Grandmaster

  20

  “So, how do you two know each other?” Britney asked Liu, poking a piece of lettuce around her plate.

  “I kicked his butt in the first round, and then I felt sorry for him,” Liu answered, and bit into a double cheeseburger. “Hey, Daniel, stop eating all the french fries.”

  “You’re the one wolfing them down two at a time,” I pointed out. We were splitting a large order, and I was positive she had eaten twice as many of them as I had. “Want one?” I asked Britney.

  “No thanks,” Britney said. “You guys enjoy them.” For some reason it seemed like she couldn’t stop watching Liu and me.

  We were all eating lunch together at a burger joint across from the hotel—the Mind Cripplers, Mariel and Britney, who had finished up at the spa, and Liu and her mom. Liu and her mother had won their first two games, and Liu’s mom was in a grand mood. “Our team is boring,” she explained to Mariel. “It’s no fun eating with chess-nerd vegans. Liu needed a burger to recharge her batteries, so I said, ‘I bet those Mind Cripplers know how to chow down.’ All except for Morris, that is.”

  “I don’t eat much during a tournament,” my dad told her. He had seemed in good spirits when he defeated Voorhees, but now he looked like the pressure and the lack of sleep were catching up to him. He hadn’t eaten a crumb for breakfast and he was passing on lunch. His eyes had deep circles under them, and as he sat there he drummed his fingers nervously on the table.

  “Well, you’d better work up an appetite for tonight,” Mr. Kinney said. “Chez André doesn’t serve finger food.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Dad told him, “Daniel and I are going to pass. We’ve been invited to a karaoke place.”

  Mr. Kinney looked back at him. “Tonight is the last evening of the tournament. I really think our team needs to stay together and strategize.”

  “And the food at Chez André is divine,” Mariel contributed.

  “Divine or not, we’ve made our decision,” my dad told Randolph. “You guys go and have some foie gras for us.”

  “Let them go,” Brad said to his father. “There’s no reason we have to do everything together. Britney and I were thinking we might split off after dinner and check out some music.”

  Britney looked surprised by this news.

  “The night before our last round you’re not going out clubbing, so you can forget that,” Mr. Kinney told his son.

  Brad smiled back at his father, but not a very friendly smile. “Thanks for the advice. I will think about it.”

  “I said no,” Randolph told him.

  Brad half stood, squared his broad shoulders, and glared back at his father. “I’m eighteen, Dad. My decision, not yours.”

  Liu whispered to me, “Boy, your team is really more interesting than ours.”

  “You’ll do what I say,” Mr. Kinney told Brad, “and right now that means park your butt in your seat and zip your lip, or I guarantee you’ll regret it.”

  Brad didn’t sit down. He looked like he wanted to take on his father, who for his part was clearly ready to tussle. Watching them, I wondered if they had ever come to blows in the past, and if so, who had won.

  “Hey, everybody.” Dr. Chisolm jumped in. “I have an idea.”

  His voice broke the impasse between the Kinneys, and we all turned to look at him. “I love fine French food as much as the next guy,” he said, “but why don’t we save Chez André for another time. If Grandmaster Pratzer doesn’t mind us horning in on his plans, a light Japanese dinner and some karaoke sounds like it might be a little more healthy and relaxing. We could all stay together, the young members of our team could let loose and have a little fun, and I could demonstrate why I went into medicine instead of rock and roll.”

  I was a little surprised by his suggestion, and I wondered if it was at least partly spurred by his desire to keep a close eye on my father.

  “Sounds good to me,” Brad said. “Anything but a boring French meal.” He sat down and took a big slurp of root beer.

  “It’s a shame about Chez André,” Mariel chimed in, “but I love Japanese food, too. And I have a little frock I can wear.”

  “It sounds like a plan, then,” Dr. Chisolm said. “Randolph, are you okay with it?”

