Endgame by Frank Brady Page B

refused him entrance to her room.
    Crammed in the car, the group sometimes tired of chess talk and reminisced about other adventures, real or imagined. Whitaker cracked at least one joke a day, usually tasteless: “I know a woman who will pay me one thousand dollars to see me in the nude: She’s blind.” Bobby often asked for explanations. “See me later, kid; I’ll tell you,” someone would pipe up.
    During the six-hour trip on the ferry from the Duval Street dock in Key West to Havana, Bobby and an older player, Robert Houghton, played blindfold chess, visualizing the evolving game and calling out their imaginary moves; but when they reached nine or ten moves and the game became more complicated, the positions began to dissolve in Houghton’s mind and he couldn’t continue. To Bobby, the positions were as clear as if he had the game set up on a board in front of him. After a few additional attempts sans board and pieces, the invisible match was abandoned and they played on the portable set. Bobby won dozens of quick games during that session, not losing one.
    Havana in 1956 was a feisty, corrupt city. Tourist agents called it “ThePearl of the Antilles,” but it was more provocatively referred to by others as “the sexiest city in the world.” Filled with gambling casinos, brothels, and streetwalkers, and with rum costing only $1.20 per bottle, the city had a reputation for debauchery. More than 250,000 American tourists went to Havana that year, most to have a wanton weekend or two. The Cabineers, however, were in Havana to play chess, and although it’s possible that some of the men went to the infamous Shanghai Theater or to other shadowy places at night, the team members played a match almost every day.
    The major team match against the Capablanca Chess Club was disappointing for the Americans: though Bobby and Whitaker won their games, the five other Americans lost.Bobby gave a twelve-board simultaneous exhibition against members of the club and won ten and drew two—“just for fun, not for money,” he was quick to explain. He later summed up his experience: “The Cubans seem to take chess more seriously.… They feel more the way I do about chess. Chess is like fighting, and I like to win. So do they.”
    The New York Times
took notice of the Log Cabin tour with a headline: CHESS TEAM ENDS TOUR . The story pointed out that the Cabineers ended the tour with a minus score; they won 23½ games and lost 26½, but Whitaker and Bobby were the leading scorers in the club matches at 5½–1½ each, excluding Bobby’s ten wins in his simultaneous exhibition.
    After Bobby’s three-week adventure, returning to Brooklyn and to school was anticlimactic. Nevertheless, the boy enjoyed getting back to the familiarity of the unregimented school and to the opportunity to play with his friends at the Manhattan Chess Club. In retrospect, he said he enjoyed his four years at Community Woodward, mainly becausethe unstructured routine enabled him to “get up and walk around the room if you wanted” and to dress any way he liked (“ordinary polo shirts, dungarees or corduroy pants”). He also enjoyed his status as the school’s resident chess player. Instead of Bobby’s adapting to the teachers or the administration, the staff ended up adapting to him. When graduation from eighth grade occurred, however, in June 1956, Bobby elected not to attend the ceremony, because he didn’t want to give up an afternoon of chess and becausehe disliked “any kind of formality and ceremony.” He was thirteen and intended to spend the summer studying and playing chess. Although he’d be entering high school the following September, that transition, exciting to many youngsters, was of little interest to him.

    Jack Collins, one of the great teachers of chess, lived with his sister Ethel in Brooklyn and was host to a chess salon in his apartment called the Hawthorne Chess Club, which met there regularly. It was open and free to just