by Frank Brady
Not fully comforted, Regina sought a second opinion. She learned of a psychiatrist who was a chess master, Dr. Ariel Mengarini, a nonanalytic neuropsychiatrist who worked for the government. Mengarini was so in love with chess that he identified with Bobby’s passion. He confessed to Regina his own fanaticism for the game and also something else she didn’t want to hear about Bobby: “I told her that I could think of a lot worse things than chess that a person could devote himself to and that she should let him find his way.”
Gradually, Bobby’s performance at the Brooklyn Chess Club began to improve. It took him a few difficult and sometimes discouraging years, but eventually he was winning the majority of his games. For their part, his opponents were impressed with his tenacity and clear signs of progress. “I’d already gone through most of the books in the public library near us and was beginning to want chess books of my own,” Bobby said later, reflecting back on the period. Nigro gave or loaned him books, and Regina permitted him to purchase a book now and then, whenever she had some spare cash. Bobby’s allowance of 32 cents a day didn’t afford him much of an opportunity to buy books—and even as he grew older and his per diem was raised to 40 and then 60 cents, the money was spent on chocolate milk for lunch and a candy bar after school.
Whenever Nigro was finished reading his copies of Chess Review and Chess Life, he gave them to Bobby, who became fascinated with both periodicals, not only for their multitude of engaging and instructive games and descriptions, but because they gave him the chance to read about the great champions in chess. Sitting with those magazines, it was as if he were studying the chess equivalent of Plutarch’s lives of the Roman generals or Vasari’s lives of the artists. Quite simply, they inspired.
Then, in the summer of 1954, Bobby had an opportunity to see in action some of the greats he’d been reading about. It turned out that the Soviet team would be playing for the first time on United States soil.
In that era of anti-Communist hysteria, when anyone in America who read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or wore a red tie was thought to be a Communist, the president of the U.S. Chess Federation, Harold M. Phillips, a lawyer who’d defended Morton Sobell in the Rosenberg espionage case, confided almost with relish that he expected to be called in front of Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and accused of being a Communist simply because he’d tendered the chess invitation to the Russians. It never happened.
It’s important to stress the difference between Soviet and American chess teams at that time. The Soviets were all not just professional players, but grandmasters, the designation given to the highest-rated chess masters who have distinguished themselves in international tournaments. Tsar Nicholas II originally bestowed the title in 1914; it was being used in 1954 and is still awarded today.
The Soviet players were subsidized by their government and in many cases given dachas as retreats where they could study and train for matches. Back then, these grandmasters commanded as much prestige in Soviet society as a movie star or an Olympic athlete does in contemporary America. When Mikhail Botvinnik, who became World Chess Champion, arrived at the Bolshoi Opera House, he was given a standing ovation. In the mid-fifties, the Soviet Chess Federation had four million members, and playing chess wasn’t just required in elementary schools but compulsory in after-school activities; youngsters who possessed talent were given special training, often working one-on-one with grandmasters who were tapped to groom the next generation of world beaters. One Soviet tournament registered more than seven hundred thousand players. In the USSR, the playing of chess was considered more than just a national policy. It was deeply ingrained in the culture, and it seemed that everyone—man, woman, and child; farmer, civil servant, or doctor—played chess. The impending clash between the Soviets and the Americans thus had Cold War implications.
Three days before the match an editorial in The New York Times observed: “It has become painfully obvious to their opponents that the Russians bring to the chessboard all the fervor, skill and manifest devotion to their cause that Foreign Minister Molotov brings to the diplomatic conference. They are out to win for the greater glory of the Soviet Union. To do so means public acclaim at home, propaganda victories abroad.” Chess was not merely a game to the Soviets; it was war, and not as cold as might have been thought.
The U.S. Chess Federation then had only three thousand members, no national program to promote chess or train children, and only boasted one grandmaster, Samuel Reshevsky. His status netted him a grand total of $200 a month, a stipend meted out by a few admiring patrons. In addition, he made approximately $7,500 a year giving exhibitions and lectures. It was falsely rumored that he didn’t even own a chess set.
In many ways the looming match was analogous to a team of National Basketball Association all-stars playing a college team. There was always the possibility that the collegians would win, but statistically their chances would be much lower than a thousand to one.
On Wednesday, June 16, Bobby, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt, arrived at the Roosevelt Hotel escorted by Nigro, to witness the first round of the historic match. It was the first time the boy had ever been in a hotel, and he looked up at the large clock at the head of the stairs, then noticed some familiar faces entering the Grand Ballroom. He recognized various members of the Brooklyn Chess Club and also a few regulars from Washington Square Park. He dutifully took his seat in the auditorium, as though he were at the Academy Awards of chess, scanning the stage “wide-eyed with amazement,” as Nigro noted.
On the stage, in front of a velvet curtain, were two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the unmistakable and portentous crimson Soviet banner with its hammer and sickle. Beneath them, spanning the breadth of the stage, were eight demonstration boards, where the moves of the games were to be displayed. The eight tables, with chess sets and boards, were at the ready for the players. There were eleven hundred spectators, more than for any previous chess event in U.S. history.
