by Frank Brady
A significant improvement occurred in his learning curve in 1956, when he was thirteen. Bobby’s intense study of the game and incessant playing came to remarkable fruition. During the annual amateur Memorial Day tournament that May, he placed twenty-first. Only five weeks later, during the July 4 weekend, he captured the United States Junior Championship at a tournament held at the Franklin Mercantile Chess Club in Philadelphia. Only four months had passed since his thirteenth birthday and Bobby had become the youngest chess master in history and one of the strongest young players in the country.
Many factors could have contributed to his meteoric rise at the time: meeting Jack Collins and playing countless games with him and with Jack’s acolytes, almost all masters who came to the Collins salon throughout the summer; his year of facing competition at the Manhattan Chess Club; the knowledge he’d accumulated from steadily studying chess books and periodicals for almost five years; and a gestalt of understanding regarding the game that, through a combination of study, experience, and intrinsic gifts, coalesced in his mind.
But there were personal elements as well. Losses that he’d experienced in tournaments created a fierce determination to win. (“I just can’t bear thinking of defeat.”) And somewhere along the way, he became more reconciled to the need to take chances. In the end it may have boiled down to what the poet Robert Frost once said about a successful education: “Just hanging around until you have caught on.”
Just two weeks after that July 4 weekend tournament, the 1956 United States Open Championship was going to be held in Oklahoma City. It would have many more contestants, including some of the best players in the United States and Canada.
While Bobby had no hope of placing among the top contenders, he was eager to continue his winning streak, aware that the opportunity to compete against stronger players would sharpen his game. Regina balked. She was concerned that he’d exhaust himself playing in a third tournament within two months. It was also impossible for her to take time off to accompany her son on the long trip to Oklahoma, and she worried about his going alone.
Bobby was adamant. If he could go to Nebraska by himself, he argued, why couldn’t he go to Oklahoma City? Regina reluctantly agreed, but raising enough money for his expenses was, as always, a problem. She persuaded Maurice Kasper of the Manhattan Chess Club to give her $125 toward Bobby’s expenses (the travel fare was $93.50), and she contacted the tournament organizing committee to arrange to have Bobby stay at someone’s home to save on the cost of a hotel. A player’s wife agreed to keep an eye on the boy and provide most of his meals. Before leaving, to help raise money for his trip, Bobby played a twenty-one-game simultaneous exhibition in the lobby of the Jersey City YMCA, winning nineteen, drawing one, and losing one, with some one hundred spectators following his games. Each player paid a dollar, with two free entries allowed. Bobby’s profit: $19. Scrimping to make up the balance, Regina sent him off to Oklahoma.
By far the strongest tournament Bobby had ever played in, the U.S. Open was held in the Oklahoma Biltmore Hotel, a somewhat palatial facility that seemed out of context in a Great Plains town, although the décor of American Indian and buffalo paintings reminded the competitors that they were in cowboy country.
Bobby, still small for his age (he appeared to be only nine or ten), became a novelty at the Open. He was interviewed twice on local television, profiled by newspapers, and by the Oklahoman magazine, and continued to draw crowds to his table. A flash of photographers seemed always on hand to snap his picture.
One hundred and two players competed in the twelve-round tournament, spread over two weeks. Bobby’s opponents were not necessarily the strongest in the tournament, nor were they the weakest. He drew with several masters, defeated some experts (players a rank below master), kept his resolve, and ended up not losing a game—which was a record for a thirteen-year-old at a U.S. Open. When the pieces were cleared, he was tied with four other players for fourth place, just one point away from the winner, Arthur Bisguier, a fellow member of the Manhattan Chess Club. His official U.S. Chess Federation rating calculated after the event was astronomically high—2375—confirming his status as a master and ranking him number twenty-five in the nation. No one in the United States, or in the world, had ever ascended so quickly.
