Word: chess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Great champions, like politicians, are forged in defeat. Garry Kasparov's came in February 1985 at the end of a match for the world championship of chess. Kasparov's rival, Anatoly Karpov, had jumped to an early and seemingly impregnable 5-0 lead. The rules stipulated that the match would be won by the first to win six games. After a long series of draws, Kasparov clawed his way to 5-3. Then Florencio Campomanes, head of the international chess federation, intervened, claiming the players were exhausted. Kasparov, just 21, was enraged. Later that year, he defeated Karpov...
Having established himself as one of the greatest chess masters of all time, Kasparov is an underdog again. As a leader of the Other Russia, a coalition of opponents to the government of Vladimir Putin, Kasparov has become Russia's most conspicuous political gadfly--a symbol of the sense that as the world prepares for the end of the Putin period (presidential elections are due to be held in March 2008, and under the Russian constitution, Putin cannot stand for a third term), all is not well in Russia. The Other Russia has been holding a series of protest marches...
Kasparov, you might say, has been enveloped by politics all his life. Being a Soviet chess prodigy will do that for you. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1963, he started playing chess before he was 5. After his father died when he was 7, Kasparov's mother Clara--whose last name he took--shepherded his career. (She still does. When TIME interviewed Kasparov at their spacious, Soviet-era apartment in Moscow recently, it was Clara who kept an eye on the clock and reminded Kasparov of his next appointment.) As he grew up, Kasparov says, he became aware...
...grayer, with less of that shock of black hair that once marked him, but as intense as ever, the onetime child prodigy won't be returning to chess. "I don't want to look back," says Kasparov. "I have a new life...
NEXT TIME YOUR CHILD assails you for ruining her life, buy her a book by Stella Chess. Starting in 1956, the child psychiatrist, with her husband Alexander Thomas, followed 133 children from infancy through adulthood. The findings, the earliest of which were published in 1960, challenged the era's accepted wisdom that infants were blank slates to be doomed or graced by parents. They found that children were born with distinct temperaments that, in conjunction with parental styles, determined the people they would become...