Searching for Bobby Fischer (20 page)

For Josh the evidence was mounting that chess was filled with disappointment and pain. After two years of success and winning, the game was making him feel like a loser, and he tried to shut it out. One afternoon Pandolfini rushed over from his studio for half an hour, feeling that a short lesson was better than none. He barely said hello and taught as quickly as possible, trying to cram two weeks’ worth into thirty minutes, and left feeling frustrated that Josh wasn’t concentrating. Twice more he came over for quick sessions, talking more in algebraic notation than in English. He was so harried that he didn’t notice that my son rarely looked at him. After these whirlwind meetings Josh wondered what had gone wrong between them. Bruce no longer kidded around or talked about the Jets and Knicks. He had stopped pasting stars and dinosaur stickers in Joshua’s little black book and no longer awarded him master-class points at the end of their lesson. Bruce must have decided that he was no longer worth the effort. It was hard for Josh to talk about it. Chess made him agitated and unhappy, which in turn made his father unhappy. But when I confronted him, he assured me with a pained expression on his face that he still loved the game.

Bruce and Josh struggled through a number of sessions. I was hoping that Bruce would be able to pull my son out of this slump, but toward the middle of October, Josh excused himself from a lesson, found Bonnie in the kitchen, and cried softly so that Bruce wouldn’t hear. “I can’t do it,” he told her. “It’s too hard.”

“It went badly—very badly,” Bonnie told me later. She had been watching the lesson from the kitchen door. Instead of looking at the board, Josh had stared at the clock and had sometimes covered his ears with his hands. He didn’t want to hear about the Samisch variation of the Nimzo-Indian. He couldn’t have cared less about mating with a knight and a bishop against a king.

“He doesn’t enjoy the game anymore,” Bonnie said firmly. “It’s stopped being fun. He can’t bear his lessons with Bruce.” She was saying things that I had been trying to ignore; it’s easy to tune out a little kid when you have fame and glory squarely in your sights.
“Haven’t you noticed? They’re not the same together. They used to be such friends, but now Bruce hardly cracks a smile. He acts toward Josh like a frustrated boss on the verge of firing a lazy worker. Both of you have forgotten that he’s a little boy.”

Bonnie went on to point out that for months I had been oblivious to Joshua’s feelings about chess; I was so intoxicated by his potential that I couldn’t see what was happening. While she talked, I was thinking that if only my son and I could have a serious conversation, everything would be okay. It was just that he was out of practice and in a bad mood. The tournaments would begin soon, and despite his loss to David Arnett in the nationals, he was still the highest-rated primary player in the United States.

“You must be blind,” Bonnie said angrily in response to my silences and equivocations. “Don’t you understand? He doesn’t like playing anymore.”

OUR LITTLE CHESS
team was in a state of chaos and dejection. Josh didn’t want to play, and whenever I managed to get through to Bruce on the phone, he sounded frazzled and exhausted. I was facing the possibility that there would be no more tournaments, no second chance to win the national championship, no more splendid contests in Washington Square. When I thought of Joshua’s life without chess, the alternatives—good grades, Little League games and clarinet lessons—seemed mediocre and boring.

Finally I arranged a dinner with Bruce to discuss our crisis. He looked thin and drawn. While he described his harried eighteen-hour day, he kept glancing at his watch. He knew that he had to be somewhere else, but he couldn’t remember where. He said he was falling behind on all his deadlines. He couldn’t write well when he was so tired, but there was no time to rest. I was apprehensive that he was about to say he no longer had time for Josh, and that we would have to find another teacher.

Instead, Pandolfini began to describe an idea. His mood changed completely, and he began to laugh and relax. After thirteen years he was considering playing in chess tournaments again, but the other players wouldn’t recognize him. He would dress in elaborate disguises; perhaps he’d wear a long beard and a flowing black cape
and speak in one of several accents he had been practicing. He would do very well in the tournaments, perhaps even win a couple, he predicted. For one thing, he would have no rating and the best players would take him lightly, which would be an enormous edge. Also, he knew much more about the game than when he had last played in tournaments. Most important, in his disguises he could play without pressure because it would be impossible for Bruce Pandolfini to lose. Each time he began to establish a small reputation, he’d change identities and begin anew. The fantasy of playing again seemed to free Bruce from the clutter and anxieties of his life. He was intrigued by his quixotic idea, experiencing aspirations he’d first felt as a teenager while playing through the chess masterpieces of Alekhine at the Marshall Chess Club, imagining himself building impregnable positions and humbling the best players in the world. Somehow, he assured me, he’d make room in his hectic schedule for this secret life.

