It takes enormous ability but also enormous desire to become world champion. Some people have one out of two — but not the one out of two that Jay Whitehead did.
Whitehead, who died in October just short of his 50th birthday, reached the elite level among youngsters when he finished second in the World Cadet (under 16) Championship at Cagnes-sur-Mer, France in 1977. Garry Kasparov finished third, having to concede a draw against Whitehead in a 28-move Queen’s Indian Defense.
But the New York-born Whitehead realized he could never devote 110 percent of himself to chess, as Kasparov did.
Like Bobby Fischer, he became terrified of losing. “I would get extremely depressed over losing games, to the point where my whole world would collapse,” he recalled in a 1997 interview.
He found other outlets. He immersed himself in Krishna Consciousness (as “Jay Krishna”), became a top-notch backgammon player and one of the world’s finest chess researchers, locating hundreds of master games that had been thought lost.
When he played in his last tournament, in San Francisco in 2002, few fans remembered the name of the only American-born player to finish ahead of Kasparov in a tournament.