Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  Frank Brady, by then not the only acquaintance being kept at arm’s length, offered a rare glimpse of his friend’s absorption at seventeen. He lured Bobby out for dinner, and in an unusually expansive mood after devouring prime rib, Bobby tried to lead Brady through some of his preparations for his next tournament. Out came the pocket chessboard. Like a magician revealing his moves in such sped-up motion that they remained a blur, Bobby set and reset pieces without a pause, re-creating moments in games that went back more than a century. His eyes fixed on the world he held in his palm, now murmuring to himself, Bobby never saw that Brady “began to weep quietly, aware that in that time-suspended moment I was in the presence of genius.”

  Soon, though, Bobby was in restless search of recognition and self-definition. Eager to discard the image of an “uncouth kid,” he began wearing bespoke suits. He took to carrying around a blue box much bigger than his pocket chess set. Inside, though he kept it secret, was a Bible, which he was reading intensively. He had been impressed by the pastor of the Worldwide Church of God, a sect that blended Christian tenets and Jewish observances. Its emphasis on austere self-control suited him (and so did its suspicion of doctors). Bobby held on to his U.S. champion title again and again, undefeated in the tournaments. He made phenomenal showings against the best in international matches.

  Yet Bobby was not a coolly self-reliant cowboy. He wrangled over rules and playing conditions, got riled up by opponents, and retreated from people who had thought they were his friends. The Soviets cast him as an uncooperative product of crass capitalism, “unintellectual, lopsidedly developed, and uncommunicative.” The American chess world, too, now spoke out about the “colossal egotism” of an older teenager who had “managed to alienate and offend…almost everybody and anybody who might be in a position to help him in his career,” as a former U.S. champion put it. Of course, Bobby had also been hearing for years now (from many of the same people) that he was in a class by himself. Perhaps that helps explain the monumentally immature snobbery on display in an interview with the writer Ralph Ginzburg in Harper’s when Bobby was eighteen—further grist for everybody’s and anybody’s worst impressions.

  Bobby took swipes at just about all of the company he had ever (uneasily) kept: women, Jews, high school teachers and students, Russian “potzers,” phonies, cheap millionaires who scrimped on prize money, chess club riffraff, “barbaric” subway riders, his mother. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She ought to keep out of chess.” He extolled his fancy clothes. Driven home by Ginzburg, he paused in front of his walk-up on a noisy, grubby Crown Heights block to describe his dreams of getting rich and living in a grand house, “built exactly like a rook,” complete with “spiral staircases, parapets, everything.” Ginzburg at least took note that Bobby “does not show malice” and included Joan’s comment that her brother was “a boy who requires an extra amount of understanding.”

  When the magazine came out, an irate Bobby accused Ginzburg of misquotations. Whatever the particular inaccuracies (Ginzburg said he had destroyed the transcript), the interview was a cruel exposé of the broader truth: Bobby, for all his bluster, was deeply insecure, clueless about how to behave and convinced no one could be counted on. Young adulthood nearly at hand, he was sure only of what he was counting on. Yet the next year his vision of becoming the youngest world champion in history vanished. Bobby was devastated when he placed fourth in the tournament in Curaçao that decided the challenger for the world championship in 1963. In need of a culprit, he accused the Soviets of throwing games to each other to ease their way to the top. (There is a good chance they did collude, although they had no need to.)

  As he entered his twenties, Bobby staked his identity ever more rigidly on being the ultimate nonteam player. He threatened to withdraw from international chess, charging that its rules favored the Soviets. After the unprecedented feat of a clean sweep of the U.S. Championship of 1963–64—not a single draw as he faced eleven top players—he kept his word. He didn’t play in the qualifying tournament for the next world championship. Even his staunchest defenders in the chess realm were ready to conclude that a nation that didn’t take the game seriously had perhaps gotten what it deserved. “Finally the U.S.A. produces its greatest chess genius,” one chess veteran remarked, “and he turns out to be just a stubborn boy.”

  · 4 ·

  “He is still very young; he is still capable of growing in many directions” was the more optimistic view of Bobby’s friend Frank Brady, writing at the same juncture. Bobby was only twenty-one, and had recently blurted out that he wished “all this controversy”—by which he meant “all this about the Russians”—were over. Brady hoped it was a sign that he would soon be ready “to fulfill his immense promise, whatever the conditions.” Bobby did rally over the next decade, but not by ceasing to demonize the Russians. As he had ever since boyhood, he clung to the self-image of the hero facing long odds and obstacles—in this case, the Soviet sabotage of his original championship dream. Bobby was more his mother’s son than he ever recognized: even a solo crusader draws strength from a sense (however distorted) of having a larger cause.

  As Bobby told it, he finally stopped stalling and showed up in Reykjavík in the summer of 1972 to play the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky, because he felt “an awful lot of prestige of the country is at stake.” Now twenty-nine, he cast the contest as a political morality tale: “the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians.” Culturally, it looked like a battle between untrammeled genius and the totalitarian engineering of expertise. But in Iceland, as in Brooklyn, temperament in fact took center stage. It proved more important than any particular approach to talent development—and more recalcitrant than Soviet trainers or American admirers hoped.

  In Reykjavík, Bobby and an independent-minded Spassky presented a spectacle of Cold War role reversal. Bobby was ready with fierce rhetoric, a stickler for rules even as he broke them, a master of mind games with his delays and ultimatums. He got marching orders from the government: Henry Kissinger prodded by phone (not that the match was a policy priority—détente was in full swing, and American officials simply hoped to avoid an embarrassing fiasco). Spassky, to his regime’s displeasure, refused to make ideological speeches. His superiors were eager for pretexts to walk out. But Spassky’s decision to go along with Bobby’s demand to play in a closed room, away from cameras—a decision “taken on his own,” his Soviet critics scolded in the postmortem—guaranteed that the match went on. Spassky waited and sweated through Bobby’s antics for the chance to play chess against the best. After a surreally suspenseful two months of chess and drama, Bobby was a point away from the title as the twenty-first game adjourned on the last day in August. The next day Spassky phoned in his resignation. At the grand banquet two days later, Bobby was bored and pulled out his pocket chess set. Side by side at the head table, he and Spassky played out other possible last moves, none of which would have made a difference.

  As “a propagandist for the free world,” Arthur Koestler remarked of Bobby, “he is rather counter-productive.” But Bobby proved immediately effective as a propagandist for chess in the dominant nation of the free world. Suddenly America’s best-known sports celebrity, he was famous not just for his genius but for his fancy suits, the snits he threw, and his push for real prize money—not to mention the way he snatched up an opponent’s pieces. He made the slow-moving game seem thrillingly aggressive with declarations like “the object is to crush the other man’s mind….I like to see ’em squirm.” At the same time, the PBS chess master–turned–commentator in Reykjavík, Shelby Lyman, revealed “a gift for democratizing chess,” Fred Waitzkin later wrote in Searching for Bobby Fischer. Lyman was a guide good at “clouding distinctions between ability and ineptitude.” The moment was ripe for “persuading the United States that chess was within reach of all of us.”

  In the USSR, Spassky’s loss elicited a fourteen-point plan from a sports bureaucracy intent on renewed
rigor and more state resources for chess. In the United States, Fischer and his triumph gave a marginalized pastime associated with oddball brainiacs a big status boost. He inspired grassroots enthusiasm among all ages for a game long linked with unworldly, innately gifted eccentrics. Yet the man who had complained that chess got no respect in America soon made it clear he wasn’t about to preside over, or profit from, the newfound zeal to popularize and professionalize the game. Rejecting deal after lucrative deal, Bobby turned his back on becoming another high-rolling sports star. “Nobody is going to make a nickel off of me!” he said, sensing potential exploitation in every offer.

  What were he and his talent worth? In Iceland, Bobby had at last confirmed the answer he had dreamed of. He had given away most of his winnings to the Radio Church of God, which had predicted doom that very year, 1972. And then the world didn’t end, and Bobby now reigned supreme. Yet he was a stubborn outsider who needed uphill battles. He demanded rule changes for the next championship, designed to spur more daring play and cut down on draws. When the international chess federation refused, he resigned his title in 1975.

  Already in retreat, Bobby now dropped out of sight, into a life of near vagrancy and delusions of Jewish conspiracies—more radically adrift than William Sidis ever was, yet with an anchor: for years, Bobby depended on the full amount of Regina’s Social Security checks, relayed to him by Joan, who deposited them for their mother. When he surfaced in 1992 in war-torn Yugoslavia and defeated Spassky in an unofficial rematch, he won a purse of $3.5 million. For a man now filled with anti-American animus, the chance to violate U.S. sanctions (and to spit on the notice prohibiting him to play) was perhaps a bonus. After an itinerant decade and a half abroad—emerging from obscurity one more time to hail the 9/11 attack—Bobby died of renal failure in Iceland in 2008.

  If only Bobby’s star power had persisted, went the refrain as American chess mania ebbed. Then the game could have secured its place as a well-remunerated, publicly venerated arena of exceptional achievement. Yet Bobby’s early departure from the stage arguably helped save chess in the United States from becoming too, well, Russian: a streamlined, hierarchical enterprise aimed at precociously winnowing, honing, and systematically steering hyped young talent toward the rewards not just of expertise but of officially approved prestige and cultural privilege.

  Instead, in an era when athletics are big business—and loom large in competitive college admissions—the “sport of thinking” in the United States has held on to a certain purity along with its penury. The result is truer to Bobby’s own spirit than it might at first seem. Against a backdrop of neo-Sputnik alarm in the 1980s, when the presidential commission’s report ominously titled A Nation at Risk stirred panic about the state of American education, chess became pedagogically correct. It acquired cachet both as an elite extracurricular activity for private school students and as an innovative supplement in inner-city public schools. At one end, “chess parents” nursed proto-prodigy dreams, eager to seize on signs of a “knack” for the game as evidence of superintelligence. At the other, the goal was to engage at-risk students in a pastime that promised crossover academic payoffs. Proponents of all stripes cited studies correlating chess programs with better reading scores, problem-solving skills, critical and creative thinking (improvements of the sort likely to be found with just about any activity that gives kids extra attention).

  Bobby hated school but certainly would have vouched for the power of chess to teach children, from tuned-out students to smart ones, a lot about learning. As he discovered early, the game requires focusing on how to focus—breaking down challenges and cultivating patience and persistence. Meanwhile, the neural plasticity that also makes children good language learners can propel gratifying progress at chess. Goaded ever onward by a rating system that shows them every increment of improvement, young players get hooked. With its blend of rigid rules and absolutist rankings on the one hand, and its infinite possibilities and competitive allure on the other, chess is ideally designed to spur what performance experts call “effortful training.”

  At the same time, Bobby would have said what the coaches of good school chess teams will tell you, too: don’t bill the game to young players as a high-GPA goody-goody’s pursuit, or as special education in disguise. And don’t count on habits of effortful study in chess to inspire academic conscientiousness. Regina learned otherwise. Asked to name the crucial ingredients of chess prowess, Bobby gave a list—“a strong memory, concentration, imagination, and a strong will”—that omitted the brainy brilliance and math aptitude often associated with the game. Cognitive research backs him up, revealing that chess masters aren’t distinguished by either. Nor, studies have found, do top players’ phenomenal recall for chess combinations translate directly into other feats of memory: tested with random positions, or different material, they aren’t likely to excel. The truth is that Bobby is the best—and the saddest—evidence that lessons learned at the board don’t transfer seamlessly to school, or to life. The game’s attraction, for those who get caught up in it, is rarely instrumental. “I just go for it,” Bobby told the shrink. That love was a factor he left off his list, but it belonged at the top. Of all the touted pedagogical uses for chess, the indisputably effective one—it can sweep students up in a dizzying, demanding pursuit for its own sake, not its résumé potential—would surely have won his approval.