It was late in August 1956, and Bobby had followed his Oklahoma success with a trip to Montreal. Once again, Regina had arranged for him to stay in someone’s home; this time it was with the family of William Hornung, one of the tournament’s supporters. The eighty-eight players in the First Canadian Open may have composed a stronger roster than had been fielded at the United States Open a few weeks earlier. Canada’s best players came out in force.
Some of America’s youngest but strongest stars had ventured north of the border to play. As usual, Bobby was the youngest of the New York City contingent, which included Larry Evans, William Lombardy, and James T. Sherwin (who played ten straight speed games with Bobby in between rounds, and lost every one: “It was then that I decided that he was really too strong for me,” Sherwin remembered).
In the fourth round, Bobby became involved in a 108-move extravaganza, a chess ultra-marathon that stretched to more than seven hours. In the contest he was pitted against Hans Matthai, a German immigrant to Canada. The game, which turned out to be the longest of Bobby’s career, ended as an interesting draw.
After the game was drawn, he wondered if there’d been anything he’d overlooked. There was just something about the position, an echo of an idea distantly heard. Could he have established a won game, even at the point just before it was drawn?
That night, in a deep but restless sleep, a dream came to him and the position appeared over and over again—seemingly hundreds of times. Just before waking, the solution came to Bobby as a kind of apparition. There was a win there.
Bobby woke and sat bolt upright. “I’ve got it!” he said aloud, not knowing that anyone else was in the room. Mrs. Hornung had just tiptoed into the bedroom to wake Bobby and tell him breakfast was ready. She witnessed his epiphany. Still wearing his pajamas, he bounced barefooted into the living room to where he knew there was a chess set ready for action and began working on the endgame that he’d struggled with the previous day. “I knew I should have won!” he fairly screamed.
Freud held that dream content usually consists of material garnered from incidents, thoughts, images, and emotions experienced during or preceding the day of the dream. Some players in the midst of a tournament do dream about their games that night, and in these nocturnal reveries some actually solve an opening trap, an endgame finesse, or some other aspect that’s been troubling them, waking with a fresh and practical idea. Former World Champion Boris Spassky once said that he dreamt about chess, and David Bronstein, a World Championship candidate, talked about playing whole games in his sleep—ones he could reproduce the next morning. Mikhail Botvinnik claimed that during his World Championship match with Vasily Smyslov, he awoke one night, walked naked to his board, and played the move that he was dreaming about in his adjourned game.
Dreaming about chess didn’t happen often with Bobby. But when it did, the result was always something he could use in a future game, or the explanation of what he could have done in a lost or drawn game. In one interview he said that he most often dreamt about detective stories, which could be intricate games in themselves. Since chess had become such a motivating force in his life, he might have been incapable of dreaming about the game, or any game, except in symbolic form—that is, his psyche might have automatically defaulted to characters instead of pieces, plots and counterplots instead of variations on the board, murders in place of checkmates.
Bobby’s last-round draw against Frank Anderson, the Canadian champion, was a nail-biter … literally. When he wasn’t gnawing on the fingers of his left hand, he began biting his shirt, actually chomping pieces out of it and leaving holes.
He finished with a score of 7–3, tied for second place, a point behind first prize, and he
won $59, which he pocketed without revealing his windfall to his mother.
Larry Evans won the prize as First Canadian Open Champion. Knowing that Evans had a car and was driving back to New York, Bobby asked for a ride. Evans was kind enough to agree. Bobby paid no attention to the stunning scenery or to Evans’s equally stunning wife, who sat in the backseat to allow the boy to sit up front. Instead, during the entire eight-hour trip, Bobby plied the champion with questions: “Why do you play the Pirc, and against Anderson?” “Did Sherwin have winning or drawing chances against you? How?” “Didn’t Mednis have a win against you? Why did he accept the draw? He could have made the time limit.” Evans recounted, “I had no idea that I was talking to a future world’s champion, just a very young master with great intensity. It was the beginning of a long and sometimes turbulent friendship.”
