The queen of chess who checkmated the male chauvinists
Intellectually ambitious girls should be inspired by Judit Polgár’s example
Daniel Johnson
The royal game has lost its queen: Judit Polgár is retiring from competitive chess at the grand old age of 38, the youngest of three sisters who finally broke the male monopoly of the chessboard. In a parting shot, she has denounced the rampant sexism of the chess world.
Chess without the Polgárs will be like tennis without the Williams sisters. But when Judit became a grandmaster at the age of 15, she was the youngest player of either sex to have done so — breaking Bobby Fischer’s record by a month. She went on to win games against several male world champions, including the present incumbent, Magnus Carlsen. In 2002 she defeated Garry Kasparov, who had once declared that women should stick to having children. Revenge was sweet.
Judit is now a mother of two, but having survived as a child prodigy in an adult domain, she is at ease in a room full of male grandmasters — and has more to say for herself than most of them. Though she does not, like her tennis counterparts, flash her knickers, there is something sexy about the intellectual prowess of a Polgár. Like her biblical namesake, who beheaded Nebuchadnezzar’s general Holofernes, this Judit is fearless, ruthless and irresistible.
Sexism alone does not explain why she, alone among women, has been able to checkmate the best men. Chess is too dry for many female tastes. It is a war game, and women (rightly) hate war. Even though chess is the most artistic sublimation of war, women dislike the obsessive, narcissistic influence it can exert on a certain type of man. As a teenager, Judit got to know Bobby Fischer, by this time a fugitive from justice and a voluble antisemite, who sought refuge with the Polgárs in Budapest. Her verdict was damning: “A sick psycho.”
Like music, with which it has a mysterious affinity, chess is a realm in which women have struggled for recognition. But a great sacrificial game, such as Judit Polgár’s victory aged 11 against the Russian grandmaster Lev Gutman, offers raptures not unlike — to take another Hungarian example — one of Liszt’s Transcendental Études.
Intellectually ambitious girls should be inspired by Judit Polgár’s example. She exploded the myth that women could not compete with men at the most cerebral level. And she did so while sacrificing neither her femininity nor her sanity.
Daniel Johnson is the Editor of Standpoint
Source: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/puzzles/chess/article4174361.ece
Nice.