ALEXANDER ALEKHINE
Sometimes seen as an entity sufficient unto itself, self-enclosed, having no meaning beyond the pleasure it confers on participants and spectators, Sport can also be viewed as a healthy substitute for war. Indeed, the very fact of its being a contest, between individuals or teams, has about it an undeniable resemblance to battle. This is obvious in sports like boxing, fencing, jousting, karate, and wrestling — all of them individual engagements. But it is equally true, though less strikingly so, in team sports like hockey and rugby, which contain incidentally a measure of violence. And it is still true, though only on an implicit level, in non-violent team sports like relays in track meets or pairs and fours and eights in regattas. However, the one sport that most of all serves as a metaphor for war, despite containing no physical skirmishes at all, is chess. On the board sit two hostile armies; and the two contestants, seated silently opposite each other, are the two generals marshalling their troops, balancing implacably the tactics of offence and defence. Even the pieces, some of them, have military names or associations: the knight and the castle evoke the mediaeval world of swords and battlements; the king and queen echo a feudal power sustained by armed force; the bishop, moving always obliquely, calls to mind the smooth prelate who, allied with power, has often blessed the guns. Only the pawns, significantly named, are limited in movement, easily captured, and confined to a minor role: in this they resemble the ordinary foot-soldier, as much cannon-fodder as anything else; yet even a pawn, if adroitly moved, can end up becoming a queen.
In some countries, chess has an honoured place in the sports pages of the newspapers. In other countries, it is separately reported, if at all: chess, it seems to be assumed there, is a pastime for the intellectual elite, not a sport in any real sense of the word. This is an attitude bound up with the belief that athletes, as a breed, are just mindless jocks. It is an assumption at odds with the facts — like the parallel assumption that intellectuals have no interest in games other than mind-games. Chess, of course, is a mind-game. But it is also, by any true definition, a competitive sport. And what is often overlooked is the taxing physical demands it makes on the players, at least on the elite level of competition. Tournaments, whether a round robin or simply a match-up between world champion and challenger, take a tremendous toll on bodily stamina as well as mental strength: to excel, it is necessary to be extremely fit. For example, when Alexander Alekhine defeated the redoubtable Jose Raul Capablanca for the world championship in 1927, the match lasted for almost three exhausting months. Compared with that, the six-day bicycle-races, fashionable at the time, were quite puny affairs.
Alekhine, born in Russia, came from a long tradition of chess excellence there, still continuing to this day. Like many grand masters, he was somewhat of a loner, and entirely self-sufficient. So he would not have been comfortable in the Soviet Union, where to be self-sufficient was counter to the sacred doctrine that the proper role of the citizen was to serve as a pawn of the state. So he escaped to France in 1917, took French citizenship, and remained there for the rest of his life. After he won the world championship in 1927, he retained it until 1935, lost it briefly, regained it in 1937, and held it from then until his death in 1946. Few players, in any sport, have so completely dominated it for such a long time.
