For a brief article in Chess Life, we are interested in hearing any recollections you have about the affect of the movie Searching For Bobby Fischer on your chess life. The movie was released in August 1993. Please email dlucas@uschess.org. Responses may or may not be used in the article.
Thank you,
Dan Lucas
Editor, Chess Life
I remember being struck by an interesting issue that the movie debated well.
Here many years later is how I remember the issue, although my memory of it might be distorted by now because it was so long ago.
ISSUE - Which is worse:
*** Pushing the young chess prodigy to the point of stressing him or of instilling in him the aggressive and almost mean attitude that sometimes helps a competitor win.
…or…
*** Emphasizing the enjoyment of chess so the young boy can enjoy a childhood that includes competitive chess.
Ben Kingsley’s character (Bruce Pandolfini?) argued for pushing the boy, saying it was cruel to stoke the boy’s desire to win while withholding the intense training necessary for the boy to be victorious.
Waitzkin’s mother argued that such intense training might harm the boy’s love of chess.
Years later we know that both points of view were at least partially correct.
.
It’s a debate/ balance that is far from unique to chess. For example, I’ve seen sports prodigies (in my opinion) that were pushed so hard by their parents - two separate cases local to me, I’m thinking about - that they ended up hating their sport (baseball, in the primary example) by around age 22, and not wanting to play even in casual adult leagues - much less the competive college and semi-pro venues they seemed easily capable of. So in those instances, Mrs. Waitzkin (or her baseball analog) appears to have a more sensible position.
It’s worth picking up Waitzkin’s own book The Art of Learning for his perspective (which, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, are closer to those of his movie mom – but then again, so are the perspectives of his real mom, his real dad and the real Bruce Pandolfini). He drifts into some odd and unexplained jargon at times (I’ve read it twice and still have no idea what he means by “numbers to leave numbers”), but his observations on mindfulness, on the “entity theory” of skill mastery, and on finding the balance between the drive to excel and the need to recharge are excellent for all audiences. I routinely recommend it to young people in grades 8 and up.