Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  Fischer’s mind is unchanged, and again the match has descended into Marx Brothers burlesque. There are scenes involving flight reservations, plots to detain Fischer in Reykjavik to prevent his escape, and aborted drives to the airport. Marshall recalls:

  We mainly communicated by telex. But one guy with a telephone would occasionally get through to us. We kept receiving messages about Fischer being booked on various planes; a plane to New York, a plane to Greenland, every flight that went out of Reykjavik had Fischer on the flight list. And we were getting these wonderfully droll messages from an Icelander about how Fischer had booked himself on these flights and that Cramer had gone to the airport to try to dissuade him. And there were all these exciting car chases going on.

  Fischer off-stage continues to command almost all the attention. In the press, much of it makes for uncomfortable reading. The Washington Post agonizes that “Fischer has alienated millions of chess enthusiasts around the world.” All the expectations of him have “turned to ashes, with Bobby Fischer himself as arsonist.” The correspondent of Agence France-Presse writes that Fischer has crossed the boundaries of all proper behavior.

  In contrast, the front pages of the Icelandic press are adorned with pictures of the well-mannered and apparently carefree world champion walking, fishing for salmon, or playing tennis. No doubt these help reassure the organizers that they can focus their efforts on keeping Fischer in the match and let the world champion await the challenger’s decision. It is difficult to resist the conjecture that their attitude is also influenced by the cold war. The West-East, us-them relationship is instrumental in what follows. The Americans and the Icelanders, partners in NATO, both with free market economies and democratically elected governments, are “us,” the Soviet chess delegation is “them.” Not being a true “them” is to prove Spassky’s undoing.

  13. BLOOD IN THE BACK ROOM

  Spassky was a gentleman. Gentlemen may win the ladies, but gentlemen lose at chess.

  — VIKTOR KORCHNOI

  Whatever the impression given in the press, the champion was in deep dismay. He had no wish to retain the title by default. To calm him down after the forfeit was announced, Viktor Ivonin took him on a long walk. Nothing was turning out as the champion had anticipated. He had wanted the focus of the combat to be on the aesthetic creations at the chessboard. “I was very patient with Fischer, but he is impossible to understand. And the organizers are making concessions to him. Remember how they said, ‘Bobby Fischer is ill and in hospital.…’”

  Ivonin had watched Spassky’s expression as he waited for Fischer for that one hour. By the end, the deputy minister was fervently hoping Fischer would not arrive, his champion looked so empty and overwhelmed. All the uncertainties of the preceding days had returned in greater measure. Spassky had gained a point but with a pyrrhic victory. Ivonin noted that in conversation, Spassky talked obsessively about Fischer. The deputy minister found that disturbing. The sensitive Spassky was unable to switch his thoughts to more relaxing matters.

  At four in the afternoon, after the forfeit was confirmed, Icelandic officials, Schmid and Moeller, the head of the match committee, representatives of the two sides, Fox, the cameramen, some journalists, and diplomats all met in the hall to reexamine the conditions and check Fox’s cameras. No one had any queries.

  Iceland’s chief auditory expert, Curt Baldursson, conducted an official test of the noise made by the cameras. These were brand-new American models and were what was called self-blimped—constructed to be soundless during filming. Baldursson received no pay for his labors but was given, instead, free entrance to the rest of the match. For his experiment, he brought along a state-of-the-art sound-level meter. “The meter didn’t register anything close to levels that could have been picked up by a human ear, so either Fischer had extrasensory faculties or this was part of a poker game.” The noise level was measured at fifty-five decibels with the cameras running and fifty-five decibels with them turned off. Baldursson wrote out a report that Fischer peremptorily dismissed. The cameras were moved behind the walls of the set, looking through tiny windows. In Ivonin’s judgment, they were unnoticeable.

  The American millionaire chess fan Isaac Turover joined the group. He played a game on the official board with Ivonin. The Soviet politician took the opportunity of probing and trying out Fischer’s chair, taking pains not to be noticed.