A week after he returned from Canada in August, Bobby bought a ticket to a night baseball game at Ebbets Field to see his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers play the Milwaukee Braves. He wasn’t disappointed: not only did the Dodgers win, but he was treated to a spectacle courtesy of Jackie Robinson. One of the great base stealers, Robinson danced around second base to worry and nettle the pitcher; when the pitcher tried to throw him out, the ball went over the head of the second baseman and Robinson sped home to score a run.
Bobby was feeling grown-up, mainly as a result of his summer travels to New Jersey, Philadelphia, Oklahoma, and Montreal, but also because of the accolades he was receiving and his growing status in the chess world. He was thirteen. If he could defeat adults at chess, why shouldn’t he be treated as an adult? He asked his mother if she’d stop coming to the chess club to take him home at night. It embarrassed him. “OK,” she said, “I’ll stop coming, and you can come home by yourself, but only on two conditions: You must be home by no later than ten p.m. on a school night and no later than midnight on a weekend night, and you must learn jujitsu to defend yourself.” Regina didn’t want Bobby to be mugged or hurt in a half-deserted subway station as he worked his way alone at night from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Bobby reluctantly agreed to the terms of the deal. As it developed, he never took a jujitsu lesson, though. Regina discovered that lessons would cost a minimum of $8 an hour—money she just didn’t have. Their agreement had been made, however, and from that time on Bobby went home by himself. The only untoward incident he had was that someone once stepped on his newly polished shoes—on purpose, he said.
“Me llamo Robert Fischer.”
During his first weeks in high school, right after he returned from Montreal, Bobby had not studied the introduction to his Spanish text, El Camino Real, had failed to attend two of his classes, and now was faced with his first ten-question quiz. Despite his trip to Cuba and his attempt to speak pidgin Spanish, he couldn’t translate or come up with the answers to such questions as “Where is the train station?” or “How much does the banana cost?” so he only answered six of the questions—all incorrectly—and left the others blank.
In the Fischer household failing a language exam was a major infraction. In and out of college, Regina had formally studied Latin, Hebrew, Russian, German, French, and Spanish. She was fluent in many of these tongues (and got by in Yiddish) and was continually taking language courses in adult education centers to sharpen her skills. Joan took Spanish and German in high school and was adept in both. “Industry!” Regina yelled at Bobby, with the not-so-subtle implication that if he spent just a fraction of the time on his studies that he devoted to chess, he’d be a stellar student. She continually emphasized to him the importance of knowing other languages, especially if he intended to play chess in foreign lands. He understood. But to accelerate his progress, she began to speak to him in Spanish, coaxed him to take up his text, and tutored him, and within a short while he was receiving high grades. Eventually, he became fluent in Spanish.
Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn was one of the largest in New York and one of the oldest in the nation. With more than five thousand students, it was a factory of learning. Entering in the fall of 1956, Bobby felt comfortable there, although much less so than at Community Woodward. He later said that at Erasmus he was adorned with a cloak of anonymity: “As practically nobody in the school played chess, the other students did not know I was a chess player, which suited me fine, and I took care never to say anything about it either.” At least that’s what Bobby thought. The other students did know who he was. Indeed, it was difficult to not take notice of him: The New York newspapers regularly ran stories and photos of the prodigy; he gave several simultaneous exhibitions that drew publicity; he sparkled out from the cover of Chess Review; he even appeared with Arlene Francis on NBC’s Home show. As for his classmates and their lack of acknowledgment, Bobby said, “I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me.” He seemed unaware that fellow student Barbra Streisand, the future singer, had a secret schoolgirl crush on him. She remembered that “Bobby was always alone and very peculiar. But I found him very sexy.” Bobby’s remembrance of Streisand? “There was this mousey little girl …” His teachers, at least some, were annoyed by his aloofness and lack of interest in the lessons at hand.
