chess fans to believe that “wherever chess nuts gather” they swear by the dialogue? Or was he so enraptured by the punning phrase “wherever chess nuts gather” that he didn’t care if it was true or not? Or was he, from
the very start of the article, trying to clue the discerning reader in to the fact that he was playing a game, much like the game he was writing about? Or was I the one with the problem because I was unnecessarily deconstructing and ruining a perfectly enjoyable article? To be fair, the joke my father told was completely harmless and—so what if the context was false?—it accurately captured the addictive nature of chess.
I now think that my focusing on the innocuous chess-nut story was a way of avoiding my discomfort with the rest of the article. My father had written all about me. On the one hand, that made me proud. On the other hand, he never asked me if I was comfortable being his subject, or whether he could share our private conversations with the world. He never said he was interviewing or profiling me, and his descriptions were not altogether flattering. He recounted, for instance, how I chatted up an opponent during an important game. I was fourteen and my adversary was a girl a year or two older whose rating was 1069. I did not yet have a rating. It was the final round, and I had a minus score of three wins and four losses. I needed a win to break even, and she needed a win to receive a trophy for being the top scoring girl in the tournament.
The game lasted a long time, almost three hours. Having finished their own matches, the other players crowded around these two. I sat over on the side, trying not to be a chess father, and pretended to read a book.
Occasionally, the ranks of the kibitzers would part for a few seconds and I’d see my son’s face, calm and smiling, as he chatted with the girl. She was pretty, true, but he was usually so serious during a chess game. I couldn’t understand it.
The girl’s father joined me. He was a teacher and he made a stab at correcting student papers. Suddenly he jumped up, walked over to the game, studied the position on the board, and then came back.
“Your boy’s in trouble,” he said. “She’s got his queen.”
A few minutes later he got up again, looked again, came back again. “I don’t know,” he said, “he’s got his rooks doubled.”
Back to the table, then back to me. “I think she’s got him.”
I looked at my watch and realized we’d be lucky to make the last train back to Connecticut. There was so much chattering at the table—I could hear his voice—that surely he wouldn’t object if I reminded him it was getting late.
I went over and said, “We don’t have much time …” when he cut me off with a “Please don’t bother me now.”
Uncharacteristic. Puzzling. But I guessed the pressure was getting to him.
Report from the girl’s father: “I think she’s in time trouble.”
Further report: “I know she’s in time trouble.”
Final report: “She has just two minutes to make fifteen moves.” A voice cried out—not Paul’s, not hers—“It’s a mate!” The kibitzers moved off and I saw Paul shaking hands with the girl. She left and I took my son aside.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I won.” he replied. “I checkmated her just as the little flag fell indicating her time was up.”
I have always been particularly irritated by this last quote. I would never have said “little flag”—that’s a writer’s prissy touch. I was very familiar with the flag, and so was he. I would have said just “flag.” Once again, his description of the game, even if he occasionally fabricated my words, got across the larger emotional truth of how tense chess could be; but it also demonstrated how wrapped up in my own playing he was, and how energetically he lived through me. The article concluded:
In the cab to the train station he apologized for snapping at me during the game. “When you said the word ‘time,’” he explained, “I was afraid you’d remind her she was in time trouble. That’s why I kept talking to her—to keep her mind off the clock. I don’t feel this was wrong because I think some of the boys there were kind of trying to help her. So I kidded with her and made the
most complicated moves I could—there towards the end—so she’d really have time problems, But I beat her before the clock did anyway.”
“You seemed so calm,” I said.
“Calm above maybe, but I was shaking under the table.” He looked out of the window for a while and then said softly, “This is the greatest moment in my life.”
This final quote was the most upsetting part of the article for me. Not simply because it was untrue but because it felt like such a serious thing for him to lie about—the greatest moment of my life!—for the sake of achieving a pat, writerly conclusion. I had to wonder whether there was anything about me he’d leave intact.
Paul Hoffman is host of the PBS television series
Great Minds of Science.
