A very interesting article written by Chidanand Rajghatta. Though the article gloats about Times of India, it gives interesting stuff about TOI and Vishy’s association which seem to go long back to the 80’s.
Vishy Anand must have a soft corner for The Times of India. Why else would he field calls from three correspondents of the same organi
sation from three corners of the world moments after he won his third world chess title?
Our association with him goes back to the late 1980s when he had just become Grandmaster. After meeting him in an Asiad Village apartment in New Delhi for an interview, I hared back to office to announce that a future world champion had arrived, as had a page one story. The raw enthusiasm — or sales pitch — of a callow reporter was viewed dubiously (nice try, Rajghatta), because in those days sports, much less chess, did not make the page one cut.
Maybe it was a lean news day, but a clairvoyant editor took the bait (or gambit) and we were off and running with a page one Vishy Anand ‘anchor’ — the first of many to follow. A few months later, he won the world junior championship in Manila and I wrote a Sunday Times profile of the young man headlined “The Joy of Chess.” He was truly a master of the chess universe (Vishwa-nathan, which is actually his father’s name) who radiated happiness (Anand).
As he began winning tournaments and beating top-level Grandmasters and Supergrandmasters in the early 1990s, he became a familiar story. One time in 1993, I recall giving up a more pressing assignment and going AWOL to watch him at a tournament in Tilburg, Netherlands, where the world’s top 100 grandmasters had gathered. The result was a Sunday Review story with the vivid headline “Veni Vidi Vishy.”
But he hadn’t scaled the summit yet, and his first tilt — and also our most memorable encounter — came in 1995 when he took on Garry Kasparov in New York. The venue was at the World Trade Center, on a specially built deck on the 107th floor. Six years later, when the WTC came crashing down, we recalled that meeting because I had interviewed him — on 9/11 —1995.
It was a terrific assault on King Kasparov’s crown, but Anand came up short (no pun here; Kasparov had crushed Briton Nigel Short for the world title a couple of years earlier). At that time, there were still doubts about whether Anand had developed the nerve and the killer instinct necessary to take on the world’s highest ranking grandmaster. Here’s what I wrote in one of the previews to that match-up.
“When he first stormed into the chess elite, he invited disbelief… A young kid with tortoise shell glasses, T-shirt, sneakers, and occasionally, even bombers. It was terrible. He was supposed to scowl, grunt, have uncombed hair and soup stains on his shirt front. He was supposed to have a nasty disposition, a foul temper and infuriating eccentricity.
Instead he traipsed around, a laughing vagrant in a world of grey suited, dour-faced boors. He played fast, he spoke fast, and he rose fast. And what better, he smiled his way into the grim and musty corridors of chessdom. Few thought he would last long or go far.
You see, in chess, you are not supposed to smile. Or be nice. Or be well-mannered. It is considered a weakness. You have to hate your opponent to
beat him. As the writer AA Milne said, “No man has yet said ‘checkmate’ in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent bitter, boastful and malicious.” This polite young man violated the basic principles of chess etiquette.
But by the time he arrived in New York, they said he had toughened (I hadn’t seen him in a while). His trainers Ubilava and Maurice Perrea insisted he now sported an iron fist in a velvet glove. “He can be polite across the table, but on the board… he’s violent!” Perrea said. In an interview ahead of the meeting, Anand himself told me “He (Kasparov) is not God…I can beat him.” It was a heartening show of confidence by a man (we couldn’t call him kid anymore) who was clearly the underdog.
As it turned out, he was not there yet. After eight consecutive draws at the start, Anand drew first blood in Game 9 and stunned the world. A furious Kasparov left without shaking his hand and slammed the door behind him, rattling Anand. The King then made a comeback, and Anand had to wait several more years before he claimed the crown, first in Teheran, and later in Mexico City, and now in Bonn.
But what was most memorable at his first shot at the world title was how he changed the very nature of chessdom. He was immensely likable, and New Yorkers, and America, took to him (I would complain that he never played enough here; preferring his favored European circuit). Journalists loved him for his impish humor and I recall a reporter telling him after the first few draws that it was pretty dull going. “Yeah, it’s not exactly rock-and-roll,” Anand responded dryly.
What Anand did at that clash, and in tournaments since, was change the dynamic and chemistry of the chess world, where malice and ego had reigned supreme.
Some of the chronicled instances of the animus among chess players are so stunning they could shame the Australian cricket team. At London’s Pursell Club in 1867, in a match between the irascible world champion William Steinitz and the English champion Blackburn, their pathological dislike for each other was so much that Steinitz once leaned across and spat at his opponent, who responded by giving him a black eye. A century later, when two viscerally antipathic Russians, Victor Korchnoi and Tigran Petrosian, met in a contest titled “The Match of Hate,” tempers ran so high (and low) that the organisers inserted a board under the table to prevent them from kicking each other.
Thought you heard enough? Only a few years ago, a chess delegation from the former Yugoslavia, carrying the strains of ethnic discord back home into the playing arena, indulged in an ugly brawl. It required para-military forces to separate Croatian Master Nenad Sulava and Serbian Master Velibor Zircovic. They have got a little civilized more recently, but still there is always a chill when two grandmasters sit across the board for a game. The nicest description that Karpov ever provided about Kasparov was “that hairy ape…” Such is the repugnance that reigned in chess.
But with Anand’s arrival, things changed. Evermore, there are young and smiling chess masters, laughing and joking. In fact, as Anand duelled Kasparov across the board, Patrick Wolff, Yasser Seirawan, Ilya Gurevich and other younger Grandmasters demonstrated the game outside for paying spectators, reducing the arcana of top level chess to a typically American pop status. “Knight to bishop five, isn’t that freaky?” Gurevich would ask. “Aw, that move sucks..” another Grandmaster would reply.
The purists hated it, but New Yorkers who paid 15 bucks to watch the match loved it. Even Kasparov said at that time — with typical immodesty — that Anand’s personality, more than his game, would be his problem. He liked Anand. And in a game that is founded on antagonism and hostility, where a visceral, pathological personal dislike often translates into victories on the board, he thought that can be a fatal weakness.
As it turned out, he survived (using psy-war, one suspects). But considering he (Kasparov) is still the highest ranked Grandmaster in history (all-time ELO rating of 2851), how one wishes he’ll come out of retirement to allow Vishy Anand to take a shot at him now. That would be one for the ages.
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