  Someone wondered aloud whether it would be the last game there. Turover said that if Fischer was not given the point back, the match was over. An Icelandic journalist asked Ivonin for his opinion. He replied that the Soviet side had not breached the rules and was not going to breach them. Nor were they going to allow anyone else to.

  The next day, Euwe telegraphed from Amsterdam to spell out FIDE’s position. If Fischer did not appear for the third game, he would be defaulted on that one, too. And if he did not come to the fourth game, the match would be declared over; Spassky would retain the championship. At least that laid to rest Schmid’s fear that he would have to stand on the stage game after game, starting the clocks, waiting out the empty hour, and pronouncing forfeits until Spassky had the requisite twelve points for victory.

  However, if the match officials thought the forfeit was history, they were mistaken. The challenger was now observing his Sabbath and had unplugged the phone. (That Fischer could not play between sundowns on Friday and Saturday was the cause of amused speculation in Reykjavik, where in July the sun does not set until nearly midnight and it is never completely dark. Fischer solved his theological dilemma by choosing an arbitrary time and sticking to it.) His cudgels were taken up by Paul Marshall, who arrived on Saturday, 15 July, like a legal tornado, replacing Davis and insisting on a rehearing of the appeal. The committee’s decision was not final—it could always be changed in the light of new evidence or deferred, said Marshall. He argued on and on; the committee listened until three in the morning. Then they confirmed their original decision, announcing that they found the conditions in the hall to be in line with the rules of the competition.

  At last there was good news. Although Fischer had booked another return flight to New York, someone had persuaded him to stay. Perhaps it was Marshall, accusing him of cowardice. Perhaps it was the thin, gray-haired widow Lina Grumette, his intermittent surrogate mother, with whom he had had supper after emerging from his Sabbath.

  Fischer’s decision to remain in the match came with strings: He would play game three only in the separate, private room at the back of the stage and without cameras, not in the hall.

  Lothar Schmid had to find a way forward. But what possible rationale could the organizers have for moving the game when the appeal committee, the sound engineer, and the mass visit to the hall had established that it was a wholly appropriate site?

  He tried reason. “I said, ‘Let’s start in the main hall. If the noise disturbs us, then we can move.’” Reason was not enough. Marshall, says Schmid, preferred unreason. If there were no current disturbance in the hall, he promised Schmid he would create one. “‘If you, Mr. Schmid, will not remove the third game into the separate room, I will go to the stage and take a big hammer and smash down the table and you won’t be able to play there.’ And I said, ‘In these circumstances, I have to think it over.’”

  This was a world turned upside down. The normal response to Marshall would have been, “In that case, you will be arrested and charged with criminal damage while we use another board.” Instead, Schmid went to the champion. “I asked Boris if he would allow the third game to be played in the separate room. He said, ‘Pozhaluista,’ “That’s fine by me.’”

  The Soviet team had not been involved in this decision. Spassky had capitulated without consulting his seconds or the deputy minister of sport, Viktor Ivonin. They discovered this only on taking their seats in the hall. Ivonin and the Soviet television and radio chess correspondent Naum Dymarskii exchanged startled comments.

  Spassky had behaved like a sportsman, Schmid said later. Today his
rationalization is less generous. “Of course, Spassky was in the lead. For him, it was worth agreeing to move the game to get Bobby back. So he was easy and friendly.” With Schmid and Thorarinsson frantic to save the match, one to safeguard Fischer, the other to safeguard his reputation and all the hard work and money that had gone into the championship, not to speak of his political future, the Soviet player became the sportsman or, rather, the pawn. The Americans broke the rules, and the ICF colluded with them. For Iceland, continuing the match was simply too vital; comparatively, too much was at stake. A larger country might have shrugged off Fischer’s wayward behavior and his lawyer’s aggressive gambits—“It’s his loss, not ours.” Iceland could not afford that, and the Americans knew it.

  For Spassky, as for Schmid, worse was yet to come.

