Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  Now the issue was the lost Gipslis game. Fischer said it must be replayed. The organizers discussed it, but they knew that if they complied, the other players would regard this as too great a concession—there would be mutiny. On the authorities’ considered refusal, Fischer finally walked out, for good measure ripping up the hotel bill for “extras” that he was handed at reception.

  Apparently at the peak of his powers, Fischer now disappeared from chess for two years. It appeared that in forfeiting the Gipslis game, he might forever have forfeited his chance of winning the world title. As the Sousse Interzonal had testified, Fischer had become the enfant terrible of chess, his antics attracting global attention to the normally sedate, dignified, inside-page, down-column Royal Game. But some of those who suffered at his hands would have thought “enfant terrible” too kind, believing that there was something demonic about him. Beyond the antics, what must be accounted for is how he lacked concern for others’ feelings while retaining the loyalty of rejected supporters, how he aroused fear as well as reverence, and why he was willing to risk the highest prize to get his way.

  3. MIMOPHANT

  …a complete pain in the fundament.

  —LOS ANGELES FREE PRESS

  A BBC journalist once asked Fischer whether it bothered him that he had chosen to focus so single-mindedly on the game. It was a problem, Fischer admitted, “because you’re kind of out of touch with real life being a chess player—not having to go to work and deal with people on that level. I’ve thought of giving it up, off and on, but I always considered: What else could I do?” It was a reply that showed more insight than is normally credited to him.

  Even to other grandmasters, Fischer’s total absorption in chess was incomprehensible. The Soviet grandmaster Yuri Averbakh describes meeting him for the first time in 1958 at the Interzonal tournament in Portoroz. The newly crowned U.S. champion, all of fifteen years old, was still in his scruffy presuit period, dressed in jumper and jeans. Averbakh says he was “something of a savage in communicating with people. He gazed without interest at the beautiful scenery of the Adriatic Côte d’Azur, never once went to the beach, never took a swim.” Perhaps the Brooklyn boy felt a stranger to the richness of the Yugoslav coast, but there is a similar anecdote from 1971, when Fischer, then twenty-eight, was preparing for his confrontation with Petrosian and stayed at the exclusive New York Park Sheraton hotel. The management reserved a plush suite for him, as befitted a celebrity. He turned it down because the view was distracting. He ended up in a modest room at the back.

  Admittedly, he had other interests. He liked listening to music (particularly the Temptations and the Four Tops, but also jazz and heavy rock), he read comics into adulthood (Tarzan and Superman), and he watched a few movies (he was a big fan of James Dean). He liked spaceships and cars. He also enjoyed swimming and table tennis. He once tested himself against a table tennis hustler, Marty “the Needle” Reisman, who wrote, “Fischer played table tennis the way he played chess: fiercely, ferociously, going for his opponent’s jugular. He was a killer, a remorseless, conscienceless, ice-blooded castrator….”

  But all these activities were never more than temporary distractions from his all-consuming passion. His lack of social graces was striking—sometimes when he was spoken to, he did not bother to turn his head in response. Former president of the U.S. Chess Federation Don Schultz remembers sharing meals with Fischer and other chess players. If the conversation strayed from chess, “you would look over to him and he’d be hunched over the side of the table, running through moves on a pocket set.” When not showing indifference to those around him, he was often suspicious of them. A journalist wrote that Fischer was likely to greet even an old friend as if he were expecting a subpoena.

  Fischer was notoriously insensitive to other people, as was demonstrated constantly by his conduct in tournaments. Lateness might upset an opponent, as it did Reshevsky in Sousse, but it never produced an apology from the offender. The only objects Fischer appeared to feel an emotional affinity for were his chess pieces. His biographer, Frank Brady, put it well: “He empathizes with the position of the moment with such intensity that one feels that a defect in his game, such as a backward pawn or an ill-placed knight, causes him almost physical, and certainly psychi cal, pain. Fischer would become the pawn if he could, or if it would help his position, marching himself rank-by-rank to the ultimate promotion square. In these moments at the board, Fischer is chess.”