And then there were the players, gathering onstage, waiting for the signal from the referee to take their places and commence their games. Soviet player David Bronstein asked for a glass of lemon juice—no, not lemonade, but real lemon juice, he insisted—which he downed in what looked like one gulp. Someone remarked that the Americans looked nervous, as indeed they should have: Aside from their previous two defeats to remind them of the odds against victory, there was the Soviets’ recent routing of the Argentine team in Buenos Aires and the French team in Paris. Donald Byrne, the United States Open champion, said he was so on edge that he spent the entire day before the match trying not to think of chess, reading the romantic prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Eventually, after some speech making about the contribution of chess toward a possible détente between the Soviet Union and the United States, play got under way. Nigro noted with proud amusement that his protégé was watching carefully and absorbing everything he could.
Did Bobby fully comprehend the political implications of the match? Did feelings of patriotism surge within him and was he rooting hard for his country to win? Did he wish—dream—that one day he’d be up on a similar stage playing against the world’s finest players? He never made a statement about the match, but it’s likely that the answer to at least the latter question was yes.
Aside from the games themselves, which he followed assiduously, Bobby noticed other things: chess players congregating in all the corridors and public rooms of the hotel discussing and analyzing the games, chess books and portable sets at the ready, and many people leaving observation posts only briefly to buy tuna fish and ham-and-cheese sandwiches at a small newsstand in the lobby. When Bobby spotted Reuben Fine—perhaps America’s second strongest player—in the audience, he became especially excited, since Fine’s books had become almost chess bibles for Bobby. Dr. Fine wasn’t playing for the United States because he had retired from play in 1948. But there was Dr. Max Pavey up on the stage—the man Bobby had played in a simultaneous exhibition three
years previously—ready to play for his country.
When Nigro introduced Bobby to writer Murray Shumach of The New York Times, the boy shied away and just looked down at his shoes. Allen Kaufman, a master player, also met Bobby for the first time that day and more than a half century later reminisced: “He seemed to be a nice kid, somewhat shy, and I had no idea that I was talking to a future World Champion.” The next day, Shumach wrote humorously of the assembled onlookers at the match: “Chess spectators are like Dodger fans with laryngitis—men with rampant emotions but muted voices.”
Not totally voiceless, as it developed. As the games became more complex, the spectators, many of whom followed each game with their tiny pocket sets or leather chess wallets, discussed the vagaries of the positions in whispers. The cumulative effect of the sound was that of a mild winter wind or the roll of a summer surf. At times, when a dubious or complex combination was played, or when the diminutive American Reshevsky took one hour and ten minutes on one move, twenty-two hundred eyebrows seemed to rise in unison. If the noise in the hall became too intrusive, Hans Kmoch, the ultraformal bow-tied referee, would stare angrily out at the audience and issue a stern, Dutch-accented “Quiet, please!” Stung by the rebuke, the spectators would look momentarily embarrassed and quiet down for a few minutes.
Bobby enjoyed being in the hall, and kept a scorecard as if he were at Ebbets Field. The eleven-year-old carefully penciled in the results for each game: zeroes for losses, ones for wins, and halves for draws. He attended all four rounds, unaware that in just a few short years he’d be facing, in separate tournaments and matches on different continents, fourteen of these same sixteen players from the United States and the USSR, a conglomeration of the finest players in the world.
Aside from following the action in the ballroom, Bobby liked the analysis room. There, out of earshot of the contestants, top players were discussing and analyzing in depth every game, move by move, as it was played. Bobby wasn’t confident enough to offer an opinion as to what move a player should or shouldn’t make, but he was delighted that he could predict some of the moves before they were made and could understand after the fact why others were played.
Finally, after four days of play, the United States team had taken a humiliating beating, falling to the Soviets 20–12. At the final round, the applause from the American audience appeared to be sincere and respectful, but privately, a plaintive cry went up among many of the chess players: “What’s wrong with American chess?” An editorial in Chess Life lamented the loss of the vanquished team and tried to explain it: “Once again in the USA vs. USSR Team Match we behold reiterated proof that the gifted amateur is rarely, if ever, the equal of the professional. No matter how talented by natural heritage, the amateur lacks that sometimes brutal precision that marks the top professional as master of his trade, that almost instinctive pre-vision which comes only from constant practice of the art under all conditions and against all sorts of opposition.” With heavy hearts, Nigro and Bobby rode the subway home to Brooklyn. If Bobby took anything away from that match, it was the knowledge that the Soviet players were the best in the world. It was a realization that made him fairly seethe with purpose.
The following year, in July 1955, a return match in Moscow was even more distorted in favor of the Soviets: The Americans lost again, this time 25–7. Banner headlines in newspapers across the globe ballyhooed the match, however, and the American players had their picture splashed across the front page of The New York Times, as well as other newspapers throughout the world. The amount of ink was attributable to the fact that Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin paid a surprise visit to a garden party held in Moscow for the American chess team. There Khrushchev issued a policy statement to the effect that the Soviet Union was solid as never before, and he was willing to pursue détente between both countries as long as the United States agreed to talk “honestly.”
