by Frank Brady
The slots of Bobby’s pocket set had become so enlarged from thousands of hours of analysis that the half-inch plastic pieces seemed to jump into place kinesthetically, at his will. Most of the gold imprint designating whether a given piece was a bishop, king, queen, or whatever had, from years of use, worn off. But, of course, Bobby knew without looking—just by touch—what each piece represented. The tiny figurines were like his friendly pets.
“The problem with Bronstein,” he went on, “is that it’s almost impossible to beat him if he plays for a draw. At Zurich he played twenty draws out of twenty-eight games! Did you read his book?” I was snapped back into the reality of having to converse. “No. Isn’t it in Russian?” He looked annoyed, and amazed that I didn’t know the language: “Well, learn it! It’s a fantastic book. He’ll play for a win against me, I’m sure, and I’m not playing for a draw.”
Resetting the pieces in seconds, again almost without looking, he said, “He’s hard to prepare for because he can play any kind of game, positional or tactical, and any kind of opening.” He then began to show me, from memory, game after game—it seemed like dozens—focusing on the openings that Bronstein had played against Bobby’s favorite variations. Multiple outcomes leaped from his mind. But he didn’t just confine himself to Bronstein’s efforts. He also took me on a tour of games that Louis Paulsen had played in the 1800s and Aaron Nimzowitsch had experimented with in the 1920s, as well as others that had been played just weeks before—games gleaned from a Russian newspaper.
All the time Bobby weighed possibilities, suggested alternatives, selected the best lines, discriminated, decided. It was a history lesson and a chess tutorial, but mainly it was an amazing feat of memory. His eyes, slightly glazed, were now fixed on the pocket set, which he gently held open in his left hand, talking to himself, totally unaware of my presence or that he was in a restaurant. His intensity seemed even greater than when he was playing a tournament or match game. His fingers sped by in a blur, and his face showed the slightest of smiles, as if in a reverie. He whispered, barely audibly: “Well, if he plays that … I can block his bishop.” And then, raising his voice so loud that some of the customers stared: “He won’t play that.”
I began to weep quietly, aware that in that time-suspended moment I was in the presence of genius.
Bobby’s prediction at the Cedar Tavern was realized at Mar del Plata. When Bronstein and Bobby met in the twelfth round, the Russian did play for a win, but when the game neared its ending, there were an even number of pieces and pawns remaining on each side, and a draw was inevitable. By the conclusion of the tournament, Fischer and Spassky were tied for first place. It was Fischer’s greatest triumph in an international tournament to date.
And then there was the Argentinean disaster two months later. Of all the cities Bobby had been to, Buenos Aires was his favorite: He liked the food, the people’s enthusiasm for chess, and the broad boulevards. Yet something went uncharacteristically wrong with Bobby’s play during his stay there, and the rumor that circulated, both then and for years after, was that he was staying up until dawn—on at least one occasion with an Argentinean beauty—allowing himself to become physically run-down, and not preparing for the next day’s opponent. The worldly Argentinean grandmaster Miguel Najdorf, who wasn’t playing in the tournament, introduced Bobby to the city’s nightlife, not caring that he was undermining the boy’s possibility of gaining a top spot in the competition. And with the bravado of a seventeen-year-old, Bobby assumed that he had the energy and focus to play well even after very little sleep, night after night. Unfortunately, when he found himself in extremis at the board and called on his chess muse to save him, there was no answer.
Whatever the reason for his poor play (when pressed, he said the lighting was atrocious), Bobby as the brilliant Dr. Jekyll morphed into a weakened Mr. Hyde, a shell of a player. In the twenty-player tournament, he won only three games, drew eleven, and lost the rest. Bewildering. Anyone can have a bad tournament, but Bobby’s past record had been one of ascendancy, and his 13½–1½ result at Mar del Plata just a short time before had left his fans predicting that he’d take top honors at Buenos Aires.
For Bobby, the defeat was devastating. It’s bad enough to fail, but far worse to see another succeed at the very accomplishment you’d hoped to achieve. Samuel Reshevsky, his American archrival, had tied for first with Viktor Korchnoi. A group photograph of the players taken at the end of the tournament shows Bobby with unfocused eyes, apparently paying no attention to the photographer or the rest of the players. Was he thinking about his poor performance? Or was he perhaps considering that, just this once, his determination to win hadn’t been strong enough?
He’d agreed to play first board for the United States that year at the World Chess Olympics, which was to be held in Leipzig, East Germany, in October of 1960, but American chess officials were claiming that they didn’t have enough money to pay for the team’s travel and other expenses. A national group called the People-to-People Committee was attempting to raise funds for the team, and the executive director asked Bobby if he’d give a simultaneous exhibition to publicize the team’s plight. The event was held at the Rikers Island jail complex, which stands on a 413-acre plot of land in the middle of New York’s East River. At the time the facility housed some fourteen thousand inmates, twenty of whom Bobby played. Unsurprisingly, he won all the games.