While Bruce talked on, I realized that years of writing articles for
Chess Life
, lecturing at universities and producing popular instructional books had made playing the game he loved too threatening. If he did poorly, wouldn’t it tarnish his reputation as a writer and teacher? But wasn’t it also possible that his reluctance to play might quietly infect a student of his? At eight, Josh was also trapped by a reputation—reluctant to play, afraid to lose. “You know why I didn’t want to play Ben,” he had said to me a few days earlier. “Let’s just say that by accident I lost a game. He’d tell everyone in school.”

At seven, Josh had often been referred to as a genius, and for Bruce it had been wonderful to have such a highly regarded student. For both of them it had been like living in a Peter Pan fantasy. Josh could fly and couldn’t fall. When he lost a game playing against adults, he came out a winner nonetheless; invariably he was praised for his talent and potential. Perhaps without realizing it, Bruce and I had fueled this illusion of invincibility. To each of us it was unacceptable for him to lose to other children. Before he was old enough to write, Josh had learned that winning was the most direct way to his father’s heart. I was insatiable for his wins, and we didn’t talk about losing; that was an unacceptable reality that he had to
wrestle with on his own. Even when he lost a game to someone who was several years older and had a higher rating, Bruce was quick to point out Josh’s carelessness and how easily he might have won; rarely did he praise the other child’s ingenuity.

AN EXCEPTIONAL STUDENT
is likely to be a losing financial proposition for a teacher. While his wife or girlfriend is urging him to find wealthier pupils, the teacher finds himself scheduling extra sessions with his star, lessons that are sometimes not paid for. There is never enough time to cover the material, and one-hour lessons frequently stretch into a third hour. In addition, the teacher spends time planning tournament strategies, photocopying problems, scanning foreign periodicals for the newest opening lines, searching bookstores for out-of-print material, worrying about results. He does all this because he is infatuated with his student’s potential, riding hopes that are unlikely to come to fruition and that he would be embarrassed even to admit. Perhaps his student will become a national champion someday, maybe even world champion. For the teacher, this would be like becoming a champion himself.

In the back of his mind, Pandolfini had a goal. Given Joshua’s rapid progress as a seven- and eight-year-old, he had a chance to become the youngest American master ever. Almost without realizing it, Bruce had picked up the pace. In the past Josh had solved problems faster than any child he’d ever worked with, and the more difficult they were, the better he liked it. Gradually Pandolfini had begun to talk to my son as an equal, often verbalizing complex chess variations without demonstrating them on the board. This saved time, but for a while he didn’t realize that Josh would sometimes nod without understanding; it simply wasn’t in his nature to admit to a weakness. Also, on some days, or even for entire months, Josh seemed to be able to grasp master-level concepts. At such times his chess ability was years more advanced than during those periods when he couldn’t bear to face the stern demands of his lessons. During the first years of my son’s play, Bruce had often reminded me that such inconsistencies were normal for a child, but lately he and I had both expected a more even performance. Pandolfini was impatient for his pupil to begin playing advanced
contemporary openings, which would raise the level of his game, but Josh had trouble memorizing the moves. He also had difficulty recording his moves accurately in notation during tournaments, and would expend more energy scribbling and erasing on the scoresheet than in playing; as a consequence, until he learned to write with more dexterity, his offhand games were more creative and sophisticated than his tournament ones. Sometimes Bruce accused Josh of not trying—younger kids could write the moves accurately—and my son would complain bitterly that he
was
trying. He was so good at some things that it was easy to forget that his aptitudes for different tasks were uneven, just like those of other seven- and eight-year-olds.

