GET YOUR PAWNS OFF OF MY QUEEN
By Nancy Macdonald
Maclean’s, Canada
June 19, 2006
The ‘Anna Kournikova of chess’ has sparked a violent love triangle
British chess ace Danny Gormally and Armenian Levon Aronian — the
world’s third-ranked player — were out partying earlier this month
during the World Chess Olympiad in Turin, Italy. Gormally, apparently
drunk, became so jealous when Aronian started hitting on the Aussie
teen sensation Arianne Caoili — known as the "Anna Kournikova of
chess" — that he knocked his rival to the ground. Gormally had
recently struck up an email relationship with the chess beauty, and
didn’t like the moves Aronian was making on the dance floor. Fists
flew again the next morning, when the Armenian team exacted revenge
on Gormally while he was out for coffee. Dubbed "Gormallygate" by
chess fans, this international incident is providing the rest of the
world its closest glimpse of the game since the historic Cold War-era
match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972. And with it,
the image of chess as the gentleman’s sport is coming undone.
You might expect this kind of behaviour from college football stars,
but grandmasters? This is the philosopher’s sport, after all — the
ultimate intellectual pursuit. But chess stars, it appears, are no
better adjusted than your average first-round draft pick. Not that
there haven’t been signs of that before. This esoterics-only club’s
most famous alumnus is Chicago-born Bobby Fischer — the raving,
Jew-hating recluse who now calls Reykjavik home. And the sport attracts
Fischer-like obsessive misfits — the type happy to spend Sundays
watching planes land. At its highest level, the game requires — no,
demands — that sort of compulsive concentration. Matches often exceed
five hours. And aside from pushing chess pieces and hitting the clock,
the only movement during the long silent hours of a match is the rise
and fall of players’ chests.
Stone-faced, players churn through thousands of possible moves in their
head at every turn, in an effort to outmanoeuvre their opponent. Chess
lingo — to capture, to crush, to destroy — suggests that in chess,
as with any sport, there’s no second place. Russian great Viktor
Korchnoi has always said that winning at chess requires hating your
opponent. There’s violence in this — a struggle to the end. And
while usually the killer instinct doesn’t manifest itself physically,
as it does in, say, hockey, there have been physical altercations:
in the late 1970s, organizers of a world championship match had to
put a board under the table so rivals Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov
couldn’t kick each other.
Like in any sport, there are also brittle egos in the world of chess,
and Gormally may be more fragile than others, in part, due to his
recent slide in the ranking. While Aronian, 23, is now recognized
as a future world champion, Gormally, 30, who stumbled in Turin, has
slipped off the charts. Caoili (whose nickname is a reference to the
sexy tennis queen), has been painted as the vixen — perhaps fairly.
"It is my weakness to sometimes start a random friction between myself
and another to test reactions," wrote the 19-year-old on her website
after the scrap.
Regardless of whether it’s deserved (Caoili is ranked third among
females in chess-poor Australia), the Kournikova tag is becoming
sportswriting’s most tired cliche. And Caoili isn’t even the only
grandmaster to get Kournikovaed — she shares the honour with Russian
chess star Alexandra Kosteniuk. That young, sexy women are excelling
at chess — now common, according to the Chess Federation of Canada’s
Robert Hamilton — should be assumed. Male or female, eccentric,
even, yep, foxy, grandmasters want to win. Chess, according to the
late great Emanuel Lasker, the longest-reigning world champ, has
falsely been elevated to a science, or an art. In Lasker’s opinion
chess is neither. Instead, he once said, it’s what human nature most
freely indulges in: a fight.
GRAPHIC: Photos 1 through 3, CAOILI has two grandmasters — Gormally
and Aronian — fighting for her.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress