Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  Regina had been looking for a cheaper rental in Brooklyn, and a fight with the Tenants League in which she had been active precipitated a departure from Manhattan. (The FBI, never sure whether she belonged to the Communist Party, wondered if the fight got her expelled.) The chess set, minus some pieces, ended up in the closet of the apartment off Eastern Parkway where the Fischers moved in 1950. Bobby, cooped up and lonely, made a game of jumping off the bed (until the landlord complained). His Brooklyn school debut did not go well. Regina was in school herself, now juggling nursing classes with stenography jobs and her political work. At one point, as was noted in her FBI file, she picketed in defense of a “colored family” that had been forced out of a building. She was a member of a group called American Women for Peace and of the International Workers Order, too.

  Regina sounds a lot like Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, busy saving the world while her family foundered. Certainly neither peace nor order prevailed in her personal life, at least from what the FBI’s neighborhood informants could tell. They variously described her as “antagonistic” and “argumentative,” a litigious woman with a “suit complex.” Someone else later said she was a “real pain in the neck.” A more sympathetic source, who had evidently talked rather than merely tangled with her, reported that Regina was “an unstable, mixed up person who cannot settle on one objective….She advised that the subject has moved about considerably and appears to encounter difficulty in everything she does.”

  That her son posed special problems was obvious to all—including Regina. Very unlike Mrs. Jellyby, she was doing her maternal best with few resources, and Joan, a conscientious honors student, could help only so much. By the time he reached fourth grade, Bobby had been in and out of six schools, unable or unwilling to engage with peers or seatwork, or homework, despite Joan and Regina’s efforts. He was obviously very bright, so Regina tried a school for gifted children, where he lasted a day; he refused to go back. Bobby, small for his age but with an oversize will, was impossible to budge. For Christmas in 1950, he had asked for a new chess set. Almost eight, Bobby was soon as preoccupied as his busy mother and sister. He had found an all-absorbing way to tune out both their well-meant bugging and their absences.

  In the most cerebral of games, he discovered an intricately rule-bound realm where a young mind can make phenomenal progress with no life experience. As fertile ground for prodigies goes, few pursuits supply better. Glacially though it moves, chess also rewards deep competitive urges, luring in the restless and the driven: there are more positional variations in the game than atoms in the solar system. Maybe by this stage, the fact that his mother and sister weren’t interested served as a goad. For an uncooperative, uprooted boy who needed rules yet thrived on obstacles, the fit was obvious. “Thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance”: Stefan Zweig’s appraisal of chess in his novella The Royal Game evoked the uncompromising purity of its allure.

  Regina, having lived in Russia, surely appreciated the game’s cultural lineage and aura, but mainly it bought peace in the apartment—and she was pleased that Bobby was no longer so stuck on comics. Right away, though, she worried about his isolation. Energetic organizer that she was, she wrote to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (the newspaper that had made Nathalia Crane famous), seeking young opponents for “my little chess miracle,” as she referred to him. Who knows what might have happened anywhere else, but Brooklyn was the chess-rich corner of the U.S. chess capital. In January 1951 the Eagle’s septuagenarian chess editor suggested she take her son to the nearby Grand Army Plaza library the following week, where several masters were holding a simultaneous exhibition. Soon to turn eight but still looking like a six-year-old, Bobby went with his new chess set in hand and found himself face-to-face with the pipe-smoking former champion of Scotland and New York State. “He crushed me,” Bobby said out loud fifteen minutes later, and burst into tears.

  Whether or not you credit the notion of a “crystallizing experience,” the phrase psychologists have coined for early destiny-defining moments in some high-achieving lives, a defeat that might have been a deterrent for anyone else proved a catalyst for Bobby. Carmine Nigro, the newly elected president of the Brooklyn Chess Club, had been watching. He liked Bobby’s sensible moves and his intense concentration. When Nigro learned Bobby had no father, he invited him to stop by the club any Tuesday or Friday night—never mind that children, the world over, were generally barred from such premises. Regina’s effort to drum up peers had failed, but Bobby landed in peculiar company he found very congenial. His mother in tow, he proceeded to show up regularly and lose constantly.

  H. G. Wells’s caricature of the chessboard-obsessed breed as “shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men,” however overstated, helps explain why things clicked. A field that took precocious talent in stride—then six-time U.S. champion Samuel Reshevsky, for example, had arrived as an eight-year-old prodigy from Poland in 1920—offered the right welcome for a boy like Bobby: gruff mentors lacking in interventionist zeal and overtly solicitous guidance. With little fuss, Bobby started going over to Nigro’s house on Saturdays to share in lessons with his son Tommy, slightly younger and better at chess. (For Regina, often on weekend nursing duty, the new routine was a godsend.) The boys didn’t become friends, but while Tommy bridled at paternal tutelage, Bobby bore down. He wouldn’t have admitted he was doing it to please Nigro, and he probably wasn’t. Leaving Tommy in the dust was perhaps an impetus. Sometimes Nigro took Bobby to Washington Square Park to face speedier players in the hustler scene there. In his first competition, early in 1952, Bobby emerged with a win and a draw.

  That still left afternoons and non-chess-club evenings for a loner who before long was a latchkey child. (“I may get back after 3 to drop off groceries, and will then go back to study,” Regina jotted in a note she left in the kitchen.) Bobby, by now an avid reader of chess books, became enough of a fixture at the Grand Army Plaza library that its 1952 newsletter included a captioned photo of him. When Joan or Regina returned to the apartment, they sometimes found him at the board in the gloom, the lamps not switched on. Bobby took refuge in his room when his mother had political friends over, as she often did. He went out several times with another visitor, a heavily accented and rumpled fellow: before his early death in 1952, Nemenyi stopped by on trips up from D.C. where, after a succession of short-term teaching stints, he had found a job as an engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory. Apparently at Regina’s insistence, he didn’t reveal his identity to Bobby. But a former prodigy himself (Nemenyi had shared first place in a national math and physics competition in Hungary as a teenager), he surely talked chess with him. And the man who had once been advised by a fellow émigré to mend his disheveled ways passed on a social nicety that Bobby always remembered. It’s polite to break your roll before buttering it, Nemenyi told him when they were out at a restaurant together.

  By the fall of 1952, Regina had found a small progressive school for Bobby, Brooklyn Community Woodward, where learning revolved around a student’s special interest and, no less important from his point of view, you could “get up and walk around the room if you wanted.” Bobby’s IQ of 180 and an agreement to teach chess to other students won him a scholarship. It would be great to report that he sparked a chess fad, but he didn’t. The thrilling development was getting picked for the school baseball team. Bobby, who lived mere blocks from Ebbets Field, now had another, more physical sport on his short list of interests. He mostly ignored his classwork, but his teachers were struck by his competitive zeal. “He had to come out ahead of everybody,” whatever the game, one of them later told a reporter. “If he had been born next to a swimming pool he would have been a swimming champion.” A photo of Bobby around this time suggests a boy quite pleased with his setup. He is sitting in the bathtub, a chess game in progress on a board laid across the tub and a milk carton by one hand. His other arm reaches up to touch a bare foot re
sting on his hair: Regina is nudging him to get out. He doubtless protests, but he is smiling.

  Regina was worrying. Bobby had settled on one objective, just what his mother had trouble doing, and he pursued it with much the same zeal Regina dispersed among her various left-wing causes and her classes. (The FBI files note that Teachers College, yet one more place she studied, put her on a “special list” because of “her continued refusal to accept guidance and her attempts to change the…school curriculum to suit her personal whims.”) She was all for studiousness, but Bobby was absorbed with his pocket chess set even at breakfast. Nigro lent him chess magazines. Teachers recalled his pockets bulging with copies of the Russian chess publication Shakhmaty, which Regina surely helped him begin to decipher—at least here was a new skill. Then he plowed on himself. He demanded she take him to Washington Square Park to play. Cowed, and probably guilty about leaving him alone so much, she obeyed.

  BOBBY FISCHER Credit 8

  Regina’s efforts unwittingly followed what before long became a postwar talent development formula—pick up on a child’s interest, and seek out high-caliber guides and enriching contexts. But stardom wasn’t her aim, and the problem she hoped to solve had gotten worse. Chess drew Bobby out of the apartment, only to pull him into an obsessive, largely self-driven pursuit of specialization that meant he did ever less schoolwork—and that increasingly cut him off from the world. Now she set about trying to limit his fixation, yet her new undertaking carried the same risk. Bobby, who bore down harder in the face of impediments, was a self-made prodigy with a vengeance.

  “For four years I tried everything to discourage him,” Regina later said, “but it was hopeless.” Carmine Nigro was not much of an ally in her mission, being a chess fanatic himself, although he had brief success in encouraging another pursuit. He gave Bobby accordion lessons until Bobby decided he couldn’t spare the time away from chess. Regina somehow got Bobby to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Kline, in 1952. (How she afforded it is a mystery, too; she was struggling to put decent meals on the table.) But when asked why he spent so many hours at the board, Bobby was curt. “I don’t know. I just go for it.” Dr. Kline reassured Regina it was a phase. She turned to another psychiatrist, a chess master himself. He didn’t predict an ebbing of the obsession—he admitted he hadn’t shaken it—but told her that as passions go, chess was a worthy one and Bobby needed to find his own way.

  His mother’s mounting resistance helped ensure Bobby’s intensifying persistence between the ages of nine and thirteen—just the surge of commitment that growing ranks of talent developers were soon insisting should be attentively encouraged. Bobby did it his way. Nothing dissuaded him, not being nagged by his mother or getting regularly beaten at the Brooklyn Chess Club. Both girded him for further battle. And then he began to win against his elders.

  “When I was eleven, I just got good,” Fischer later said, and the surge probably did feel as much like wizardry as the fruit of tenacity. In fact, Bobby was anything but a case of spontaneous mastery, or even of superspeedy takeoff. Congenital zealotry was key, and as was true for his prodigy predecessors, cultural timing proved unpredictably propitious. Bobby’s hard-earned leap in skill happened to coincide with a thrilling external goad: in June 1954 Nigro took him to watch the Americans play the Soviet chess team for the first time on home turf, the largest chess event in U.S. history. He was rapt through all four days in the grand ballroom of the first hotel he had ever stepped into, the Roosevelt. He meticulously kept score as the Americans were trounced, 20–12. Bobby had discovered the best chess players in the world—the men to beat.

  In the U.S. chess world, the Cold War overtones of the contest stirred professional envy more than political animus. Of course, the Americans didn’t stand a chance, an editorial in Chess Life lamented. They were mere amateurs in a country that had no stake in the game. In the USSR, chess was a national mission, as The New York Times emphasized, too: “They are out to win for the greater glory of the Soviet Union. To do so means public acclaim at home, propaganda victories abroad.” Since the mid-1920s the Soviets had been promoting chess as ideal training for the proletarian mind and, as a Soviet chess chronicler put it, “indisputable proof of the superiority of socialist culture over the declining culture of capitalist societies.” After a brief interlude of American chess dominance while the Soviets were absent from the international Olympiads, in 1945 the Russians triumphed in a tournament played over the radio. U.S. strength dwindled in the late 1940s. A top player, Reuben Fine, quit to pursue his psychoanalytic career, and the former U.S. champion Samuel Reshevsky scaled back. In the USSR, meanwhile, the number of registered chess players grew to a million by the 1950s, and elite ranks surged.

  A rising young Soviet chess talent had every opportunity on a path that would have struck Regina as ideal—the answer to all her problems with her headstrong, lopsided son. Bobby’s future opponent for the world championship, Boris Spassky, who was six years older, was also the son of a single mother. She was so poor that she resorted to digging potatoes in Leningrad. As a lonely nine-year-old looking for entertainment, Boris spent the summer of 1946 watching games in a chess pavilion and fell in love, he said, with the white queen: “I dreamed about caressing her in my pocket.” On his own, Boris found his way to the local Young Pioneer Palace, where he shared his passion with peers and entered a national system of expert instruction and competition.

  He was taken under the wing of a senior chess coach who prescribed physical exercise (swimming and skating) as well as cultural exposure (opera and ballet), along with rigorous chess training. A steady dose of patriotic songs and ideological indoctrination rounded out the regimen. At eleven, Boris was still bursting into tears whenever he lost, but he was also bringing in the family paycheck: he earned a monthly state stipend higher than the average salary of an engineer. In the early 1950s, Boris moved on to other coaches. They taught him life skills—table manners, how to knot ties—along with chess strategy. By then they knew the ideological lessons weren’t taking, but Boris mostly got away with his barely disguised disdain for the Party. By 1955, at eighteen, he had won the World Junior Championship.

  That same summer of 1955, when Bobby was twelve, his chess regimen was a patchwork of his own making. He had no coach, but for several years he had been coaxed out of his shyness and exposed to new chess circles. Regina wanted to send him off to camp again, as she had for some part of every summer since he was six. He had come to at least love the chance to swim, but this time he refused. Nigro, who never expected to be paid, was ready to initiate Bobby into a new level of tournament play. Over Memorial Day weekend they drove to a Westchester County resort for the U.S. Amateur Championship. Bobby was nervous and tried to back out as they approached. Regina would have been overjoyed to hear him suggesting they instead make the most of the amenities, like tennis. Nigro pushed, sensing how much Bobby feared losing.

  Bobby did fare badly. Nigro’s advice, though, left an imprint on the player whose “fighting spirit,” as Garry Kasparov has said, became a signature. He shouldn’t expect to win every game, Nigro reassured him—just to play his best in each game. Or, as Kasparov summed up Bobby’s version of the bromide, play “every game to the death, as if it were his last.” At summer’s end, he entered a tournament held in Washington Square Park that continued into the fall, sometimes crying when he lost (though he later denied it). He hung on, making his way up the ladder as a rainy chill set in, and placed fifteenth. Nigro would slip away and bring him back a burger, fries, and a chocolate shake. Never looking up from the board, Bobby ate. One day, half an hour after finishing his lunch, Bobby whispered, still focused on the board, “Mr. Nigro, when is the food coming?”

  By then, Bobby had spent almost his entire summer at the Manhattan Chess Club, the strongest club in the country. Founded eighty years earlier, it was a mecca for serious chess players, and Bobby’s arrival there unfolded like a too-good-to-be-true screenplay. He and Nigro had been out rowing on the C
entral Park Lake; the boy, he felt, could use a change of scene, and his shoulders needed some beefing up. Spotting the plaque on the club’s Central Park South building, Bobby asked to go in. He quickly defeated two opponents, attracting a crowd. The men who gathered were impressed at the way he could take in the whole board. Bobby’s blitz games were enough to prompt one of the club’s directors to introduce him to the president, a millionaire garment maker, who offered him a free junior membership. Bobby, the youngest member the club had ever admitted, quickly became a star in the weekly speed tournaments and moved out of the club’s lowest group of players. The club regulars discovered this not-quite-teenager had phenomenal stamina, too. Bobby would arrive at the club in the early afternoon, and at midnight Regina picked him up (he cringed) for the subway ride home.

  With the well-timed appearance of Nigro in his life, as much friend as teacher, yet with no systematic training, Bobby had cultivated an intense dedication to the game that rivaled the best-paid Soviet prospect’s prescribed chess discipline—and that lacked any of the balance the Russians emphasized. In a picture Joan snapped in a subway car, probably after one of his long days at the club, Bobby is asleep with his head on his mother’s shoulder. Regina is smiling, perhaps just a little uneasily. A woman seated nearby gazes fondly their way, with no idea what lies behind the sweet mother-son scene.