Word: chess
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...said professional wrestling, you get partial credit. The correct answer, of course, is chess. The governing body of world chess, led by its eccentric president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, has launched an all-out campaign to remake this most elevated of intellectual exercises into a fast-paced, high-stakes spectacle suitable for prime-time television. In the process, Ilyumzhinov is either rescuing chess or dragging it down to the level of Tonya Harding vs. Paula Jones, depending on your point of view. In the highly political, deeply petty world of top-rung chess, nothing is black and white...
...story of Ilyumzhinov's rise to power reads like a James Bond movie scripted by Vladimir Nabokov. Like many other chess players, Ilyumzhinov was a prodigy. At 9 he was the chess champion of his native Kalmykia, a tiny, impoverished Russian republic populated by the descendants of Genghis Khan. But his talents went beyond pushing pawns. In his 20s he made millions running a string of banks in the early wildcat years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism. At the tender age of 31 the dapper Ilyumzhinov (he has a fondness for white capes and vintage Rolls-Royces) was elected President...
...Ilyumzhinov took over the presidency of the venerable Federation Internationale des Echecs, FIDE for short, which curates the rules of chess and tabulates the world rankings. He immediately set out to reshape the sport in his own image. In an attempt to make chess more sponsor friendly, he compressed the traditional two-year championship schedule into a more dramatic three-week tournament. He sweetened the pot with liberal infusions of cash from his deep pockets and sped up the game clock, discarding the time-honored classical chess format, in which players spend hours elaborating intricate moves, in favor of rapid...
...have discovered more and more since coming to Harvard, I am not alone in my collecting and listening habits. Though I will not name names (as occurs in the London but not the Broadway recording of Chess), I know more than a few who can sooner list all Mandy Patinkin’s albums than Mandy Moore?...
...chieftain. He is too courtly, too intellectual. But when he was in exile in Pakistan, Hamid Karzai had an intensity that attracted all kinds of Afghans to his salons. I remember sitting at a Karzai banquet with an Afghan former communist general, a Kunduz tribal elder and a wizened chess master. Karzai listened to them as equals, and they in turn were inspired by his quiet determination. Then one day I heard that Karzai had hopped a motorcycle, smuggled himself into southern Afghanistan and started his dangerous--but ultimately successful--campaign against the Taliban, all without his having to fire...