The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 27

if THE OTTAWA CITIZEN SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1990 B3 Weekend Observer Higi stakes: There's much more than a $3-million purse at stake during the fifth title match between world champion Gary Kasparov and his archrival Anatoly Karpov. It's a grudge match. Kasparov, the 'Muhammad AIT of chess who has turned thousands around the world into chess fans, is a Soviet radical who calls Karpov 'the symbol' of the communist system By Fred Waitkin The New York Times -Y yt A tor1-'- If 1 'I'D )dki Kasparov, above, is deputy chairman of a fledgling anti-communist faction. karpov, right, enjoyed a close relationship with former premier leonid brezhnev, and is identified with the old guard. over the years the two men have played 124 championship games with 18 victories for kasparov, 16 for Karpov, and 90 draws.

For most of September the world chess champion Gary Kasparov was sequestered, with his wife, his mother and an en tourage of trainers, in a spacious beach house on a bluff above the south shore of Martha's Vineyard. There, he prepared for his fifth title match against his archrival, the former world champion Anatoly Karpov. Every morning he ran barefoot for two and a half miles along the beach and afterward he swam just beyond the breaking surf or played tennis. After lunch and a nap he spent five or six hours over a chessboard with grandmasters imported from the Soviet Union, honing his fierce attacks and straining to come up with new ideas to spring on Karpov. The match, which began on Oct.

8, is the first world championship match held in North America since 1907 and it may well capture the imagination of chess-apathetic America, primarily because of Kasparov, a man who dominates international chess today as boldly and poetically as did Muhammad Ali in boxing. In Europe, Kasparov's animal presence and relentless, attacking style have turned tens of thousands of chess illiterates into fans. For the championship match, the stakes are high. Karpov and Kasparov will divide a record $3 million purse, with $1.7 million going to the winner. In addition, the two Soviets have been ideologically opposed for as many years as they have faced each other over the chessboard, and the world champion, who favors democracy and calls Karpov "the symbol of the system," says the match, coming in the midst ofpolitical upheaval, will be viewed in the Soviet Union almost as a referendum.

"The match will have black and white symbolism old versus new, communist versus anti-communist," Kasparov says. Kasparov, who is of Armenian descent, had not trained seriously for a year, since he, along with 60 friends and members of his family, as forced to flee his home near Baku, in the beleaguered Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, during the rioting between Armenian and Azerbaijani factions. Since then he has shuttled between Moscow, where he feels unhappy and homeless (even while revered by the Soviet population as a national treasure) and the major Western cities where he has been promoting chess and fanning the political fires at home with open criticism of the communist system. Indeed, he has been so preoccupied that his manager and closest friends have been worried for some time that he would go into the contest against Karpov distracted and unprepared. The world championship match, as many as 24 games (the first to score 12 points a victory being a point, a aw half a point gains the title) taking place over two and a half months, is a grueling physical, emotional and intel-' lectual test.

If a player is out of the habit of concentrating for long hours, no matter how great his genius he is likely to become exhausted and bored. Kasparov ieads this match by 2.5-1.5 points. The champion has won one game and three others ended in draws. Kasparov, 27, claims he has trained without distraction, but one must wonder. Almost every night he received calls from the Soviet Union with the lat- est disturbing news.

The world champion is hugely popular in Europe and we were frequently besieged by admirers and journalists. Kasparov, with bushy black eyebrows and a powerful jaw, is a man of average height but with a welterweight's muscular build. With his intense gaze and forceful personality, he seems to occupy much of the space in a large room, not to mention a car. Focused on something a political idea, a friend, a chess position he is nearly indistractible, and on subjects as diverse as the National Basketball Association playoffs "Sorry, but Portland played bad strategy at the end of the third game against Detroit" French literature "Camus is too wishy-washy" or abortion "It is a painful decision, but I pro-choice" his observations are always forthright and often provocative. We drove from Paris to Lille for an exhibition, Kasparov playing simultaneous games against 20 students selected from different engineering institutes.

For the thrce-and-a-half hour event, sponsored by a steel manufacturer, he was paid $20,000. The following week in Paris, he earned twice as much. Before the event we were taken to a seafood restaurant by the student organizers. Kasparov threw himself into passionate discourse. "The police in Moscow are no longer doing their job," he said.

"They are out on the streets fighting democrats." With bitterness and rage, he described the recent shooting of his friend Artur Yusupov, a grandmaster, by robbers in his Moscow flat and said 1 Sj, utterly consumed by politics. Earlier this year he became deputy chairman of the Democratic Party of Russia, a fledgling anti-communist faction. At each chess-related news conference he talks about Gorbachev, about his new democratic coalition and about the tragedy of the Baltic states. a After the match with Karpov he intends to run for deputy in the Soviet parliament, though his future as a politician may. in fact, depend on his retaining the chess title, which gives him enormous political leverage and popular support.

In politics Kasparov is clearly moved by the same dramatic sense of himself that drives him on the chessboard. "I am the raider," he says, "the soldier who uses a parachute and attacks the back of a front. It is a very risky profession, but it is thrilling because there is a chance for a big result." In France this spring, as Kasparov moved relentlessly from engagement to engagement, I found myself wondering about the strain of such a life. One afternoon in Paris he was signing autographs and answering stale questions at an elegant cocktail party given in his honor. After 45 minutes he whispered to me, "I must leave." I chased him out the door and down a winding street.

Kasparov, a soccer player and long-distance swimmer, walks at the pace most middle-aged men jog, so keeping up with him without running was very awkward. My struggle seemed to amuse him. Increasing his blistering pace, he smiled, pumped his arms and reveled in his escape into a fine sunny afternoon. He went on this way for blocks, not speaking. Then, abruptly, he slowed down and said, "My wife is 26.

We should have one or two children, but look at this life that I live. When would I see them? What do you think?" I had the feeling he was deciding the future of his family right then. After a moment, however, he straightened his tie and turned back to the cocktail party, ready to be world champion again. (Excerpted from The New York Times Magazine. Fred Wailzkin is the author of Searching tor Bobby Fischer: The World ol Chess.

Observed by the Father ol a Child 3 and at one point was losing the encounter 5-0, with Karpov needing only one more victory to retain the title. But Karpov, a physically frail man, began to falter, and despite unexplained official time-outs that infuriated Kasparov and gave the champion time to rest, Kasparov won three games and seemed to have Karpov on the ropes. The world press was heralding the match as one of the great sporting comebacks when, incredibly, Florencio Campomanes. president of the Federation Internationale des Echecs, the world governing body of chess, and a close friend of Karpov's, suddenly declared the match canceled due to the exhaustion of both players. The enraged challenger told journalists, who were already interpreting the result as a fix, that his health was fine and that the decision was made at the behest of the Soviet chess federation to save Karpov's title.

Months later Kasparov won a rematch to officially become world champion and subsequently won two more encoun ters with Karpov. During the third match, after losing several games where his opening novelties were easily outplayed by Karpov, Kasparov claimed that one of his most trusted trainers, Evgeny Vladimirov, who had been acting suspiciously in camp, was discovered copying the world champion's newest opening ideas into a notebook; Kasparov is convinced Vladimirov was bribed by Karpov. The competition between Kasparov and Karpov is both petty and profound. Over the years the two men have played 124 championship games and the evenness of their score is stunning 18 victories for Kasparov, 16 for Karpov, with 90 draws. Just as the famous championship match in 1972 between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky was flavored by the Cold War, Karpov-Kasparov has its political side.

Already the cloak-and-dagger speculation has begun. Alburt, a grandmaster who defected from the Soviet Union in 1979 and a two-time U.S. national champion, warns that the world champion must remain alert away from the board as well as in front of it. "Many forces in the Soviet Union want Karpov to win," he explains. "Kasparov is an enemy to Gorbachev.

If I were Kasparov I would hire some expert to check my rooms. I would never discuss an opening novelty with my trainers in my room and never on the phone." At times the world champion seems that within a climate of political chaos, his poor country was becoming lawless. Eventually he was coaxed into chess talk, responding to questions about the Polgars, three Hungarian sisters who are chess prodigies and considered by almost the entire chess world to be extraordinarily talented, the youngest, Judit, a possible world championship contender someday. "She is talented but not greatly talented," Kasparov said. "Women by their nature are not exceptional chess players.