  Mr. Kinney didn’t look particularly happy, but he could tell that the tide had turned against his fancy French restaurant. He hesitated a long beat and then grunted, “Okay, then. If Morris doesn’t mind us barging in on his night out?”

  Dad glanced at me and I gave him a covert nod. “It’s fine with me,” he said. “Mabel? This was your idea.”

  Liu’s mom looked around the table and opened her arms wide. “The more Mind Cripplers the merrier,” she said, and there was a mischievous twinkle in her eye, as if she knew exactly what she was getting into and welcomed the insanity. “You let my daughter and me join you for lunch. The least we can do is return the favor for dinner. Let’s make a night of it. My only requirement is that we all have to really try to let our hair down and have some fun. Except for you, Morris,” she said with a teasing smile. “I mean the hair part.”

  I was a little surprised—I had never seen anyone flirt with my father before.

  “Mom!” Liu said.

  “It’s okay,” my father replied, smiling back at Liu’s mom. “I may be bald, but wait till you see me do Elvis.”

  21

  The middle rounds of a chess tournament are a grind. The opening day excitement is over. The final-day glory is yet to come. Sandwiched in between are the middle rounds, when tired minds are stretched to the breaking point.

  You could see the pressure taking its toll. Red eyes crawled from boards to score sheets, sore backs slouched in uncomfortable folding chairs, openings were misplayed and middle games squandered as exhausted players blundered away pawns and then slammed chess clocks like they really wanted to slug their opponents.

  I kept expecting my father to make a mistake or shout at his opponent and get disqualified. But he hung in there—when it came to chess it was like he had an iron will and reserves of energy. Then again, I think he had a special reason for not wanting to lose to his third-round opponent.

  Dad was matched against a guy named Hutchinson, who had a child’s body and an adult’s serious face. He was twelve, but he looked like he was nine. “Prodigy,” people whispered. “Pint-size wrecking ball. Could become the strongest American player in years. He won the New York Elementary Title. He’s jumped five hundred rating points in the last three months. This kid is the real deal.”

  When Hutchinson sat down opposite my dad, it was like an older and a younger version of the same person coming face to face. The twelve-year-old propped himself up on a pillow to get a better view of the board, thumped his thin elbows down on the table, and folded his wrists together just the way my dad did.

  For all the kid’s chess success, there seemed to me to be something very sad about Hutchinson—he looked so lonely and precocious sitting up on that dais with the adult grandmasters, scrunching up his face in concentration and attacking fury. My father looked back at him and I could tell Dad was remembering how it felt to be a young hotshot, and all the reasons he had given up the game.

  It was a battle between age and youth, a former prodigy and the new up-and-comer. Hutchinson threw down the gauntlet and attacked right from the start, and Dad leaned slightly forward in his seat, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and accepted the challenge, defending carefully with the black pieces.

  I would have liked to watch more of their game, but my own third-round opponent was the expert who had been intimidated and destroyed by George Liszt in the previous round in just fifteen moves. His name was Owen Burghoff, and he sure wasn’t intimidated by me.

  We had each won a game and lost one, but Burghoff clearly felt he didn’t belong so far back, playing such a low-rated opponent. From the moment he sauntered up I could see that he was determined to clobber me quickly and climb back into the upper brackets of this tournament.

/>   He was a fussy dude—overdressed in a gray sports jacket. When he arrived at the table I held out my hand for a shake but he pretended not to see it. While we waited for the command to start our clock, I tried to make polite conversation, but he gave me one glance and then completely ignored me. He took off his expensive watch and laid it down exactly parallel to the edge of the chessboard, checked the lead in his mechanical pencil, and filled out his score sheet in small, perfectly formed letters.

  I hated his manners and decided not to go quietly. I knew I couldn’t beat an expert, but maybe I could make him sweat a little. I got through the opening on fairly even terms but dropped a pawn in the middle game, and then I lost a second pawn. Burghoff pressed his advantage and kept glancing impatiently across the table at me, as if waiting for me to give up. He hissed at me at one point: “You have no chance. End this with dignity and resign.”