  He had an inexhaustible appetite for chess work. When the Dane Bent Larsen, eight years Fischer’s senior, acted as his second (supporting Fischer with his chess preparation and analysis) in the Candidates tournament in Yugoslavia in 1959, the sixteen-year-old Fischer would not give him time off, insisting that every spare moment, evenings included, be spent studying openings.

  How does a man who lives for chess take defeat? Among Fischer watchers there are, broadly, two schools of thought. One school maintains that he was petrified of losing, that this was his deepest dread, and that his incessant demands about the playing conditions were conscious or subconscious strategies to avoid appearing. This view of Fischer was common in Soviet circles. Lev Abramov, the former head of the Sports Committee Chess Department, wrote an article called “The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer.” Why “tragedy”?

  A tragedy in that Fischer was scared to sit next to the chessboard. The most paradoxical thing was that this outstanding, amazing chess player sometimes couldn’t force himself to come to the game, and if he managed to overcome this “disease” he still lacked confidence until he got a good result. I think it was a disease.

  Soviet grandmaster and psychologist Nikolai Krogius agrees: “As a psychological type, Fischer resembles the French marshal [Masséna], who was unable to pull himself together before a battle, but who was transformed when the battle began. Napoleon said that [Masséna] demonstrated his talent as a military leader only from the moment ‘when the cannons began to fire.’”

  A linked but divergent interpretation is that Fischer was so utterly convinced of his superiority that failure became inconceivable. Thus even the occasional defeat tended to have a shattering impact on his self-esteem. Certainly there is empirical evidence to back up such a claim. The records show that on those rare occasions on which he lost in tournaments, he would perform below par in the following game, too, with his percentage of victories not as high as normal. Recovery from knocks was easier for players whose worldview included their own fallibility. As a boy, if Fischer lost a speed game—in which there is no pause for thought and moves are bashed out rapidly, often in split seconds—he would invariably reset the pieces and demand another; it hinted at a deep psychic need to reconstruct his self-image, the self-image of a winner. Tears often accompanied defeat. He cried in the Candidates tournament in 1959 when Mikhail Tal defeated him. He was seen crying again when he lost to Spassky at the Mar del Plata tournament the following year. When goaded by reporters before his match with Petrosian—“Do you cry after losing?”—the twenty-eight-year-old Fischer countered like a petulant schoolboy, “Well, if I cry, the Russians get sick after losing.”

  The most interesting phenomenon about Fischer, however, is not the effect chess had on him, but the effect his chess had on his opponents, destroying their morale, making them feel that they were in the grip of an alien hostile force to whose powers there was no earthly answer. “He’s a chess computer” was a compliment often paid by his admirers. “He’s nothing but a computer” was the disparaging comment of his detractors.

  What did they mean? Well, computers do not suffer nerves. They lack a psychological attachment to particular rules or styles of play, and they calculate with both speed and precision. In all these regards, Fischer appeared to his opponents to function like a microchip-driven automaton. He analyzed positions with amazing rapidity; his opponent always lagged behind on the clock. Referring to the future chess computer, Jim Sherwin, an American player who knew Fischer well, described him as “a prototype Deep Blue.�
�� The Soviet analysis showed that even when faced with an unexpected position, Fischer took not longer than fifteen or twenty minutes to make his move; other grandmasters might take twice as long. Nor did Fischer appear to be governed by any psychologically predetermined system or technique. Take just one example, the twenty-second move of game seven against Tigran Petrosian in the 1971 Candidates match. Who else but Fischer would have exchanged his knight for the bishop? To give up an active knight for a weak bishop was inconceivable; it seemed to violate a basic axiom of the game, to defy all experience. Yet, as Fischer proved, it was absolutely the right decision, transforming an edge into another ultimately winning advantage.

  Human chess players can often feel insecure in open, complex positions because a part of them dreads the unknown. Thus they avoid exposing their king because they worry that, like a general trapped in no-man’s-land, this most vital of pieces will inevitably be caught in the crossfire. Common sense and knowledge born of history tells them that this is so. An innate pessimism harries them, nagging away, warning them off the potentially hazardous move. Not Fischer. If he believed his opponent could not capitalize on an unshielded king, if he could foresee no danger, then he would permit it to stand brazenly, provocatively unguarded.

