He ignored the warning. In a press conference, Fischer opened his brown leather suitcase and removed a letter from the Treasury Department. He then spat at it, with precision. Asked about the then top two players in the world, Karpov and Kasparov, he described them as “the lowest dogs around.” A U.S. arrest warrant was later issued—it is still valid.
For admirers of the two champions, the rematch was an unedifying spectacle, rather like the sight of two former heavyweight boxers, well past their prime, climbing back into the ring for a last big payday. After game one, the experts were in a state of high excitement—Fischer had won it brilliantly: he looked like the Fischer of old. But it was a form he was to regain in only a couple of games. Although he won convincingly, ten games to Spassky’s five, with fifteen draws, the quality of the chess was regarded as somewhat pedestrian. An immensely profitable few weeks for the two adversaries, the episode tarnished the Reykjavik legend as a bad sequel to a movie can sully the original.
Then the nomad was off again. Zita Rajcsanyi, a nineteen-year-old Hungarian chess star, had been instrumental in drawing him into the Spassky rematch and had kept him company in Yugoslavia. But although Fischer spent several years in Budapest in the 1990s, Rajcsanyi married and disappeared from the scene. At some stage, Fischer moved to Tokyo. There are reports of his having a child. Sightings of him became as rare and often no more accurate than those of the Loch Ness monster.
Fischer has descended into an abyss of unreality, the world of Holocaust denial, persecution complexes, and conspiracy theories. In the 1980s he became fixated on the study of anti-Semitic tracts, such as the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. In the late 1990s, he broadcast occasional interviews, though he performed only on condition that they went out live. This was a risky proposition for station chiefs: Fischer railed about the Jews, usually referring to them as kikes, Jew-bastards, or Yids. He told those with whom he retained any kind of contact that he had a mission to tell the truth. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Huh!” As for the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, “Well, America got what it deserved.” That very day, on Philippine radio, he shouted, “Death to the U.S.A.!” (The USCF subsequently passed a motion condemning their only world champion.) An anticommunism had somehow transmuted into an anti-Americanism. In an interview with Icelandic radio, he recommended the country break with the United States and shut down the Keflavik air base. His e-mail address in Japan was us_is_shit.
Fischer’s mother and sister have died. His mother took to the grave an astonishing secret: Her son’s biological father was not her ex-husband, Gerhardt, but a Hungarian-born physicist, Paul Nemenyi, which whom she began an affair in 1942. Against Nemenyi’s wishes, Bobby was never told what the U.S. government must have known. For a quarter of a century, as Bobby was growing up, the FBI tracked Regina closely, suspecting her of being a communist agent. They documented every detail of her life: her political affiliations, her contacts, her movements. They investigated her telephone records and bank account details; they interviewed her neighbors and work colleagues. Dozens of special agents were involved, and scores of informers serviced them with information. Many of the FBI memos are from or to the then director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Given Bobby’s anti-Semitic and anticommunist obsessions, there is a poignant irony to the fact that his parents were communist sympathizers and that he is ethnically Jewish on both sides of his true parentage.[1]
Does he still play? With the advent of Internet chess, Fischer gossip began to circulate with ever-increasing velocity within the international chess community. On the Internet, many players—especially grandmasters—adopt a pseudonym as their “handle,” their Internet name. One reason for this practice is to prevent potential opponents from studying their games and detecting within them certain structures and patterns. There have been insistent tales of Fischer himself dabbling in cyberspace. An astoundingly successful “handle” is observed smashing opponents with consummate ease and the cyberwhispering begins: “Fischer is back.” The remarkable readiness with which these stories are embraced is akin to the eager anticipation of religious cult members awaiting a second coming. With his disappearance, the Fischer mystique has become part of chess lore, captured, for example, in the Hollywood film Searching for Bobby Fischer, about a father’s relationship with his talented son and the pressures of being compared to the former champion.
He invented a clock, the Fischer clock, the principal idea of which has rapidly gained currency in the chess community. Like many of Fischer’s proposals, its aim is to strip chess of risk as far as possible so that it is the better player who ultimately wins. With the conventional clock, a situation can occur in which a player has only one minute on the clock to make, say, ten moves—in such circumstances silly slip-ups are quite common. On the Fischer clock, each time a player makes a move, he or she is given more time. For instance, the clock may be set to give the mover an extra two minutes after every move. A mad time scramble is thus avoided.
To reenergize chess and to free it from the oppressive body of theoretical knowledge built up over decades, Fischer now advocates random chess, in which the pieces on the back row are shuffled at the beginning of each game. Random chess would force players to clear their minds of preparatory work and think about each game afresh. Fischer dreams of another Spassky rematch—this time at random chess. Spassky told the authors of this book that he would agree to one, “just for fun.”
