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Journalism of Courage
Chess is not friendly to prose. Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what8217;s exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game. 8220;Then, on move 21, came Black8217;s crusher: a6!8221; 8212; totally opaque, as are references to the
Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense, the Giuoco Piano, and the Queen8217;s Gambit Declined. You can ignore the technical stuff and write about powerful queenside attacks, hammering rook assaults, intense positional struggle, and so on; but the truth is that the game is the technical stuff. A move that counts as dramatic is a move disclosed after an exhaustive analysis of all other possible moves, and the analysis can take forty minutes or more. Then someone reaches out and pushes a little piece of wood two inches. To readers who have not pondered the alternatives themselves, and who already think that the huddles in football take too long, it8217;s hard to communicate the thrill8230;
One possible reason for the world8217;s interest was the Cold War8230;After Reykjaviacute;k, and a few grudging public appearances, Fischer went off the radar screen. Fischer gave an interview on a Philippine radio station on September 11, 2001, in which he said that 8220;America got what it deserved.8221; 8230; In the end, he revealed himself to be not a rebel or a mad genius but 8212;what was fairly obvious all along 8212; a delusional paranoid. As a chess-playing psychologist, William Hartston, said: 8220;Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.8221;
Excerpted from Louis Menand8217;s 8216;Game Theory8217; from the January issue of the 8216;New Yorker8217;
