The Journal News, White Plains, New York, Sunday, August 05, 1984 - Page 79
Game success depends on hard work, enthusiasm
By Shelby Lyman
In chess and other human endeavors, talent in undeniably important. But perhaps even more important for ultimate success are enthusiasm and a capacity for hard work.
From the start, Bobby Fischer's talent for chess was indisputable. But his deep passion for the game and his ability to endlessly immerse himself in it were even more out of the ordinary.
Recently 16-year-old Patrick Wolff of Belmont, Massachusetts, became the second youngest player to win the US Junior Championship. Like Fischer, who was the youngest, Wolff is distinguished by an exceptional love for chess and an impressive ability for work.
The new junior champion learned to play chess at the age of seven. According to his father, Robert Wolff, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, “Patric insisted I teach him the moves. He immediately became obsessed with chess. He got up at six every morning to play chess. He read books and practiced the moves.
“Chess proved a focus for his energies. It gave him discipline. He has enormous discipline — the result of all the work he has done in chess — which shows up in his school work and all sorts of other things.
“He just doesn't just play chess. He systematically studies openings, endgames and so forth and so on. He has studied chess that way for years. He works very hard at it.”
But the payoff for Patrick Wolff occurs when he sits down at the chessboard opposite a live opponent. He vividly recalls his first game:
“I was so excited about the novelty of my first tournament. I had always wondered what it would be like. I couldn't believe I actually was playing in a tournament. Playing chess was exciting. It was the competition, playing against the other person seeing how well you could do.”