  Faced with Fischer’s extraordinary coolness, his opponents assurance would begin to disintegrate. A Fischer move, which at first glance looked weak, would be reassessed. It must have a deep master plan behind it, undetectable by mere mortals (more often than not they were right, it did). The U.S. grandmaster Robert Byrne labeled the phenomenon “Fischer-fear.” Grandmasters would wilt, their suits would crumple, sweat would glisten on their brows, panic would overwhelm their nervous systems. Errors would creep in. Calculations would go awry. There was talk among grandmasters that Fischer hypnotized his opponents, that he undermined their intellectual powers with a dark, mystic, insidious force. Time after time, in long matches especially, Fischer’s opponents would suffer a psychosomatic collapse. Fischer managed to induce migraines, the common cold, flu, high blood pressure, and exhaustion, to which he himself was mostly resistant. He liked to joke that he had never beaten a healthy opponent.

  Part of Fischer’s destructive impact lay in his demeanor during the game. Tall (six feet two) and confident, he cut an imposing figure. Don Schultz, the former president of the U.S. Chess Federation, says that “just watching him sitting at the board you’d think, Gee, that guy’s going to win.” The fact that Fischer never looked for a draw and rarely agreed to a draw while there was still some uncertainty in the position, increased the mental exertion required to play him.

  In Reykjavik to cover the match, the novelist Arthur Koestler famously coined the neologism “mimophant” to describe Fischer. “A mimophant is a hybrid species: a cross between a mimosa and an elephant. A member of this species is sensitive like a mimosa where his own feelings are concerned and thick-skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of others.”

  There is no doubt that, like a psychopath, Fischer enjoyed that feeling of complete power over his opponent. Like a psychopath, he had no moral compunction about using his power. In a letter to a chess-playing acquaintance about the 1962 Olympiad in Bulgaria, he describes a game he played against the great Mikhail Botvinnik. Ultimately the game was drawn when Fischer fell for a Botvinnik trap (after which, according to Fischer, Botvinnik puffed out his chest, and strode away from the table like a giant). But Fischer had held the initiative for much of the game, and in the letter he is gleeful about the discomfort Botvinnik appeared to suffer, mocking the Soviet for changing color and looking about to expire.

  Yet here was a paradox. Chess players are often described as either objective or subjective, those who play the board and those who play the opponent. In the thin air at the summit of grandmaster chess, where each player’s style and opening repertoire are familiar to all, there can be no such precise division; a mixture of the two approaches is inevitable. Within this spectrum, however, Fischer certainly occupied the board end. Fischer relished his opponent’s suffering but did not require it to take pleasure in the game. Indeed, some gibed that from his perspective the only thing wrong with chess was the necessity of having another human being on the other side of the board to play the moves.

  According to his biographer, Frank Brady, Fischer’s intelligence quotient was estimated at Erasmus Hall High School to be in the 180s, and clearly he was capable of great mental feats in chess. He had a prodigious memory. He could remember all his games, even most of the speed games he had played. He would amaze fellow grandmasters by reminding them of some casual speed game they had played more than a decade earlier. This recall could be applied beyond chess. There are anecdotes about how he could listen to a foreign language with which he was completely unfamiliar and then repeat an entire conversation.

  It was an intelligence distinct from knowledge or wisdom. He was not “educated,” he was not well-informed about current events, he was not “cultured”—and showed no desire to be. Nobody would describe him as mature. Indeed, those who knew him best were struck by his lack of social and emotional development.

  He had little sense of humor in any of its forms; he never deployed irony or sarcasm or games with language such as punning. He appeared always to take remarks literally. The Yugoslav chess journalist Dimitri Bjelica remembers once traveling in a car with Fischer and the future world champion Mikhail Tal in Zurich in 1959. The driver was speeding along in a reckless fashion. “Fischer said, ‘Careful, we could crash.’ And I joked, if we died now, the world headlines tomorrow would say, ‘Dimitri Bjelica killed in an automobile with two passengers.’ Tal laughed, but Fischer said, ‘No, Dimitri, I am more famous and popular than you in America.’”