The realization that he might be losing Josh was a terrible blow for Pandolfini, who had begun to feel like part of our family. Twice a week after the lesson he had sat at our small kitchen table eating dinner, discussing Joshua’s homework, or what school he ought to go to, or expressing pained concern about a second-grade infatuation that had turned out badly. On his own, he had spent many hours worrying about his pupil’s future and systematically plotting its course. Now he had to face the fact that their lessons simply weren’t working. When he tried to introduce new material, Josh sat at the table with a sullen expression, fooling with a ball or a toy car, waiting for Bruce to leave.

He’d been pushing Josh much too hard, Pandolfini realized. In preparing for the nationals the previous spring, he had treated his student like a robot, cramming variations into him that my son found inaccessible or unattractive. He had tried to ignore Joshua’s willfulness and age, and had grown increasingly impatient with his resistance to various time-honored ideas. But perhaps this stubbornness was a vital component of Josh’s fighting spirit and chess intuition. By nature Bruce tended to be pacifistic and compliant, whereas his pupil was competitive and pugnaciously opinionated. Perhaps the well-intentioned but constant drilling of chess principles was taking the guts out of our little player, ultimately even contributing to a fear of playing. Bruce wondered whether he had wanted Josh to win too much. Perhaps he should have allowed his student to discover more for himself, even if it meant losing games
and rating points. Maybe early success had been a trap for both of them.

Pandolfini and I decided that he and Josh had to get away from serious chess, to forget the imperatives of winning and the endless memorizing of opening variations that had taken all the fun and game out of the game. Bruce threw all of his plans and programs out the window. Chess would have to become fun again or Josh would quit. In fact, he might quit anyway; he had to have the room to make that choice. To play with enthusiasm and creativity he would have to be allowed to discover why and for whom he was studying. It wouldn’t work if he was doing it all for his father and his teacher. Bruce would have to start listening to his pupil, and at this moment Josh was thinking more about his new school than about chess. He hated taking the bus in the morning; he felt sick from the driver’s cigar and the plastic smell of the van’s upholstery; he couldn’t stand what they served for lunch. He and Bruce began to talk about such matters during their lessons. Josh was excited about the math program at Dalton and showed Bruce a tricky conceptual problem that he had figured out in less than ten minutes. Then he timed his teacher while he solved it.

Like a married couple who have been going through bad times, the two of them had to learn to laugh together and to begin to worry about each other. One afternoon my son asked Bruce why he looked so gloomy, and Pandolfini talked about his bad day. Then Josh talked about a pretty girl in his class, clasped his hands and hoped fervently that she liked him. He asked Bruce whether he should risk asking her over and then worried about what would happen if she said yes. What do you do on an afternoon play-date with a girl who doesn’t like football?

Pandolfini allowed chess to become incidental to other matters. When he brought the game up he did so gently and without urgency. He set up chess problems for Josh to solve, simple ones of the sort he’d introduced two years earlier. He timed his student on the clock, and they both laughed while Josh tried to find the mate before Bruce had all the pieces in place on the board. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this Pandolfini would stand up, yawn and say, “C’mon, Tiger, let’s go outside and toss the football.”
Twenty minutes of beginner problems and an hour of shagging long passes became a chess lesson. After a couple of weeks of this they started playing speed games as well, but they chatted about football at the same time, and when Josh blundered Bruce turned it into a joke.

Almost overnight, Pandolfini could see that everything was coming back together, but he didn’t want it to happen too fast. One afternoon Josh beat him in a seven-minute game without odds of any sort. Afterward, Bruce told me that he had never seen Josh play such an elegant, original combination. The two of them continued to joke and to talk about sports, keeping chess on the back burner. Bruce gave his student a new little black book, and every lesson he crammed it full of superstar and Day-Glo dinosaur stickers. Sometimes they spent a third of the lesson fooling with the book and the stickers.

By now my son was looking forward to seeing Bruce again. His coach at Dalton, Svetozar Jovanovic, had also been concerned about his unhappiness and had arranged events to integrate Josh into the school. He called to invite Josh to play a simultaneous exhibition against the primary team, assuring him that afterward the children would know who he was and it would be easier for him to make new friends.