During that same summer of the Americans’ annihilation by the Soviets, Bobby Fischer, now twelve, was engaged in his own battles on the board, playing in a tournament in Greenwich Village. The scene at the outdoor chess tables in Washington Square Park was a mélange of urban vitality and color. In contrast to the subdued, almost meditative pairings at the Brooklyn Chess Club, the park’s contests were waged by a fast-talking and disparate group of chess hustlers, Village bohemians, and tournament-strength players who enjoyed competing in the open air, sometimes from sunup to sundown. Intriguingly, the chess tables crossed class barriers: One might find Wall Street bankers playing against homeless men from Skid Row, or Ivy Leaguers facing down high school dropouts. As for the park itself, it was an American version of a Middle Eastern bazaar, with folk singers, storytellers, beggars, political dissidents, soapbox orators, and even the occasional snake charmer. The “anything goes” atmosphere encouraged audacity and inventiveness.
Despite the park’s nonconformity, during the 1950s organized tournaments and other games were played there almost every day, even in winter, with players wrapped in mufflers and hats, awkwardly moving their pieces with gloved hands. “At first I couldn’t get a game,” Bobby said, looking back on his days at the park. “The players were all adults, mostly old men in fact, and didn’t care to waste their time on a boy. Mr. Nigro introduced me around and when I got better it was easier to get a game.” Bobby’s recollection of a homogenous cast of “old men” was probably skewed by his child’s perspective at the time. In reality, the tables were populated by players of all ages; there just weren’t many children as young as him.
In the park in those days chess clocks to time the games weren’t often used, but a form of speed chess called “blitz” (the German word for “lightning”) was quite popular. In this variation, players had to move immediately as soon as an opponent made his move. If a player didn’t respond after more than a few seconds, the opponent—or a designated timekeeper—would shout “Move!” and if the demand wasn’t complied with, that player would lose the game. Many shouts of “Move!” could be heard on any given day in the park. Bobby played this form of chess at Nigro’s insistence and wasn’t particularly good at it, but it did quicken his appraisal of the position at hand and forced him to trust his instincts.
As Bobby’s participation in the summer of 1955 Washington Square Park tournament got under way, he took his place on a wooden bench and began moving his pieces on the stone tables embedded with lightly colored red and gray squares. As soon as the action on the board began to grow tense or complicated, the boy would grow more pensive and often have to kneel on the bench to get a better perspective. Pink and white petals from late-blooming cherry trees would occasionally float down onto the board, and some would gently land on his head. Dog owners out for a stroll would continuously pass by, pulling on leashes and calling out commands to keep their animals from scurrying under the tables and sniffing the ankles and shoes of the players. Kibitzers, always free with mostly unwanted advice, would often have to be chased away by the tournament organizer José Calderon.
During the games, Nigro would ritually head off for a few minutes to a nearby restaurant and return with a hamburger, French fries, and a chocolate milk shake for Bobby, who’d consume the lunch absentmindedly, his eyes always on the board. Bystanders commented softly to Nigro on how steadfast and serious the boy appeared. Once, thirty minutes after his lunch, Bobby, unaware that he’d already eaten, whispered, “Mr. Nigro, when is the food coming?”
The 1955 Washington Square tournament included sixty-six players of all different strengths and talents. Since the entry fee was only 10 cents (the $6.60 collected was sent to the American Red Cross as a donation), anyone could enter. So there were rank beginners who barely knew the moves, seasoned club players who’d been playing chess all of their lives, and a sprinkling of masters. So involved was Bobby in his games that he never noticed that some of the top players en route to Moscow for yet another return USA-USSR match had stopped by to watch, and a few were even following one of his games.
B
obby won a series of contests against weaker players, but as he progressed up the tournament ladder, he confronted stiffer opposition and started to lose. Harry Fajans, a tall, pencil-thin master with poor posture, who was a member of the Marshall Chess Club, one of the most renowned chess institutions in the country, related that when he beat Bobby in that Washington Square tournament, the boy began to cry. When questioned about the incident years later, Bobby was highly indignant and vehemently denied it.
The rounds of the tournament stretched into October, and toward the final weeks it was often cold and rainy. Bobby, dressed in a light zip-up jacket that wasn’t warm enough, pressed on despite the discomfort, his pieces occasionally sliding off the cement tables slick with rain. “We were glad when it was over,” Fischer remembered.
He finished fifteenth, and was awarded a ballpoint pen, perhaps because he was the youngest player. He later recounted: “I felt bad when the pen was handed to me, because it looked like the ones that I was always buying for a quarter or a half dollar.” A few weeks later, however, while walking with his mother past a drugstore, she pointed out an identical pen for sale in the window. It had a price tag of $10.00. “I felt better,” quipped Bobby.