Jim's Mailings

Chess and Golf

Today's papers celebrate Tiger Wood's success at the Firestone Golf Tournament and his winning more than one million dollars. Coincidently John Tierney wrote a column which was also published today, concerning the results of last week's PGA Tournament at Baltusrol in New Jersey. He reports that more than 80% of the TV watchers are male, reasoning that about 80% of those happen also to be golfers themselves. Still the TV as well as the admissions create enormous excitement for the players themselves. NOT SO WITH CHESS, another heavily biased men's game. On the same page was another NY Times article translated by Sally Ann Welford from Spain.

Tomas Eloy Martinez
When Garry Kasparov lost his battle in May 1997 to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, in New York, chess players around the world realized that human imagination had surrendered to a machine that had no mercy or feelings.
The idea, as old as the world itself, that the human species would end up succumbing to the tools it had created also returned.
Thus the same hands that had lighted the sacred flame would end up snuffing it out.
In its beginnings, chess symbolized war, power and the ascendance of the soul to the serenity of the gods. When the game was invented in India, or in China (it is still not certain which), some 15 centuries ago, the chessboards represented prairies and kingdoms, valleys of blood, impassable rivers, ramparts of fire.
The Arabs took the game, freed of images, to Sicily and Spain, where the Abbot Ruy Lopez wrote a celebrated treatise in 1561, which is still in use today.
Now chess has returned to Spain, but the game is less solemn and more pathetic than it was in its initial days of glory.
A few weeks ago, I listened to a tale told by Joaquin Estefania, director of the journalism school run by Spain's newspaper El Pais. He revealed that some of the grand masters of Eastern Europe and Latin America wander like beggars around their country's villages and towns, competing for the carrion of slim earnings and traveling on night trains without paying for a ticket by hiding in the bathrooms.
Estefania told me that this story was written by an alumnus of the school, Daniel Borasteros, with such painful truths that you would rather not believe them. I made Estefania promise to send me the article, and when at last I read it, I realized that chess had reached a depth even sorrier than the defeat of Kasparov by the machinations of Deep Blue.
Losing against a machine is already disconcerting, but losing your own dignity is to lose against yourself.
When I was a boy, no one ever dreamed of beating the East European masters  who devoted eight or even 10 hours a day to studying chess  paid by the state or by philanthropists of the science of chess. As in the world championships, the winner's prize there, rarely more than $2,500, was always decided among the Soviets. That is the sum that Boris Spassky won against Tigran Petrosian in 1969.
They played not for money but for pride. I remember when the Pole Miguel Najdorf, left stranded in Buenos Aires by World War II, confronted 45 adversaries in 1940 for free. Blindfolded, he gave an extraordinary demonstration of memory and skill as he won 39 of those games, tied four and lost two.
Borasteros describes how Davor Kolmjenovic, a Croatian master based in Spain, lives like a primitive, surviving solely on the bread served during games, stashing it away in a paper napkin. Like many of his colleagues, he plays about 50 games a year for prizes that run from $24 to $1,213, and sometimes he comes away with empty pockets.

"We have gotten to a miserable stage," said an Azerbaijani master, Azer Mirzoev, who sometimes travels hundreds of miles a day to return home because he can't afford to stay in hotels.
When hunger takes a grip, solidarity becomes imperative: The players settle the results of the games and divide the prize money.
However, they don't always come to an agreement. At the beginning of this year, the Argentinian Gabriel del Rio offered to share the $145 winner's prize money with one of his opponents. It was fortunate that the other did not accept, because in the end del Rio came out first.
Nearly all of them, when they arrived in Spain, told exaggerated tales of prowess. Kolmjenovic managed to get into various tourneys boasting that he had defeated the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov, who is the world's No. 3 player. If that had really been so, it could only have happened through a lapse of Topalov's concentration.
Chess players' value is measured month by month by an infallible point system, according to which Kasparov  who is in the top spot  has 2,812 and Kolmjenovic only 2,440, some 300 places behind Kasparov.
Both Lenin and Stalin venerated chess, but the Soviet Union only presented its most tenacious champions, the ones who played with a solar-system-like exactitude. Geniuses sprang up in other places, however. Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca, the young prodigy of the 1920s, did not even study. His winning moves sprang naturally from his mind, like breathing.
Alexander Alekhine, the Russian aristocrat and immigrant who beat Capablanca, lost the world championship only once  by showing up drunk at the matches.
Later, Bobby Fischer turned chess into a show for which he was paid millions of dollars, until he disappeared from the scene, victim of his own dissolute character, and ended up living shabbily and extravagantly, like Howard Hughes.
Barely a decade ago, fans passionately attended tourneys and discussed from a distance the grand masters' plays, which were projected on huge screens. Now, the majority prefer to try their skill against computer games that, for $15, offer millions of mathematical combinations to respond to each move.
The Chinese believed that chess, on a small table, reproduced all the figures of heaven, those of the past and those to come.
That vision, undoubtedly real, contains the powerful images of Deep Blue and the robots that would be permanent champions, as well as the images of the poor indigent masters who wander around Spain, village to village, exchanging their knowledge for a crust of bread.
Martinez, director of Latin American Studies at Rutgers University, is the author of "The Peron Novel." This article was translated by Sally-Ann Welford. (New York Times)

posted by James E. Opfell @ 9:17 PM