  The board had been reset in the unwelcoming, bare back room behind the stage, used normally for table tennis. It was small, about seventy-five feet by thirty feet, with a sloping roof. On one side were windows that looked out over a grassed area toward the main road. The noise of passers-by and children frolicking could be heard.

  Spassky arrived in time for the start and sat down at the board. Lothar Schmid was opening a window. Anxiously, Spassky looked around for Fischer. The challenger arrived and was immediately possessed by rage. Wrapped in blankets, a closed-circuit television camera had been installed to carry the action to the thousand-strong audience in the hall and the journalists and commentators in the press room. Fischer roared at Schmid: “No cameras!” He prowled the room, turning switches on and off. Schmid protested that Spassky was being disturbed. Fischer yelled back at him to shut up.

  White-faced, Spassky stood. Lothar Schmid recollects, “When Bobby started to fight again, Boris became upset and he said, ‘If you do not stop the quarreling, I will go back to the playing hall and demand to play there.’” With the challenger turning the World Chess Championship into a verbal brawl, Schmid, panic-stricken, pleaded with the champion to continue the game. “Boris, you promised.” He turned to Fischer. “Bobby, please be kind.” Schmid remembers: “I felt there was only one chance to get them together. They were two grown-up boys, and I was the older one. I took them both and pressed them by the shoulders down into their chairs. Boris made the first move, and I started the clock.”

  So on 16 July 1972 at nine minutes past five in the afternoon, the World Chess Championship match was finally saved.

  Schmid is unrepentant about his unorthodox tactics. “I could have said to Bobby, ‘If you’re disputing the conditions, you don’t have to stay here in this closed back room. You are within your rights to lodge another complaint.’ But I thought—and I think that’s how it would have been—he would have gone away and never come back. This was the decisive moment in the match.”

  Fischer was two down to the champion. He had never beaten Spassky, and now he had the black pieces. Nonetheless, early in the game he went into furious attack; at last the spotlight was where it was meant to be, on the chessboard. “This is wild stuff,” exclaimed a spectator. Fischer’s eleventh move, Nh5, was a shock; it left his pawn structure in a mess and removed a pawn from the defense of his king. One expert in Reykjavik described the move as “an entirely new conception”; Spassky spent half an hour studying it.

  Grandmaster Reuben Fine, a psychoanalyst, thought Fischer’s ambiguous feelings toward women could be read off from moves like Nh5. Fischer, he maintained, liked to attack his opponent’s center from the side. Applying his professional insights, he concluded that Fischer’s tendency to hug the edge was “most likely the chessic equivalent of the running away that he was always threatening” and that this running away had to do with his apprehension about females.

  Another grandmaster marveled, “Bobby’s attacking as though his life was involved.” Spassky was being outplayed. At the adjournment, Fischer wrote a move that, according to Frank Brady, left him exultant. “‘I sealed a crusher!’ he crowed, smashing a fist into his palm. ‘I’m crushing him with brute force! Haaaaaa!’”

  Following a night’s analysis of the position, and assisted by grandmaster Isaac Boleslavskii, a new arrival on a brief visit, Spassky opened the sealed move—B-Q6 check—thought for five minutes, and resigned. Schmid apologized to the audience for the brevity of the show. They had paid the equivalent of a dollar a minute and seen one move. Ten minutes after Spassky had left, Fischer rushed in to claim his victory. He had beaten Spassky for the first time.

  The contestants in the back room. Normally it was used for table tennis, not psychic bloodletting. ICELANDIC CHESS FEDERATION

  Left to right: Geller, Spassky, Fischer, and Lombardy. And Spassky had acted to save the match. HALLDOR PETURSSON

  This second session of game three—that single move—was held on the stage in the main hall. Overnight, Spassky had written a letter to Schmid, a not quite official protest, delivering it just before midnight. He said that the back room was unsatisfactory: there was too much noise, from the air-conditioning, the traffic, children. (Curiously, the children had not disturbed Fischer.) The rest of the games must take place in the auditorium, in accordance with the match rules. Fischer, no doubt buoyed by victory, agreed to return to the auditorium provided there was no filming. Thorarinsson went along with this, leaving Fox stranded and muttering about legal action. It was not a difficult decision for Thorarinsson. “The filming is not the first priority. The chess match is the first priority. If this is the only way the match can go on, then we must take it.”

