“Well,” he said, “I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense. Thiel addressed the statie coolly in his usual uninflected baritone. The other young men in the car - relieved to have been stopped but also afraid of how this might play out - looked at each other nervously. He pulled the Rabbit over, rolled down the window, and listened as a state trooper asked if he knew how fast he was going. Thiel looked up when, predictably, the lights of a police cruiser appeared in his rearview mirror. He was, recalled one classmate, Megan Maxwell, “a strange, strange boy.” He didn’t drink, didn’t date, didn’t crack jokes, and he seemed to possess both an insatiable ambition and a sense, deeply held, that the world was against him. Thin, dyspeptic, and humorless, he had seemed like an alien to his classmates since arriving at Stanford two and a half years earlier. For large portions of the trip, he seemed to be flooring the accelerator. The chess team had no particular reason to hurry, but the 20-year-old driver of the Rabbit weaved in and out of lanes, nearly rear-ending cars as he slipped past them. To get across the Santa Cruz Mountains, they took California’s Route 17, a four-lane highway that is regarded as one of the state’s most dangerous because of its tight curves, bad weather, and wild-animal crossings. ![]() Sometime around the spring of 1988, several members of the Stanford University chess team traveled to a tournament in Monterey, California, in an old Volkswagen Rabbit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |