ATimes-Advocate Escondido, California Friday, June 30, 1972 - Page 17
World Match Most Publicized: Chess in Golden Moments
New York (NANA) — When Bobby Fischer sits down with Boris Spassky in Iceland Sunday, the world will be treated to the greatest chess match—certainly the most publicized—in history.
It is a long history dating back at least to the eighth or ninth century, although Montaigne insisted that Alexander the Great played a form of chess 2,500 years ago.
Chess has always been the most international of games. Masters competed even while their countries were at war. It also has been a great equalizer, with kings playing paupers and sultans playing their slaves.
Among the latter was Mir Sultan Khan, who was not a sultan at all but a serf in a remote village in the Punjab. An Indian Maharajah recognized his genius for chess and in 1929 took the 24-year-old lad to Europe to try his luck against the great players of the time. Illiterate, he was unable to study the books; he learned from watching other Indian players who could read English.
While it lasted it carried the fragrance of an Arabian nights fantasy. The American chess team was invited to the Maharajah's London home for dinner. It was a weird tableau. Mir Sultan Khan, the chess genius, waited on table. The maharajah saw nothing awkward in the situation.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the boy prodigy was Paul Morphy, of New Orleans. He learned the game at 10, and won the American championship at 20. There followed triumphs in London and Paris, and challenges to play anyone in the world at odds, with no takers. He retired at 21, ([after the U.S. Civil War, the North pitting Union army upon the Southern Confederate States. Due to being a resident of deep south Louisiana, some in the north automatically assumed Mr. Morphy was a political fanatic just like themselves, and began an all out campaign to attack and ruin Mr. Morphy's life at every possible opportunity and completely rewrite the history of his chess endeavors, including tall tales of Mr. Morphy “cheating” at the game. Mr. Morphy became disillusioned and retired back home to Louisiana among people who still remembered him as he was, and loved him. He continued to play chess with familiars, but not in public. Mr. Morphy made a limited number of attempts to reintegrate in the chess world, including a visit to Paris, which were quickly thwarted by past associates in the Northern states who had made verbal threats of “cutting him so dead”… such malicious threats and false reports, assaults on Mr. Morphy's character and reputation, blackening his name in public newspapers with fictitious idle gossip, including insinuated threats on his life. Reported “death notices” often appeared in newspapers, whilst Morphy yet lived. Some suspected he either committed suicide or was murdered, by poisoning, as the evidence demonstrates, he had ample enemies with motive, generating a regular circulation of rumors for years, and always coming out of Northern sources... (but you're not supposed to know all this.)]) including became a recluse and died at 47 in 1884, leaving a heritage of chess theory that is pre-eminent to this day. It was said ([by those Northern political fanatics)] he was insane the last 26 years of his life. ([but Morphy himself spoke to newspapers himself, inviting people to come to New Orleans and see for themselves that he walked Canal street daily. His friends testified that he was in perfect health, body and mind. Associates reported on their private in-house chess with Mr. Morphy, and that he continued to offer knights odds to friends and associates. Numerous reports contradicting his malevolent detractors, were offered up by friends and family and associates of Morphy affirming his good state of health and finances. All to the chagrin of his detractors. After public records were made available on the internet, there is no record of a Paul Charles Morphy ever having been an “inmate” as the detractors claimed throughout the 1880s. But it is true, his greatest detractor of all, Steinitz, died in said condition and in the care of public charity. Seems Karma had the last word on this matter.])
[…]
The first official world champion, in 1866, was Wilhelm Steinitz. He was born in Prague, but shuttled throughout his life between Vienna, London and New York. Today's concepts of position, openings and defense are due to 40 years of his dedication to the game.
Steinitz was notorious for hysterics and vituperation. Like most chess champions, he was a megalomaniac. One of his patrons was a well-to-do personage named Epstein, a power on the Vienna Stock Exchange. While playing with Steinitz, Epstein was irritated by the former's humming and demanded he shut up, please. Steinitz, of course, bridled.
“One the stock exchange, you are Epstein,” he growled. “But here, I am Epstein.”
It was inconceivable to Steinitz that he could ever lose. Prior to an important round-robin tournament, someone asked him what his chances were.
“Excellent,” he snapped.
“Everybody has to play Steinitz. But I don't.”
Near the end of his life he developed delusions that he could manipulate electricity, and rambled about a game with God, insisting that he was going to give him a handicap of pawn and move. Nobody ever learned who won.
Before the invention of the chess clock, in 1880, a game was endless. Morphy was reputed to have contested one of Louis Paulsen where, for 11 hours neither player touched a piece. At last Morphy raised an eyebrow.
“Oh,” said Paulsen. “It is my move?”
Some consider chess merely a game, others a science, but there is also an esthetic to the contest. David Bronstein, an authentic genius, lost a world championship by playing for an “artistic win” when a simple draw would have sufficed.
There is also an eccentric humor that is associated with chess masters. One of its great exponents was Xavier Tartakower, a Middle European of diverse passports during the period between the two World Wars.
In one tournament Tartakower suffered a rare five losses in succession and was asked, “How come a player of your experience can lose so many games in a row?”
“I had a toothache during the first game, so I lost,” Tartakower replied. “In the second game I had a headache, so I lost. In the third game, an attack of rheumatism in the left shoulder, so I lost. In the fourth game, I wasn't feeling so well, so I lost. And in the fifth game? Well, must one have to win every game?”
Addiction to chess has often disrupted and even destroyed married life. Tony Santasiere, a veteran master, once excoriated the great Sammy Reshevsky for being a failure on the level of “love,” his term for the creative artist who risks all for the beauty of an idea without thinking of the money that accompanies the winning of a tournament.
Reshevsky's sin stemmed from his confession, “never again will I permit chess to interfere with the more important business of caring for my family,” a premise that left his critics horror-stricken.
“Any unskilled laborer can raise a family,” snorted Santasiere, a bachelor. “But a Reshevsky? A genius, a dream for all humanity? Schopenhauer was correct: A married philosopher is ridiculous.”
Egocentricity in chess is rampant, particularly among the male species. “Louise,” German master Arnold Schottlaender once told his wife, “if one of us dies, I think I'll move to Berlin.”
Despite the presence of an occasional female, chess remains predominantly male-oriented. In the 1930s, Vera Menchik, a Czech-born Englishwoman, was considered capable of beating the best of the men, but her career was cut short when she perished in a German buzz bomb attack during World War II.
Most women players today rank considerably below second-rank men. Near the top is Jacqueline Piatigorsky, an attractive grandmother who, with her famed cellist husband, Gregor, prefers to operate as a patron.
In the early 60's, the most promising aspect of women's chess was the meteoric rise of Lisa Lane. A genuine beauty with brunette, patrician features, she progressed through the customary stages of celebrity status: shyness at first, then confidence, finally scowling irritability when photographers hounded her upon her return from a disastrous European tournament which she blamed on an unhappy love affair.
Miss Lane's candle continued to burn, but only a little while longer. Last heard from, she was the entrepreneur of a chess studio in Greenwich Village in New York City.
World Match Most Publicized: Chess in Golden Moments Fri, Jun 30, 1972 – 17 · Times-Advocate (Escondido, California) · Newspapers.com
Chess in Global Limelight Fri, Jun 30, 1972 – 23 · Times-Advocate (Escondido, California) · Newspapers.com