  I probably would have given up against anyone else, but I had taken such a dislike to this guy that I decided to make him sit there and wait. “Don’t talk to me during the game or I’ll have to call over a ref,” I warned him. I took my time on a bunch of fairly obvious moves, and got up to watch my dad because I could tell that if I left the table it would really irritate Burghoff.

  Dad looked like he had imploded. He had sunk deep into himself, and his whole body seemed to be trembling, as if his heartbeat was shaking his extremities. But he had absorbed all of Hutchinson’s best shots, and now he was slowly tightening his defensive position, like a boa constrictor choking the breath out of a pesky rodent before devouring it.

  “Your dad will win this game,” Grandmaster Liszt whispered as I passed, “but at what cost? Look at him, Daniel! Do yourselves both a favor and get him out of here before it’s too late.”

  “Worry about yourself,” I told him. I returned to my own table, took eight minutes to study my obviously lost position, and finally made a move that I could have made in ten seconds. Burghoff rolled his eyes as if to say “Finally” and immediately made his own highly aggressive move. He intended to finish me off and get out of there.

  Suddenly I saw it. He had moved too quickly and left himself open to a combination that would win his queen. I made the right move, and he saw what he had fallen into. His body went rigid, as if someone had poured concrete down his spine. He took twenty minutes on his next move, and fifteen on the one after that, searching the board as if looking for a hidden cave beneath the squares where his queen could flee to and escape. But there was no cave, no way out, and eventually he had to make the forced move. I reached across the board and took his queen.

  Suddenly I was flooded with so much energy I could barely sit still or think straight. I was a queen up against an expert! “Don’t give it back,” I cautioned myself. “Don’t choke. Just play smart.” Burghoff thrashed and squirmed and set traps and tried for counterplay, but a queen up is a queen up, and the game was soon over. He didn’t shake my hand after the game either—he just stood up in a huff, grabbed his fancy watch, and stalked off.

  I felt a tug on my arm. It was Liu. She looked really impressed. “Did you actually beat that guy?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I toasted an expert. How about that?” I asked.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “Not bad at all,” my dad seconded. He was standing on my other side, smiling at me proudly.

  “I assume you beat the young brat?” I asked him.

  Dad nodded. “Spanked him and sent him to bed without any supper.”

  “Sounds like we may have some reasons to celebrate tonight,” Liu said.

  “Not so fast,” Dad cautioned her. “We still have to get through the dreaded fourth round.”

  My father’s warning proved prophetic. I came apart in the fourth round and lost very quickly. I was tired from the last game, and my opponent—a kid named Gajanand, who was playing on a team from one of the elite New York public high schools—destroyed me. Still, two and two was a very credible score to finish the second day.

  Eric dropped his second game and was also two and two. Brad had won two games, drawn a game, and lost a game, so he was a half point ahead of me at two and a half and one and a half. Dr. Chisolm and Mr. Kinney had won three games and lost one. So all in all, the Mind Cripplers were doing pretty well and were positioned to win the tournament if two things happened. First, we had to do well in the final round. And second, my father had to win his fourth game.

  If chess was really war, there was murder and mayhem going on up on the dais—the patzers and the prodigies and the overambitious experts and masters had been sent packing and now the grandmasters were starting to face off. There had been five of them when the tournament started, but one of them—Grandmaster Murray—had drawn a game with a master. That left four undefeated grandmasters going into the final two games: my dad and George Liszt, and Grandmaster Sanchez and Grandmaster Leshkin.

  In the fourth round, my dad was paired with Grandmaster Sanchez, the top-rated player in this entire tournament at 2620. I had heard from the tournament gossip mill that Sanchez was one of the strongest players in America and frequently played in international tournaments. He was a small, dignified man in his late thirties, with a calm, polite manner that vanished when he sat down at the chessboard.