October 1956
Scattering fallen leaves as he rushed down the tree-lined street, thirteen-year-old Bobby vaulted up the red-carpeted stairs of the Marshall Chess Club two steps at a time and entered the Great Hall. It was not his first visit. Indeed, he’d already begun making frequent visits to the Marshall, New York’s other major chess club, where he enjoyed a heady feeling of being where he belonged, of possibly writing his own page into chess history.
The club—which was located on Tenth Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, one of Manhattan’s most attractive neighborhoods—had been quartered in this venerable brownstone (built in 1832) since 1931, when a group of wealthy patrons, including one of the Roosevelts, bought the building so that their beloved Frank J. Marshall, the reigning U.S. Champion, who would hold the title for twenty-seven years, would always have a place to live with his family and to play, teach, and conduct tournaments. Walking down the street with its rows of stately brownstones festooned with window boxes of flowers, and a private boarding stable on the same block, Bobby could have easily felt he was transported back to the Gas Light or Silk Stocking era of the nineteenth century.
Most of the world’s most renowned masters had visited the club—it was steeped in the echoes of legendary games, epic battles, hard-fought victories, and heartfelt defeats. Indeed, its only peer in the United States was the Manhattan Chess Club, forty-nine blocks to the north. In team matches, the Manhattan usually, but not always, came out on top.
Looking somewhat like a British officers’ club, the Marshall was wood-paneled, with plush burgundy velvet curtains, several fireplaces, and oak tables fitted with brass lamps. It was at this club that Cuba’s brilliant José Raúl Capablanca gave his last exhibition, where World Champion Alexander Alekhine visited and played speed chess, where many of the most gifted international grandmasters gave, and continue to give, theoretical lectures. Artist Marcel Duchamp lived directly across the street and was an active member of the club, and became a great fan of Bobby’s. The Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis took lessons there. If a motion picture location scout were searching for an idealized chess club, the Marshall might be his pick.
Certainly, there was a sense of decorum that permeated the club, even when it came to dress. Bobby’s habitual mufti of T-shirt, wrinkled pants, and sneakers was considered an outrage by Caroline Marshall, Frank Marshall’s widow and the long-standing manager of the club, and on several occasions she informed him of his sartorial indiscretion, once even threatening to bar him from the premises if he didn’t dress more appropriately. Bobby ignored her.
He was at the Marshall that night in October to play in the seventh round of an invitational tournament, the Rosenwald Memorial, named for its sponsor, Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of Sears Roebuck who was an important art collector and chess patron. The invitation came a
s a result of Bobby’s having won the U.S. Junior Championship three months earlier, and the Rosenwald was the first important invitational and adult all-masters tournament of his career. The other eleven players were considered some of the finest and highest rated in the United States, and the club members were excited by the event. Bobby’s opponent that night was the urbane college professor Donald Byrne, an international master, former U.S. Open Champion, and a fiercely aggressive player. Dark-haired, elegant in speech and dress, the twenty-five-year-old Byrne invariably held a cigarette between two fingers, his hand high in the air, his elbow resting on the table, in a pose that gave him an aristocratic demeanor.
Regina accompanied Bobby to the club, but as soon as he began to play she left to browse at the nearby Strand Bookstore, whose shelves contained millions of used books. She knew it would probably be hours before Bobby’s game would be over and she’d have to return.
To that point Bobby hadn’t won a game in the tournament, but he’d drawn three, and he seemed to be getting stronger each round, learning from the other masters as he played. In chess tournaments, contestants are not only assigned opponents, they’re also given, for each round, a color: black or white. Where possible, the tournament director alternates the colors, so that a player will play with the white pieces in one game and with the black in the next. Since white always moves first, having that color can provide a player with a distinct advantage in that he can make immediate headway on a preferred strategy. Alas, against Byrne, Bobby was assigned the black pieces.
Having studied Byrne’s past games in chess books and magazines, Bobby knew something of his opponent’s style and the strategies he frequently used. So Bobby decided to use an atypical approach—one unusual for Byrne to face and for Bobby to try. He played what was known as the Gruenfeld Defense.