  Many of Fischer’s views seemed to be locked in to his adolescence—for instance, his attitude to women: “They are all weak, all women. They are stupid compared to men.” His lifelong awkwardness with the opposite sex was legendary, his natural gaucheness particularly pronounced in the company of those women who knew little and cared less about the sixty-four squares. He believed women were a terrible distraction and that Spassky should have remained single: “Spassky has committed an enormous error in getting married.”

  Fischer never had girlfriends, though he did express a crude preference. “I like vivacious girls with big tits,” he once said. Playboy magazine was favorite reading material. At the Bulgaria Olympiad in 1962, he told Mikhail Tal that he found Asian girls attractive—especially those from Hong Kong or Taiwan; American girls were too vain, they thought only of their looks. Mind you, he had to think about the economic costs of bringing over an Asian bride. He estimated it at $700, roughly the same as a secondhand car; if the bride did not meet with his approval, he could always send her back.

  In 1971, Fischer went to Yugoslavia, where he stayed with Bjelica, who was directing a series of television programs on great chess players of the past. Bjelica used Fischer to analyze some of their games. On a day off, they decided to go and watch a beauty pageant in Sarajevo, for which they had been offered front-row seats. As Bjelica recalls, halfway through the event “Fischer suddenly whipped out his pocket set: ‘What do you think of queen to g6?’”

  Hate was among Fischer’s mechanisms for dealing with the world beyond the board; indeed, he was capable of being a grandmaster of hate. This hate could spring from the most trivial personal slight or from a worldview most would find bizarre. Once formed, it was unshakable; he had no concept of forgiveness.

  After the Curaçao tournament, his wariness and dislike of the Soviet Union slowly and inexorably descended into a state of delusion. He said his aim for the world championship match against Spassky was to teach the Soviets “a little humility.” Soviet players were not only “cheats” who were unfairly privileged by the support they received from the state, but they were out to get him personally. This conviction took Fischer into a land of fantasy. He had to be vigilant in case they tried to poison his food. He worried about flying in
case the Soviets had tampered with the engine.

  Fischer also hated Jews. Long before Reykjavik, he made anti-Semitic remarks and expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler to Lina Grumette, a chess player who had arranged a simultaneous match in Los Angeles, when Fischer was seventeen, and in 1967 put him up for a couple of months after he had moved to the West coast. As his mother was Jewish, under Jewish law he was Jewish himself, although this was a label he always rejected. When he discovered that he had been included in a list of famous Jews in the Encyclopedia Judaica, he wrote to the editor to declare how distressed this mistake had made him and to demand that it not be repeated. He was not and never had been Jewish, he said. And in what he must have regarded as confirmation of his status, he revealed that he was uncircumcised.

  Perhaps his rejection of his Jewishness was part of his rejection of his mother, though she appears to have been religiously unobservant (while turning to Jewish charities for help in looking after her children). However, Fischer was able to separate his hatred for Judaism as a religion and Jews as an ethnic group from Jewish people as individuals. He was on perfectly amicable terms with Jewish chess masters in the United States and the USSR.

  We have already touched on a final aspect of Fischer’s personality. Naturally, all grandmasters want the playing environment in tournaments to be as good as it can possibly be. But in the history of chess competition, nobody had ever imposed the preconditions insisted upon by Fischer, or risked all to gain them.

  He was acutely sensitive to noise, light, the color of the board, and the proximity of the audience. Noise or disturbance in the audience was not, as for most players, a mere irritant; it could, and increasingly did, cause what seemed a searing distress. (Fischer would, no doubt, have approved of a German book, Instructions to Spectators at Chess Tournaments, containing three hundred blank pages followed by the words “SHUT UP”) As for the lighting, Fischer required the glare off the squares to be neither too bright nor too dim. Otherwise, he said, he could not concentrate.