  Bobby didn’t mind being anointed “the greatest natural player in history,” a tribute that reflects the mystique of innate genius long associated with chess. But he never tried to disguise how much self-driven nurture was involved—yet another corroboration of the latest research on high-level chess performance. “The ability to put in those hours of work is in itself an innate gift,” Kasparov proposed. Or perhaps it was an urge that gathered force in a lonely boy in an empty apartment. Starting early, and summoning rare curiosity and energy, Bobby amassed an unmatched trove of combinations to deploy in unprecedented ways. He worked endlessly—in both senses: his dedication was unceasing, and his obsession was in the service of ends no one else should presume to dictate. That left his talent at the mercy, ultimately, of the many hurdles he set himself.

  Nobody was going to force Bobby to defend his primacy at the board, fighting for the cultural superiority of the free world. It might have been liberating if someone had. In vain, Regina tried to appeal to his legacy beyond the board. “Don’t let millions of people down who regard you as a genius and an example to themselves,” she wrote him as he veered into anti-Semitism. But after so many years, she knew she couldn’t set him straight. The best she could hope for was that Bobby still knew she wouldn’t let him down, as in her own way she never did. “Remember,” her letter went on, “whatever you do or whatever happens I am still your mother and there is nothing I would refuse you if you wanted or needed it.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Programmers

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  As the spring semester of 1972 ended, a lonely fifteen-year-old college sophomore named Jonathan Edwards began spending as many nights as he could on the couch in a basement room of the electrical engineering department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At just about the same time, an eccentric high school junior named Bill Gates was quietly leaving home by the basement door every evening he could. His destination was the darkened office of a local Seattle company. Farther south, in what had recently been christened Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, a pot-smoking and acid-dropping high school senior, was secretly scheming with his good friend to produce “Blue Boxes” that enabled free long-distance phone calls.

  The real lure for all the boys was, of course, a bigger box: computers. As a Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club member, Jobs “fell in love,” he recalled later, with an early, clunky desktop. The Lakeside Mothers Club at Gates’s elite private school had bought time for students on the refrigerator-size Program Data Processor-10, only to watch anxiously as some of them became addicted. In that empty Seattle office at night, Gates
and several friends were hunched over the teletype keyboard (with a chess board at hand to occupy them while programs were running). Jonathan Edwards, alone in his lair, was keeping his PDP-11 discovery to himself. That summer a Baltimore Sun article highlighting two “Hopkins Students Who Skipped High School” didn’t mention what Jonathan was hooked on. Julian C. Stanley, the Johns Hopkins professor of psychology who helped speed him onward, didn’t remark on it either.

  The fact that parents and teachers had next to no clue about what the boys were up to was part of the thrill. It added to the allure of a pursuit that exerted a rule-bound fascination similar to the spell cast by chess—with one enormous difference. Computers had real-world clout. To revise Stefan Zweig’s verdict on the self-enclosed realm of chess, the domain that had mesmerized Bobby Fischer: here was mathematics that added up to something, art with an end product, architecture with substance. The computer revolution was at hand. On this frontier, there was no clearly rated hierarchy of experts, much less a tradition of revered champions. The first hulking machines of the Cold War era belonged to a faceless military-industrial complex. Now computers were getting smaller, and the people obsessed with them had suddenly gotten much younger. Amid the antiwar protests, generational tumult, and technological ferment of the 1970s, a new category of teenage prodigies was emerging. They came bearing an insubordinate message with more far-reaching implications than Bobby’s: they were nobody’s protégés.