Reykjavik changed chess itself. In the immediate aftermath of the 1972 match, a sudden fascination for the game brought salad days for the chess masters. Publishers sought them out to satisfy the appetite for information: A huge array of books appeared, from those targeted at the complete beginner to those aimed at the already accomplished. There were books on openings, books on the middle game, books on endings. There were books on tactics and books on strategy, books on how to beat the patzer and a book on how to beat Fischer. A number of instant books were released on the match. The first, by David Levy and Svetozar Gligoric, was on its way to the printing presses before the result had been officially declared, and went on sale in New York stores within twenty-four hours of the declaration. Gligoric had penned his final sentence immediately after his good friend Lothar Schmid let slip that Spassky had resigned by telephone. The one-hundred-thousand print run sold out rapidly.
The chess phenomenon was such that grandmasters, and even international masters, could now make a decent living. The prize money shot up for competitions; cash was to be earned from giving simultaneous matches, from writing, from coaching. Edmar Mednis turned professional along with several other top players. “During the first year subsequent to the match, it was as though money were falling from heaven.”
Soon after Reykjavik, San Francisco promoter Cyrus Weiss floated the idea of a professional chess major league, in which five teams across the United States would compete against one another in a series of televised matches. At the time, this seemed far from quixotic. Chess was entering the nation’s sporting bloodstream. A decade earlier, the U.S. Chess Federation had fewer than 10,000 members. Now there were over 60,000 and the rate of growth appeared to be carrying the numbers into orbit.
A generation of youngsters was stimulated to take up the game. The rise of Britain as a chess powerhouse can be traced back to Reykjavik. Nigel Short, who one day would challenge Garry Kasparov for the title, decided then, at age seven, that he would become a professional.
The match itself inspired the (then) most expensive musical ever staged, Chess, written by Tim Rice and the ABBA partnership of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. The idea for the musical had occurred to Rice shortly after Fischer’s victory: “The good guy was the Russian, who was meant to be the bad guy, and the bad guy was the American, who was meant to be the good guy. It was all very confusing and a perfect illustration of how politics creeps into everything.” His lyrics reflected this:
&nbs
p; The value of events like this need not he stressed
When East and West
Can meet as comrades, ease the tension over drinks
Through sporting links
As long as their man sinks.
Again, this cold war aspect was singled out by a 1980s British pop group, the critically acclaimed Prefab Sprout, in their song “Cue Fanfare”:
The sweetest moment comes at last—the waiting’s over,
in shock they stare and cue fanfare.
When Bobby Fischer’s plane touches the ground,
he’ll take those Russian boys and play them out of town,
playing for blood as grandmasters should.
However, in America, at least, the explosion of interest did not endure as long as the cold war. Although grandmasters have never quite returned to their earlier levels of impoverishment, within a few years the enthusiasm of promoters had begun to subside, and sponsorship money for tournaments to dry up. And just as Fischer had been primarily responsible for the boom, so, by disappearing from the scene, he was principally responsible for the bust.
Apart from Fischer, none of the Western participants benefited materially. Palsson was left financially worse off than before, though his house is rich in bulging scrapbooks. Paul Marshall never received a dime: “I guess being involved in such an intimate way in what turned out to be a world-shatteringly silly event, and the fact that it was good for dinner party conversations for the rest of my life, was probably enough of a fee.” Gudmundur Thorarinsson went on to serve as a member of Parliament for two terms—but failed to scale the political heights to which he had hoped the match would take him. Nevertheless, more than three decades on, he is still starry-eyed over the event he brought to Reykjavik: “People say this was the chess match of the century. It was not the chess match of the century. It was the chess match of all time.”
Beyond the legend, what we are left with, of course, are the games. As one would expect from a clash between the two preeminent players of the day, several were of extraordinary brilliance, artistic creations that will be with us always. One thinks, for example, of the magnificent game ten, apparently so effortless, so economical, so unshowy—yet so beautiful. There were also some staggering howlers, a function of the inhuman stress affecting both players: Bxh2 in game one (Fischer), Qc2 in game five (Spassky), pawn to b5 in game eight (Spassky), pawn to f6 in game fourteen (Spassky). Works of art are usually the product of a single guiding mind and hand. A chess masterpiece is the product of competing genius: Crass blunders from either side can disqualify a game from true greatness. But Spassky’s errors and defeat must not be allowed to obscure the fact that he was one of the finest players of all time. In his career, he could boast match-play victories against some of the totemic chess names of the second half of the twentieth century—Keres, Geller, Tal, Larsen, Korchnoi, and Petrosian.
Fischer, some will maintain, was the outstanding player in chess history, though there are powerful advocates too for Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, and Kasparov. Many chess players will dismiss such comparisons as meaningless, akin to the futile attempt to grade the supreme musicians of all time. But the manner in which Fischer stormed his way to Reykjavik, his breathtaking dominance at the Palma de Majorca Interzonal, the trouncings of Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian—all this was unprecedented. There never has been an era in modern chess during which one player has so overshadowed all others.
Our story is in essence a tragedy. What could have been the feast of chess anticipated by Spassky is as much remembered for the pathologically manipulative behavior of the challenger, the panic of the officials, and the psychological collapse of the champion, as for the quality of the games.
While we may sympathize with the organizers and the manifest and manifold pressures upon them, the game three capitulation to the challenger can be seen as their moral tragedy. Had they not been impelled to give way to Fischer, Spassky might have left Reykjavik early, and as champion. On the other hand, had Spassky himself not been so fixed on playing Fischer, had he been a little less of a free spirit and a little more willing to work with the authorities, he might have left Reykjavik on his own initiative, and as champion.