He was president and editor-in-chief of
Discover,
and served as publisher of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
before returning full-time to writing. He lives in Chicago and Woodstock, New York. Author of at least ten books, he has appeared on
CBS This Morning
and
The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
as a correspondent. Hoffman is also a puzzlemaster using the pseudonym Dr. Crypton
.
DARCY FREY
utumn is arriving quickly this year in Coney Island. For weeks the clouds have come across the water low and gray, and the trees along Ocean Parkway are already bare. As I drive toward McDonald’s with the players in my car, we splash through piles of trash and fallen leaves. “If you crash and I get injured, Coach is gonna kill you,” Stephon advises me from the back seat. “That’ll be four years down the
drain.” Then he announces, to no one in particular, “When I go to college, I’m going to Syracuse or Georgia Tech.”
“How come?” I ask.
“Because at Syracuse you play in front of thirty-two-thousand, eight-hundred-and-twenty people every home game—it’s crazy-loud in there,” he says, meaning the Syracuse Carrier Dome. “And because Georgia Tech knows how to treat its point guards.” Stephon is no doubt thinking of Kenny Anderson—the player he is most often compared with—who left Georgia Tech after his sophomore year and just signed a five-season, $14.5 million contract with the New Jersey Nets. Anderson’s salary is a figure Stephon knows as precisely as he does the seating capacity of the Carrier Dome.
Driving along, we pass beneath the elevated train tracks over Stillwell Avenue. There is a lot of commercial activity on this block, catering mostly to the summer crowds who take the subway here on their way to the beach and the amusement park. But once we get past Stillwell, the shops and pedestrians grow scarcer block by block. The train tracks are considered the official start of the Coney Island peninsula; beyond them are the projects, and few store owners will risk doing business out there. The McDonald’s near Stillwell is pretty much the last outpost of franchise food before the streets lose their commercial appeal and plunge into the shadow of the high-rises.
Elbowing his way to the counter, Stephon orders two Big
Macs, two large fries, a chocolate shake, an ice cream sundae, and waits for me to pick up the tab. Russell accepts my offer of a burger and fries. Corey, as always, pays his own way. With our food in hand, we pile back into my car.
Stephon, hungrily consuming his first burger, wedges himself between the two front seats in order to speak directly into Russell’s ear. “So,” he says, “what are they offering you?”
Russell angrily snatches his head away and stares out the window; from this spot along Mermaid Avenue, the projects and acres of rubble-strewn lots loom in front of us like an abandoned city, Dresden after the war.
“You mean you’re just gonna sign?” Stephon goes on. “And then when you get to campus and see all them players driving those nice white Nissan Sentras, what you gonna say to yourself ‘Oh well, I guess they got them from their
mothers’?”
Stephon takes another bite of his burger. “That’s just like Tchaka. All these coaches coming around, and he ain’t asking for
anything
. Not even a guaranteed starting position. That’s
crazy!
He gonna get to campus and everybody on the team gonna be driving cars except him! He’s gonna be, like, ‘Excuse me but five guys got cars here!’”
Russell shifts uneasily in the seat beside me. He professes not to care, but in fact Russell hates to hear the stories that have been circulating lately about kids offered inducements to sign with certain colleges or players at other high schools who never
study and get “passed along” in their classes; it offends his belief in the meritocracy of basketball. “By the way, Stephon,” he says, “the NCAA does
not
allow players to get cars.”
“Ha! You think the NCAA gives a fuck about cars?” Stephon, still with his head next to Russell’s, gives a high, piercing laugh. “Why do you think the best players go where they go? ’Cause the schools promise to take care of them and their families. They say the magic word—
money.”
Not getting the reaction he desires from Russell, Stephon turns his attention to me. “I’d rather hear ‘no’ than not ask and have some other guy come along and get some. You know what I mean? If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Like if I wasn’t getting my burn”—his playing time—“here at Lincoln? I’d be, like, later for this. I’d be up and out with quickness.”
Russell has finally had enough. He palms Stephon’s little head with his giant hand and dunks him into the back seat.