Rossolimo glanced in my direction as the door to the street closed behind me. Whatever small sign of recognition he may have shown was blurred by the twisting of his body as he scooted his custom-made, wheeled chair from one side of his chess studio to the other.
Two men sat at nearly opposite ends of the roughly square-shaped arrangement of tables in the room, concentrating intently on the chess positions on the boards in front of them. If one didn't know better, one could erroneously conclude that the dark-suited figure in the chair shuttling back and forth between the two men was a messenger of some kind.
I sat down at a chess board a couple of seats down from the man on my left, whereupon the cadence set by the wheels on Rossolimo's chair changed to accommodate a stop at my board to make a move before pushing off to play moves against his other two customers.
Nikolay Rossolimo had been a chess grandmaster for almost as long as I had been alive, and was known as a player of the old school. Here and there, the walls of his studio were decorated with oversize diagrams showing critical positions from games of his that had won prizes for what chess players call "brilliancy."
He embraced an ethic of beauty in chess play, and elegance, which made him somewhat of an anachronism among the leading lights of the game, who even then harvested wins with all of the soul of a combine moving through a wheat field, and it was that ethic of beauty that drew me to him and his studio during the time that I knew him.
Rossolimo was born in Ukraine in 1910. In 1929, he emigrated to France, where he lived until 1952, when he pulled up stakes again and came to the United States. Given the overall appreciation for chess and the prospects for a grandmaster to make a living at the game in the US, Rossolimo made ends meet by waiting on tables, driving a hack, and playing the accordion. Meanwhile, on the side, he ran a chess studio on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village.
There, he'd play you for a couple of bucks an hour, along with others who wanted to whet their chess skill on the unyielding stone provided by Rossolimo's game, and it always seemed to me he raised no more of a sweat playing against ten people than he did against one. I had been coming to the studio, on and off, for almost three years, whenever I had enough gas money to drive into Manhattan.
That day turned out to be fairly slow. After some time, only Rossolimo and I were left in his studio, reviewing the game I had just lost to him. It seemed the right time to ask a question I had wanted to ask for some time.
"Nikolay Spiridonovich," I began, using Rossolimo's patronymic, "I have given some serious thought to becoming a master. What do you think, do I have what it takes?"
The figure in the chair opposite me arched his eyebrows and smiled easily as he leaned back in his chair and raised his eyes from the board to look at me. "Tell me more," he said. I did, and for a few sentences, I had stars in my eyes, just as I had since becoming obsessed with the idea. But as I spoke, I began to feel tendrils of doubt probing the chinks in the armor of my belief.
"I know I'm not any kind of prodigy," I said, finally running out of steam. "But I love chess, and I do pretty well in my games," I said, quickly adding, "though not against players of your caliber, of course. Not now, not yet." That last sentence came out by itself, and it sounded presumptuous as I said it; I felt like a schoolboy.
Rossolimo's eyes looked steadily into mine, as if my soul was a chessboard and he was calculating variations and evaluating the overall position of the pieces on it. Then he spoke.
"I think a man can have whatever he wants," he said, "if he is willing to pay the price."
"I am," I said, believing it to be so.
"Ah, but do you know what that price is?" he said. Whereupon, he rattled off a number of factors, some of which I had considered, most of which I had not. Was I willing to drop out of school, if that's what it took? Was I willing to abandon my friends, if that's what it took? Was I willing to play tens of thousands of games – in tournaments and in offhand play - and study shelves of books on theory, and do so in my spare time because I'd need a full-time job to put bread and butter on the table? And finally, was I willing to risk never being rewarded in any substantial way for my devotion to the game?
"In the end, if you are willing to pay the price," said Rossolimo, "then what you suggest is almost certainly attainable. But let me add this. It is a happy thing that you love chess. And so, if somewhere along the road you take, you find that your love for chess is dying, and that playing the game involves more toil than satisfaction, more duty than enjoyment, then turn back!" He leaned forward in his chair and grasped my forearm. "The price will have become too high, and is not worth paying."
As things eventually turned out, I was not willing to pay the price. And realizing that somehow made my status as a non-master, and my disappointment, easier to bear.
* * *
I was interviewing for my job in the Soviet Union at about the time Rossolimo began play in the 1975 World Open, which had become (and still is) one of the premier tournaments in the country. Over 800 players entered, and when the dust cleared, 65-year-old Rossolimo walked away with 3rd prize and $1000. Commentators approvingly noted that his play during that tournament displayed the romantic verve and eloquent, clean combinational play that had characterized the games of his early career. Very soon after, Rossolimo was dead, of head injuries suffered after a fall down a flight of stairs in his apartment building on West 10th Street. The news came as a profound shock to me.
It has been nearly 35 years since Rossolimo died, and from time to time, I fondly recall that afternoon in his studio, and how - over a chessboard - I was taught a most valuable lesson in life.
P.S. I still love the game.
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