Jim West On Chess: Dick Schaap Redux

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Dick Schaap Redux

Even though Dick Schaap and Bobby Fischer had a falling out between themselves, mainly because of an uncomplimentary 1979 article that Schaap wrote in Games Magazine, it would be a mistake to think that Schaap was not a friend of chess.

Not long after The New York Times printed this story on international master Jay Bonin in 1995, Dick Schaap who worked at ABC TV's World News Tonight was instrumental in getting Bonin interviewed on that program.

I happened to be playing in a tournament at the Marshall Chess Club on the Saturday night when it aired and could be viewed on the television in the manager's office.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov