Game Of Kings
by Michael Weinreb
“There are eighty-five billion ways to play the first four moves of a chess game, and it has been said that there are more variations in a single chess game than there are atoms in the universe.” –pages 67 & 68.
The above quote represents the dichotomy that is chess. Logically, the fact that there are eighty-five billion ways to play the first four moves makes sense: there are a lot of different pieces that one can choose to move during the start of the game. (Specifically, you can move two knights to two different spots each, and eight pawns that can either be moved up one spot or two.) But to see it written out like how it is above also introduces another different logical fact shared by the majority of the American populace: that chess is more math than sport. We tend to think of nerds or, at the very least, young boys who possess a certain level of social awkwardness that allows them to care about this game–a game that can sometimes require you to sit still in a chair for five hours to play; sitting, thinking, moving pieces, hitting a timer after a completed move. It is essentially part war simulation, part math, part psychology, and part memorization. Additionally, I am going to assume here that if you are reading this that you went to high school, and the Dorky Chess Club Guy is a stereotype that is only topped by Dumb Jock and Slutty Cheerleader in the Pantheon of high school stereotypes. Bottom line: the chess kids can’t win, especially when you factor in the typical scarcity of girls either on the team, or even as recreational players.
What Michael Weinreb attempts to do here is to humanize chess. Because, when you factor in all of the things I have just stated in the previous paragraph and combine it with the fact that the pre-eminent American and international chess icon, Bobby Fischer (“whose name would become shorthand for a brand of mania that is unique to his sport“), turned out to become a tragically broken and paranoid anti-Semitic shell of a man, the sport of chess does not always travel on the same wavelengths that most people respond to. As with Weinreb’s articles on ESPN.com, there is a really palpable feeling to go along with the descriptions he uses when writing, whether it be about Eliot Weiss, the teacher who runs the chess team at Murrow (“Weiss bears a certain resemblance to Paul Krugman, the renowned economist and columnist at The New York Times, and the walls of his classroom are adorned with cartoon paeans to great moments in math theory…”), or about the environment that surrounds the kids at the hotels when they compete in the supernationals (“a self-contained biosphere of overpriced gift shops and ‘authentic’ Irish pubs“).
Obviously, chess is not for everyone and this book will never be confused with The Da Vinci Code for the typical person looking to make an impulse purchase at the bookstore. And, obviously, with any non-fiction/journalistic book about sports or a person or a group of people, the endpoint is always expected to be that of how the subject at hand is relatable to everyday life, or that there is a larger metaphor at play that we do not always catch. And Weinreb is able to provide this for us.
The most interesting facet I took from the book is that to really excel at something–not just be great but to be the flat-out best at something–you are almost required to condition yourself and break yourself down into a shell of a person in intervals. I think this is what gets glossed over when profiles are done on modern athletes. We read or see profiles about the modern athlete and their workout regiment, and how they knew that this was always what they wanted to do, and that it’s not about the money, and that they want to be the best that they can be, and that their dream since childhood was winning a championship or knocking in the winning run or hitting the winning shot or throwing the winning touchdown. All of that is true because it is an assembly of Franken-clichés; a veritable monster of actualized sound bytes that the press has now enabled every player to regurgitate into any microphone or camera that is placed before them. But what about the subconscious battle between individual achievement versus having to conform to the dynamic of your team? The athlete who knows he is great has to sometimes pretend to be humble. This is why Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan are Icons in such a stratified level above everyone else: they knew they were great, we knew they were great, they would kill to win, and they had a personality that mostly disarmed us against seeing their killer instinct as genuinely hyper-competitive.
Chess, while some of us may not think of it as a sport, does involve imposing your will on your opponent and the desire to destroy them. Because it is naturally infused with math, memorization, and strategy, chess is probably the purest form of sport as a representation of life-as-chaos. To become the next Bobby Fischer you would literally almost have to do nothing but think about chess; only the most monomaniacal mind could hope to come close to becoming the next Fischer. Same with becoming the next Jordan or Tiger Woods, except that monomania is most certainly not a sexy attribute to possess. In fact, the monomaniacal mind would most likely be classified as OCD or possibly even autistic in some form.
So, while we happily buy into the marketing of the modern athlete and the marketing of his or her constitution and ethics, if we really want to know what exists at the core of the athlete’s mind and psyche we may have to look to a young person sitting in front of a table with sixty-four squares and an army of pieces at his or her disposal.
Similar to college sports, chess players have rankings (a ranking of 400 would be like a novice, 2400 begins the Master levels, and 2851 is the highest ranking ever, achieved by Garry Kasparov) and those rankings become mutated to the point of skewing their ability to see their opponents literally as numbers. “I can’t believe I lost to a 1744,” thinks a 2083 to himself as he sees a foregone defeat. And when it comes to pro athletes we know that with the superstars, the game somehow slows down for them (i.e.-when a baseball player is in the midst of a hot hitting streak, they might say that “the ball just looks bigger” during those times). But we can’t really grasp that idea logically; instead, we are forced to grasp it as the extension of the athlete’s persona or image. We know that Kobe Bryant is good but, at some point, we just accept it because he’s Kobe Bryant and not because he continually reinvents himself or allows us to hear what he really thinks. Kobe Bryant (or any other pro athlete) would never use a ranking system to describe an off-night or a victory–”I was surprised I was getting as much space as I was for my jumpers because, you know, I’m a 2218 and Tim Duncan’s a 2289 right now…”–even though it would probably be an honest breath of fresh air to hear.
So it is kind of that much more interesting that these chess players–high schoolers who have their own de facto social awkwardness attached to them; who, in many cases, are first-generation Americans still juggling their parents’ culture with all of the culture that exists outside of their front door; who, at some point, become totally aware that as much as they love chess they will most likely watch it float by because there is no real future in it–look at their strategy and their game the way that they do. There is a confidence in these kids that comes out during a chess match that we do not always see emanate from a pro athlete. (To be sure, this confidence exists in pro athletes as well but, by undermining its description with safe clichés in interviews and profiles, the window in which to view it is compromised. Or, to put it another way: a chess player, after saying the appropriate niceities after a victory, is more apt to saying that he destroyed his opponent; today’s pro athlete always has to guard against the temptation to speak his mind when it comes to victory.)
Maybe this is ironic and maybe this is a flawed analogy. Maybe the last few paragraphs have been a wasted effort in trying to make a case for this book to you, the reader. But the fact that the previous paragraphs only comprise about one-third of all of the things that I have thought about w/r/t chess and today’s atmosphere of professional sports since I have read this book is certainly adequate grounds to praise Weinreb for writing this bewitching little book about chess.