  It made me feel proud that my father was up on the dais this late in the tournament, matched on fairly even terms with one of the strongest chess players in America. A live feed of the grandmaster games played on large monitor screens out in the common area. I could see my dad and Grandmaster Sanchez concentrating intently, and each time they moved the growing crowd reacted and kibbitzed.

  My dad had the white pieces, and I was surprised to see him start off with the Giuoco Piano, the very opening he had cautioned me never to play against stronger players because all its major lines have been analyzed to death. His fourth move brought gasps from the spectators as he moved up his knight pawn, offering it as a sacrifice. I watched on the monitor as Grandmaster Sanchez looked across the board at him, smiled slightly as if to say: “Are you serious?” and then took the pawn.

  “I can’t believe he’s playing that!” a tall man near me said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The Evans Gambit,” the tall man explained. “It was one of the most popular openings two hundred years ago. All the great old masters played it—de la Bourdonnais, Anderssen, and of course Morphy. But no one plays it anymore.”

  I had to smile. My father, aware that he hadn’t kept up with the latest advances in chess theory and facing a top young grandmaster, was channeling his boyhood hero, Paul Morphy, and playing a very old opening.

  “That’s not quite true,” a studious-looking teenager told the tall man. “Nunn and Timman played the Evans Gambit thirty years ago.”

  The tall man shrugged dismissively. “Nunn and Timman? Hardly a revival.”

  “And Kasparov defeated Anand with it in 1995,” a man with an authoritative English accent pointed out. “It’s never been completely refuted.”

  The crowd grew from fifteen or twenty to thirty, and then to fifty. On the other monitor, I could see George Liszt locked in a tight positional battle with Grandmaster Leshkin.

  One by one the Mind Cripplers joined me till our whole team was there, watching. The Evans Gambit put my father down a pawn, but gave him a wide-open attacking game. Both his bishops were soon sweeping long diagonals, and his king was safely castled while the black king was stuck in the center of the board.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous and at the same time more proud of my dad than I was in that hour when he attacked Grandmaster Sanchez with everything he had. The challenge brought out his very best, both in chess and also physically. He was obviously exhausted, but the game energized him. They sat facing each other, concentrating deeply and not saying a word or moving a muscle. They were both completely locked in, going at it with everything they had.

  I finally understood what my father had meant back in our home in New Jersey wh
en he told me that true chess was not replaying memorized openings or stale variations but mental combat—two minds in unfamiliar territory, wrestling with each other. Grandmaster Sanchez played a hitherto untried line at move nine, and he and Dad were soon far off down their own unexplored road, with no maps from the past to guide them.

  My Mind Crippler teammates were rooting for my father as he sacrificed yet another pawn, and then a knight, to press his attack. “That’s it, Morry, hit him with the kitchen sink,” Randolph enthused, fists clenched.

  “Your dad’s a freaking badass giant deep-sea octopus!” Eric said, clapping me on the back. “Look at those tentacles.”

  Grandmaster Sanchez took a long time on his twenty-ninth move, and an even longer time on his thirtieth. I couldn’t completely decipher the position, but it was clear that he was worried. The whispers in the lobby swung back and forth: “He’s got this defended.” “No, he’s toast.” “No way Sanchez is going to get caught in some mating net. He’s a world-class player.” “World class or not, he’s not getting out of this one alive.”

  I stood there watching my father, and I was sweating profusely in the air-conditioned hall. My knees felt weak, and my hands were clasped tightly, as if some team prayer might help. But I wasn’t praying—I was watching my father do what he was best at, after a lifetime of hiding his talent. Maybe every kid deserves to see his father be a hero just once, for a few minutes.

  Liu seemed to understand how I felt—she stood next to me and propped me up slightly with her right hand touching my shoulder. “He’s incredible,” she whispered, and it was so strange to hear someone say that about my bald, potbellied accountant of a father.

  “Check,” my father said, when Sanchez finally made his thirtieth move.