Unfortunately, though the exhibition did garner coverage in local newspapers, not one story mentioned the reason for the event: to bring attention to the American team’s financial straits. But if the State Department and American chess organizations couldn’t help, Regina Fischer thought she could. Probing into the activities of the American Chess Foundation, she demonstrated that some players (such as Reshevsky) received support while others (such as Bobby) did not. A one-woman publicity machine, she sent out indignant press releases, as well as letters to the government demanding a public accounting.
Although Bobby desperately wanted to go to Leipzig to play in his first Olympics, he began to seethe over his mother’s interference, and on at least one occasion he openly took her to task when she made a public appearance at a chess event. She felt she was helping her son; he felt she was simply being a pushy stage mother.
While picketing the foundation’s offices, Regina caught the attention of Ammon Hennacy, a pacifist, anarchist, social activist, and associate editor of the libertarian newspaper the Catholic Worker. He suggested that Regina undertake a hunger strike for chess. She did so for six days and garnered yet more publicity. Hennacy also talked her into joining the longest peace march in history, from San Francisco to Moscow, and she agreed. While on the march she met Cyril Pustan, an Englishman who was a high school teacher and journeyman plumber. Among other areas of interest, their political beliefs and religion—both were Jewish—meshed perfectly, and eventually they married and settled in England.
When, ultimately, Bobby walked into the lobby of the Astoria Hotel in Leipzig, he was greeted by a man who resembled a younger and handsomer Groucho Marx: Isaac Kashdan, the United States team captain. Kashdan and Bobby had never met before, but the former was a legend in the chess world. An international grandmaster, he was one of America’s strongest players in the late 1920s and 1930s, when he played in five chess Olympics, winning a number of medals. Having been warned that Bobby was “hard to handle,” Kashdan was concerned that the young man might not be a compliant team member.
Bobby may have sensed the team captain’s wariness, because he turned the conversation to Kashdan’s chess career; the teenager not only knew of the older man’s reputation, he was also familiar with many of his past games. Kashdan responded to Bobby’s overture and later commented: “I had no real problem with him. All he wants to do is to play chess. He is a tremendous player.” Although separated in age by almost four decades, the two players became relatively close and remained so for years.
One of the highlights of the Olympics came when the United States
faced the USSR and Bobby was slated to play Mikhail Tal, then the World Champion. Fischer and Tal met in the fifth round. Before making his first move, Tal stared at the board, and stared, and stared. Bobby wondered, rightly so as it developed, whether Tal was up to his old tricks. Finally, after ten long minutes, Tal moved. He was hoping to make Fischer feel completely uncomfortable. But his effort to unsettle the American failed. Instead, Bobby launched an aggressive series of moves, waging a board battle that was later described as both a “slugfest” and a “sparkling attack and counter-attack.” The cerebral melee ended in a draw, and later both players would include the game in their respective books, citing it as one of the most important in their careers.
That seventeen-year-old Bobby had held his own against the reigning World Champion didn’t go unnoticed, and players at the competition were now predicting that in a very short time, Bobby would be playing for the title.
By the end of the Olympics, the Soviet Union, which had fielded one of the strongest teams ever, came in first and the United States eased into second. Bobby’s score was ten wins, two losses, and six draws, and he took home the silver medal.
At the closing banquet someone mentioned to Mikhail Tal that Bobby, who’d been studying palmistry, was reading the palms of other players, almost as a parlor game. “Let him read mine,” said Tal skeptically. He walked over to Bobby’s table, held out his left hand, and said, “Read it.” While Bobby stared at Tal’s palm and pondered the mysteries of its lines and crevices, a crowd gathered around and hundreds of others watched from their tables.
Sensing the building drama, Bobby took his time and seemed to peer even more deeply at the hand. Then, with a look on his face that promised he was going to reveal the meaning of life, he said in stentorian tones: “I can see in your palm, Mr. Tal, that the next World Champion will be …”
At that point Bobby and Tal spoke simultaneously. Fischer said, “Bobby Fischer!” And Tal, never at a loss for a quip, said, “William Lombardy!” (who happened to be standing to his immediate left). Everyone assembled screamed with laughter.
A short while later, Chess Life, in describing the incident, chose to find in it an augury of things to come. Said the magazine: “By the look of confidence and self-assuredness on Fischer’s face, we wonder if in fact, he did ‘see’ himself as the next World Champion.”
7
Einstein’s Theory
BOBBY LEFT THE BALLROOM of the Empire Hotel, just steps away from the construction site of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts cultural complex. He’d just clinched the 1960–61 United States Championship, and he walked briskly through the snow-covered streets with his mother and Jack and Ethel Collins. Jack found it tough going with his wheelchair, so he and his sister took a taxi to a victory dinner for Bobby at Vorst’s, a German restaurant a few blocks from the tournament site. If there was any question of his accomplishment, Chess Life set the record straight:
By winning the United States Championship for the fourth time in succession, Bobby Fischer, 17-year-old International Grandmaster from Brooklyn, has carved an indelible impression in the historic cycle of American chess and has proven without a doubt that he is both the greatest player that this country ever produced and one of the strongest players in the world. Fischer has not lost a game in an American tournament since 1957.
