On Olympic chess?

Most of the time, when I tell people I've written a book about chess, they make presumptions. This is understandable. To the majority of Americans, chess is an inscrutable game practiced by inscrutable geniuses who wear tin-foil belts and hear Russian radio broadcasts emanating from their teeth. There's a lot of confusion, and understandably so, because chess is an intricate game, but not so intricate that a novice like me--someone who never really played much chess at all before he started writing about it--can't comprehend the general idea of what's happening, of who's winning and who's losing and who's nervous and who's not and what the general tenor of the game is.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as we Americans observe a group of men and women position forty-pound stones on a sheet of ice. The other day, I was watching the United States men's curling team blow off a match against somebody (seriously, has there been a more milquetoast Olympian than poor John Shuster? If I may get all Reilly-esque for a moment, he makes Charlie Brown seem like Norman Vincent Peale), and the loony female color commentator made an allusion to curling as "chess on ice." At some level, this felt patently ridiculous to me; so many people compare chess to so many things (football, politics, military manuevers, WB sitcom plots) that its meaning is essentially lost. Anything that is complicated and zero-sum now becomes a "chess match." I would like to rebel against that, except this is also the game's greatest selling point. This is the reason why chess continues to exist--because it is the purest manifestation of a complex, zero-sum, human endeavor.

Anyway, the other thing people tend to ask me when I tell them I've written a book about chess is whether I imagine chess to be a sport. I find this question irrelevant. To me, chess is a competitive pursuit, and I find that I'm generally interested in any competitive pursuit, though some obviously interest me more than others. I also know that I've spent eight hours in a hotel ballroom during a chess tournament, and while it's true that chess is not, and could not, be classified as a "physical pursuit," it is also true that any mental pursuit, engaged in for hours at a time, naturally leads to physical fatigue. Therefore, I would argue that chess is as much a sport as golf. I would even argue that chess is as much a sport as curling, and, given the proper broadcast team and presentation, could also be just as fascinating for a broad television audience.

So: Why not open up the Olympics to competitive chess?

All right. I can hear you laughing. But come on; how many Olympic sports have become Olympic sports simply because they are physical pursuits disguised as sport? The reason people enjoy watching curling rather than snowcrossdancing or skiboarding is because it incorporates actual thought; when I watch a curling match, it feels like doing Sudoku or a crossword puzzle. At least I'm using my brain, and that should count for something, especially at a sporting event that rests its reputation on such lofty ideals. Why shouldn't the Olympics be as much of a mental pursuit as a physical pursuit? Why shouldn't one of the oldest and purest games in the world command our attention once every four years? It might not be as physically draining as cross-country skiing, but it might actually be more exciting.

On The Feline Psychedelic Movement

One day, in the formative years of my childhood, my parents brought home a Siamese cat. I cannot remember where this cat came from, or what it looked like, or even whether it was a male or a female; what I remember is that we named this cat Trouble. The name arose because this cat was the feline equivalent of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. At night, it would slip out of the house unnoticed, and in the morning, it would return, looking like it had gone 12 rounds wth a steroid-addled jaguar. The other thing I remember about this cat is that it had periodic digestive problems; in the morning, at some unholy hour, I would wake up and scurry downstairs to watch the sepia-toned, intermittently racist Looney Tunes episodes that would air before Superfriends. Inevitably, I would have to slalom through several mounds of coughed-up hairball-based material (or materiel) Trouble had left behind during the night.

My point is this: I've never understood cats, but I admire their inscrutability. If I weren't prone to sneezing fits of Biblical proportions in their presence, I'd probably own one myself. But I am also fascinated by the unwavering intensity of cat culture (my book editor was, in fact, the acquirer of the I Can Haz Cheezburger books, which turned out to be one of the great money-making decisions of his career). Which brings me to the Olympics. Or more specifically, to the Olympic broadcast, whose sponsors include a cat food company called Friskies. And based strictly on their ad campaign, the Friskies company seems like it would be a hell of a place to work.

It makes sense that Friskies would advertise during the Olympics: I would imagine that when stereotypical advertising executives are sitting in their stereotypical wood-paneled boardrooms and engaging in stereotypical conversations about demographics, one of the things they probably say is, "I'll bet 93 percent of the crazy cat ladies in the top Northeast markets spend at least sixty minutes watching pairs figure skating during the Olympics." And maybe they took this information to Friskies, and the Friskies executives said, "All right, let's design a campaign that appeals specifically to people who would like their cats to have more active fantasy lives centered around foodstuffs." And the ad executives took this information, and they created a commercial that is the cat's equivalent of Yellow Submarine.



So my overarching philosophical question is this: Are we on the cusp of a feline revolution? Have a generation of housecats been so turned off by the ignominy of LOLCats that they will now readily embrace psychedelia? Will catnip be driven underground? And how do we, as humans, prepare ourselves for the uprising? Our only hope is their inherent inability to spell will hamper their efforts. Also, those flying fish are pretty distracting, man.

On Topical Questions

I've been traveling for a few days, and have an unholy amount of work to get done in next couple of days, but here are two questions that have arisen--well, arisen in my own mind--during my absence:

1. What percentage of major college sports are content with virtuous mediocrity? And is this choice more admirable than selling one's soul for championships?

I speak specifically of my alma mater, the Pennsylvania State University, which now stands at 0-12 in the Big Ten despite coming off a year in which it won the NIT championship, despite the fact that the roster includes a guard who is almost certainly the best player in the program's history. I've written previously about my alma mater's long and illustrious basketball tradition, and every time I think it might actually getting better, it seems to get precipitously worse: On Saturday, I went to watch Penn State play Michigan State at the mausoleum known as the Bryce Jordan Center, where Daughtry concerts and tractor pulls generate far more interest than anything basketball could provide. The place was half-full; I was told it was one of the best crowds of the season.* Anyway, this post at Black Shoe Diaries outlines a number of the major issues, and also hints at the larger philosophical issue, which is whether it is perhaps more noble--given that modern college basketball is essentially sanctioned mafia warfare--to lose with dignity rather than win ignominiously.

2. Does it make sense to slide into first base?

I don't care what you say about the Winter Olympics. I know they're an easy target for blowhards like Bernard Goldberg. But I enjoy the Winter Olympics for the same reason I enjoy college football more than I enjoy pro football: Because it essentially a two-week mosaic of athletes dealing with the biggest successes/failures of their lives on national television. And I don't really care what the pursuit is--the stakes are what make it compelling. (Then again, I also spent two years attempting to document the merits of competitive chess, so this should not exactly surprise you.) But I do think the most intriguing debate of these Olympics may be this one: A number of speedskaters, in order to make up a couple of tenths of a second in the case of a photo finish, are literally attempting to get a leg up at the finish line. It evokes the age-old argument of whether it makes sense to slide into first base, but more than that, it's one of those utterly ridiculous trends that defy neat empirical categorization, like barefoot kicking and black mamba tights. And if all this high-kicking in tight outfits will lead to an inadvertent wardrobe malfunction, well, at least it gives the skeptics something to do other than mocking male figure skaters in Cobra Kai outfits and feigning outrage over athletes who compete in sports we don't really understand.

*This could easily be remedied by moving the majority of home basketball games back to Rec Hall, which, for those who are unfamiliar, was like a scruffy replicant of Cameron Indoor Stadium, and regularly provided the home team with a 10-to-15 point home-court advantage based on overall volume and students' direct proximity to the floor (at Rec Hall, if you were so inclined, you could actually bear hug Chris Webber on an out-of-bounds play. I will never cease to romanticize the place). But to do this would be to essentially admit defeat.