Evidently, I’m funny (at least about chess)
On chasing Bobby Fischer-themed Heffalumps and Woozles.
I was rather excited—and surprised!—to learn recently that I won a 2019-2020 Chess Journalists of America award for “best humorous contribution.” The award recognized my Jan. 2020 article “Did This Man Save the 1972 World Championship? (PDF)” in Chess Life magazine, and beyond being unaware I was up for any award, the reason I was so surprised is that I hadn’t intended the feature to be humorous at all, let alone uproariously so in award-worthy fashion.
I’m sure I’m not the only writer who may be so invested in articles on the present and future docket that I can re-read something already published with fresh eyes, having so forgotten it that it’s almost like I’m reading someone else’s work. I returned to the chess feature in question to see what led the judges to laugh at (or with?) it.
Image based on a screen capture of the beautifully-laid out Chess Life magazine article.
Sure there is a line like this: “Fact-checking anecdotes about [Bobby] Fischer can be like trying to photograph Bigfoot or chasing Winnie the Pooh’s Heffalumps and Woozles.” But what writer doesn’t try to slip A. A. Milne references into as many stories as possible? Besides, as anyone who has read the terrifying accounts of the latter, Heffalumps and Woozles are very serious business. Not anything to laugh at.
Perhaps the judges were responding less to particular jokes and more to the sense of the absurd in the piece writ large. And it was a very, very strange rabbit hole down which to descened. For those who are interested, I recommend seeing the whole story (and as Chess Life kindly lets me post PDFs, here’s the link to join/subscribe to the magazine), but here’s the gist:
One Stuart Lassar, a septuagenarian living in Vienna, Austria, is firmly convinced that his white lie (impersonating a ping pong expert) played a pivotal role in keeping Bobby Fischer in Iceland in 1972. Fischer, who seemed a perpetual flight risk from the World Championship match against Boris Spassky (and who resisted arriving to begin with), was ready to leave mid-match, but playing ping pong with Lassar, the protagonist of the story contends, calmed Fischer. The rest may be history.
As the Heffalumps and Woozles line above indicates, this piece was some 95 percent fact checking and 5 percent storytelling. And like many good stories, it ends with perhaps even more questions and uncertainty than there were at the beginning. Please let me know what you think if you read it.