They are not great fighters." "Feminists would not like you for saying such things," a student responded. "The feeling is mutual." In the chess world Kasparov is known as a ferocious offensive player, a bold risk-taker who will sacrifice pieces for positional advantages. He is always attacking, often from directions his opponents hadn't considered, playing moves that have subtle multiple threats. Thus he prefers open games, where the middle of the board is unclogged, pieces can move freely, the positions are double-edged and the possibilities are vast, the chess terrain best suited for flights of imagination, at which Kasparov is absolutely in a class by himself. This is a reputation that serves him well in the excruciating psychological battle that chess at the highest level invariably becomes.

"He keeps increasing the pressure," says one young master who has watched Kasparov on numerous occasions. "Top grandmasters flinch under the tension of his style and confidence. You can tell from their moves they are scared." At dinner in Lille, one of the students inquired when I first met Kasparov and I answered that two years ago my son Joshua, then 11, had played against him in a simultaneous exhibition along with 58 other children in the South Bronx and had managed to draw the game. Kasparov overheard this exchange and said, "I had a good attack against Joshua but I misplayed it." Then to my utter amazement he recited the first 20 moves of the game and recalled the final position of another game that had also been a draw. "He has one flaw, in character as well as in chess," said Lev Alburt, a grandmaster.

"Gary has an internal urge to create wonders, to put himself in lost situations and then make a Hou-dini-like escape. He does this because he has learned that he can make a miracle at the last moment, and this is dangerous because miracles don't always happen." In Lille, as the games began, Kasparov stepped athletically from board to board, pushing pawns and pieces ahead. He says he is a rhythm player, that in a "simul" like this he plays best when he is moving on the beat from game to game. Suddenly, in the midst of things, the promoter of the event threw an arm around the champion's shoulders and. speaking into a microphone, asked Kasparov, who for a few seconds looked like a man emerging from a dream, to describe who was giving him a hard time.

Stuttering at first, Kasparov began to explain where he was doing well or badly, which is a little bit like a niagi- cian giving away the trick while he is doing it. If chess is to achieve a wider popularity, Kasparov said, it is necessary that the fear and excitement felt by the players be conveyed to the fan. Kasparov wants the fan to understand his exhilaration, wonder, anger or, if he should lose, mortification. "Chess is a passionate game, but people don't know," he said in Lille. "The game can't exist in empty space it needs a public." Then he was back whirling around the room, snatching pieces, calculating, grimacing.

rocking on his heels. When games turn his way he is relentless, pressing, his knuckles white with struggle. He is lusty to win. Of course Kasparov occasionally loses. When he makes a weak move in an exhibition he makes no attempt to conceal his emotions, to maintain a poker face as he would against Karpov.

After a blunder his jaw is clenched tight and he shakes his head no, no. In the Lille simul Kasparov won all 20 of his games and the fans were rapturous. "I feel happy but exhausted," he said afterward. "If they get something I must lose something." Kasparov was born in Baku in 1963. From the age of six, when he began solving complex chess problems, it was clear he was a unique talent.

By the age of 13 Kasparov was traveling abroad to represent the Soviet Union in various tournaments. At 18 he was Soviet champion; at 22 champion of the world, an amazing accomplishment but not without a cost, as he is the first to admit. "Earlier than most kids I realized that everything in life has a price and it helped ni deal with the pain," he said. "I realized that losing my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history." When Kasparov was still a teenager it was apparent to many chess experts that he was the strongest player in the world with the exception of Karpov, who was champion at the time. Kasparov says Karpov, then one of the most influential men in the Soviet Union, en joyed a close relationship with Leonid Brezhnev and used his influence to block the Armenian boy's progress.

At times Kasparov was not allowed to travel abroad to international tournaments, crucial for the development of a young grandmaster. In 1984, when Kasparov finally had his chance at the championship, the five-month, 48-game marathon against Karpov was dominated more by politics than by brilliant chess moves. The nervous young challenger began poorly WiiiiHiiaii.