  Because of Spassky’s letter, the organizing committee and representatives of the delegations met the next morning—a little late, under the circumstances—to discuss the legality of moving the game into the closed room. Golombek, an elder statesman of the chess world, told the committee that he could recall only two occasions when games were transferred to an alternative site because of a problem in the original venue: in the matches between Botvinnik and Smyslov and between Botvinnik and Tal. In both cases, the substitute venue had held spectators.

  Schmid then spoke. He said Spassky had shown admirable sportsmanship in agreeing at such short notice to move to the back room. For future reference, the chief arbiter added: “I saved the match, but I’m not going to take this sort of decision again.”

  Schmid’s praise for Spassky’s sportsmanship provoked bitter comments in the Soviet camp. Ivonin noted in his diary that Fischer’s behavior had taken a heavy toll on the champion. Spassky told him that his previous image of Fischer was shattered: “I idealized Fischer. The third game broke my idealism.” He had also seen something deeply disturbing in Fischer that he described as “an animal.”

  That evening, the Soviet delegation held a meeting with the ambassador Sergei Astavin. They agreed there should be no more “charity” toward Fischer; the Americans did not go in for charity. The group believed that the Americans had acted deliberately to drag Spassky down and distract him—and that they had succeeded.

  Later, Anatoli Karpov remarked that Fischer’s game two forfeit was “a stroke of genius, a stroke tailor-made for Spassky. It proved that Fischer knew Spassky inside out. Had it been Petrosian instead of Spassky, he would simply have licked his chops and swallowed the extra point.”

  It was not the Soviets alone who recognized how destructive these events were for Spassky. Brady wrote that Fischer’s win brought the challenger’s gestalt into place—he had drawn blood, and it would become, says Brady, “a torrent of energy streaming out of Spassky’s psyche.”

  In all this, what motivated Fischer? Many Fischer observers, including a few in the Soviet chess establishment, believed he was frightened of the chessboard. For Fischer, leaving Iceland proved as difficult as arriving. Marshall believed that when it came to a decision, “he was less afraid of playing than he was of the unknown. But make no mistake, he was terrified of playing.”

  The Icelandic grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson, who was a friend and admirer of the challenger, also located the source of his behavior in that fear. “Why did Bo
bby not turn up? I tell you one thing. He had something really sick inside him. He had a terrible fear of losing.” Losing was for other players; “Bobby Fischer” could not afford to lose.

  14. EYEBALL TO EYEBALL

  …and the other guy blinked.

  — SECRETARY OF STATE DEAN RUSK, AFTER THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

  How does one negotiate with a Fischer, a man who is apparently prepared to risk everything rather than accept a compromise? Most people would not consider that to be rational. Yet there were few occasions when the challenger did not get his way with FIDE, the Icelandic Chess Federation, and other tournament organizers. The board and pieces, the lighting, the chair and table, the noise level, the proximity of the audience, the visibility of the cameras—all had to be just so. The prize money or appearance fee had to be increased. The games had to be played at specific times. Fischer’s exasperated opponents would capitulate in the face of these demands, sometimes after putting up a perfunctory, halfhearted fight. But with other competitors, the tournament regulations were always strictly interpreted. So why with Fischer did the rules take on this remarkable plasticity?

  Game theory, a branch of mathematics that analyzes complex human behavior through simple models, offers some insight into Fischer’s success to those perplexed by the apparent weakness of officials. Game theory has been used to revolutionize the study of intellectual disciplines from economics to international relations and from evolutionary theory to philosophy. Its proponents have won Nobel Prizes, and one of its key exponents, John Nash, has been the subject of a best-selling book and Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, A Beautiful Mind.