Fischer’s life testifies to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s proposition that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Achieving his only goal destroyed his raison d’être. Without that goal, he seemed to lose his already weak hold on reality. With nothing more to prove, fear of defeat prevailed over his desire to play. Fischer turned Reykjavik into a battleground, and the match would be the last real chess war he would ever wage.
Boris Spassky went to Reykjavik to celebrate chess. Bobby Fischer went there to fight. His version of the match triumphed. The relics of the combat can be seen in the Icelandic Chess Federation museum, found down a Reykjavik side street, on the first floor of what looks like the run-down offices of a struggling small business. Some photographs and cartoons capture the atmosphere of the event. And there, recently reclaimed from the cellars of the National Museum to which they had been consigned, are the chessboard, signed by the contenders, the chessmen they pushed across it, and the clock started by Lothar Schmid at five P.M. on 11 July 1972 to begin the match of the century.
APPENDIX
We have mentioned Regina Fischer, Bobby’s mother, only in passing. The FBI suspected that she was a Soviet agent. The Bureau’s files, the fruit of three decades of surveillance, present a fascinating portrait of a woman possessed of extraordinary force of character and unconventional attitudes. They also tell of the secret at the heart of her family.
Regina’s parents were of Polish-Jewish origin. Her father, Jacob Wender, was a dress cutter by profession. The family had moved first to Switzerland, where Regina was born on 31 March 1913, and then, when she was only a few months old, to St. Louis in the American Midwest. Her mother, Natalie, died when Regina was ten; Jacob married Ethel Greenberg, with whom Regina did not get along. Jacob and Regina were naturalized as Americans on 12 November 1926.
After graduating from high school in St. Louis, Regina attended Washington University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Denver. In 1932, nineteen years old and without a degree, she went to Berlin to study and to work as a governess. There she fell in love with Gerhardt Fischer, five years her senior; he was also known by another name, Gerardo Liebscher.
In early 1933, the couple made the decision to uproot to Moscow. Regina claimed later they had done so to get married: Of course, with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, she might have felt increasingly uncomfortable there. But that Russia was the chosen destination probably indicates the true reason for their leaving Germany. Gerhardt was a communist. He might even have been a Comintern agent.
In any case, they married in Moscow on 4 November 1933 and lived on in the city for five years. Their daughter, Joan, was born there in 1937. Regina studied at the First Moscow Medical Institute. Gerhardt was associated with the Moscow Brain Institute. For some of the time, they occupied apartment 42 at Zemlianoi Val 14/16, in a neighborhood of substantial Stalin-era apartments, with big living rooms and kitchens. Their choice of refuge from Nazi power scarcely offered peace and security; this was the height of the Great Terror. But unlike many other foreign communists who sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union, Gerhardt was not among Stalin’s victims.
Toward the end of that five-year period, there is evidence that the marriage might have become rocky. When Regina went to renew her passport at the American embassy on 29 July 1938, she informed a member of staff that she had separated from her husband. But this could well have been a cover-up. It is likely that Gerhardt had left (or been sent) to operate on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war.
Regina departed for France later that year, meeting up with Gerhardt in Paris (whether he arrived in France from the USSR or Spain is unclear). Peace in Europe was looking increasingly uncertain, and Regina was now determined to return to the United States: She did so on 23 January 1939. Gerhardt, who
did not have a U.S. passport, stayed on in Europe; he had somehow managed to acquire a Spanish passport, number 5999, evidence of his involvement in civil war Spain. But it remains a mystery why he was denied access to the States when he was married to a U.S. citizen. In any case, on 4 January 1940, he landed in Chile, where he eventually set up a shop selling and installing fluorescent lighting, and dabbled in photographic work.
Until Bobby was seventeen, Regina was omnipresent in his life. What she almost certainly did not know, and what Bobby could not have known, is that the family was closely monitored by the FBI, which amassed a nine-hundred-page file on her. The dossier reveals that some factual details routinely offered in biographical accounts of Bobby’s early life are wrong.
Regina was first brought to the attention of the FBI on 3 October 1942, when she was working as a student instructor at the U.S. Air Force’s Radio Instructors’ School at St. Louis University. She expected her second child the following March. Regina was financially desperate, so much so that, through a Jewish charity, she attempted to place her daughter, Joan, with another family.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
The arrangement quickly collapsed, the foster mother asking Regina to take Joan back. The woman did not tell Regina that she had contacted the authorities. America was at war. She had discovered some “suspicious” items and documents among belongings Regina had left with Joan and considered that these posed a potential threat to the “national welfare.” The suspect possessions included several pages of scribbled “chemical formulas,” [sic] as well as a B-2 Cadet camera with a state-of-the-art lens and a collapsible umbrella. There was also a letter from a left-wing friend that included the sentence, “Washington is really a fascinating city, although right now it is getting too hot for comfort.” The woman considered it worthy of note that Regina owned “a heavy black rubber apron and two heavy rubber sheets.”
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