On a Wing and a Dare
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on Sat, 09/19/2009 at 4:05am.
In 1994 two of my sons, Wayne and Neil, attempted something that had never been done in Australia before. They, and two of their clubmates, launched a hang glider from a hot-air balloon.
The location was Canowindra, just across the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, the acknowledged ballooning capital of Australia. Their pilot was a pastry chef who flew his balloon as a second job: inevitably he was known as The Flying Pieman.
When they checked into their motel they learned that the whole town had been talking about them. The manager had seen the hang gliders strapped to their vehicles and said, “Are you the four guys who are going to...” and she made a downward diving motion with her hand.
“That's us,” said Wayne.
“Look,” she said, “would you mind paying for your room in advance?"
Obviously nobody thought they were going to make it.
In chess terms there are many players who have gone where nobody has gone before—these are the people who take risks at the highest level and who prove that their ideas were well founded. People like Richard Reti, Aaron Nimzowitsch and even Ernest Falkbeer, a “fireworky” player. (See the current story about him in Le Blog de la Batgirl.)
Of course, it's not only the innovators, the trail-blazers, who fly high in the chess firmament. There have always been just a few giants who are able to create the kind of tactical magic that leaves the rest of us feeling spellbound.
One of the first such games I ever saw was Paul Morphy's famous victory over Carl Isouard and the Duke of Brunswick, played at the Italian Opera House in Paris during a performance of the Marriage of Figaro. The opera's sub-title, “A Day of Madness” may have been appropriate for this particular game which was all over in seventeen moves. As a beginner when I first played through the moves, I was left with a feeling of awe for such a man. Now that I understand better how he accomplished this remarkable win, the awe hasn't diminished much. This game is so well-known that I hesitated to post it here, but there will be some players who haven't seen it yet.
I read all I could about Morphy but then found the games of Mikhail Tal and he became—and remains—my chess hero. Ah, to play like that! With another 40 IQ points I still wouldn't be able to imitate his brilliance.
In the 1956 USSR Championship, following his sixth round loss to Spassky, Tal said his play deteriorated. He won one game, drew several others, and then came to the final round against Alexander Tolush. He dismisses the game as a “rather complicated combinative attack” but it's full of wizardry. By move 14 Tolush was two pawns to the good and Tal's king was on f2, but Tolush had only his queen out beyond the third rank. Over the next 17 moves Tal battered him unmercifully in a pyrotechnic extravaganza. (Does that sound like hyperbole? You bet! But that's how I felt about the game.)
Finally, here's a brevity from the Munich Olympiad in 1958. A.Russell of Ireland has obviously been discombobulated by Tal's moves. His pain didn't last very long.
Two years later Tal defeated Mikhail Botvinnik to become, at that time, the youngest World Champion in the history of chess—a record that remained for twenty-five years, until Bobby Fischer forfeited his crown to Anatoly Karpov.
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