There was only one problem with Chess Life’s semi-hagiography: Reshevsky didn’t agree with it, nor did many of his supporters.
Some chess players felt that it was an insult to proclaim Fischer the greatest American player at seventeen, and thereby diminish the reputation of Reshevsky at fifty. It didn’t help that a study had been published that year in American Statistician magazine, “The Age Factor in Master Chess,” in which the author posited that chess masters go downhill after a certain age, “perhaps forty.” Reshevsky wanted to prove the study wrong.
For many years Reshevsky had enjoyed a reign as America’s “greatest,” and now all the spoils and baubles seemed to be going to Bobby, whom many thought of as simply a young, irreverent upstart from Brooklyn. That said, at least an equal number of observers couldn’t get enough of “the upstart.” They believed that he signaled the possibility of a chess boom in America.
The officers of the American Chess Foundation maintained that Reshevsky was the better player, and they arranged to have him prove it. During the summer of 1961 a sixteen-game match between the two players was negotiated and a prize fund of $8,000 was promised, with $1,000 awarded to each player in advance. Of the balance, 65 percent would go to the winner and 35 percent to the loser. Such a match evoked the drama of some of history’s great rivalries—clashes such as Mozart vs. Salieri, Napoleon vs. Wellington, and Dempsey vs. Tunney. When four world-class chess players—Svetozar Gligoric, Bent Larsen, Paul Keres, and Tigran Petrosian—were asked their opinion of who would prevail, all predicted that Reshevsky would be the winner, and by a substantial margin.
Reshevsky, a small, bald man who dressed conservatively, had a solemn and resolute personality. He was an ice king who was courteous but curt. Bobby couldn’t have been more different. He was a tall, gangly, intense, quarrelsome teenager, a quixotic chess prince who exhibited occasional flashes of charm and grace. And their styles on the board were just as divergent. Reshevsky’s games were rarely poetic—they displayed no passion. The longtime champion often lapsed into time pressure, barely making the control. Fischer’s games, though, were crystalline—transparent but ingenious. Bobby had taught himself, after years of practice, to budget his time and he hardly ever drifted into time pressure. (The regimen Jack Collins had imposed when he imported a German clock for Bobby had proved its worth.)
The other differences? Fischer was thoroughly prepared—“booked up,” as it was called—with opening innovations. Reshevsky, though, tended to be underprepared and often had to determine the most effective moves during play, wasting valuable time. Fischer was more of a tactical player, with flames of brilliance, while Reshevsky was a positional player. He maneuvered for tiny advantages and exhibited an obdurate patience. He was methodically capable of eking out a win from a seemingly hopeless and delicate position.
Ultimately, though, the match wouldn’t be rendering a judgment on which player’s style was the best. Its agenda was more basic—that is, to determine who was the best American player period.
Hardly a pas de deux, there was a seesaw of results: wins for Bobby … draws … wins for Reshevsky. One day Bobby was King Kong; the next, Fay Wray. By the eleventh game, which was played in Los Angeles, the score was tied at 5½–5½. There was difficulty scheduling the twelfth round, which fell on a Saturday. Reshevsky, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t play on Saturday until after sundown. (Early in his career he did play before sundown, but he came to believe that this was a transgression that had caused the death of his father, and thereafter he refused to compete on the Sabbath.) The starting time was therefore changed to 8:30 p.m. When someone pointed out that the game could easily last until two in the morning, it was rescheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. the next day, Sunday afternoon.
Complications set in. Jacqueline Piatigorsky (née Rothchild, a member of one of the richest families in Europe) was one of the sponsors of the match and was paying for all of the players’ expenses. She was married to the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, who happened to be giving a concert in Los Angeles that Sunday afternoon. So that she could attend her husband’s concert, Jacqueline asked that the game begin at 11:00 a.m. When Bobby, a classically late sleeper, heard of yet another change of schedule, he protested immediately. He simply couldn’t play at that time, he said. “It’s ridiculous.” Bobby also didn’t see why he had to cater to Mrs. Piatigorsky. She could always come to the game after the concert, he argued. They’d probably still be playing.
At the tournament site—the Beverly Hilton Hotel—Bobby’s chess clock was started promptly at eleven a.m. Reshevsky paced up and down, a few spectators waited patiently, and when the little red flag fell precisely a
t noon, the tournament director declared the game a forfeit. The thirteenth game had been scheduled to be played back in New York at the Empire Hotel.
Bobby said he was willing to continue the match, but the next game had to be a replay of the twelfth game. He didn’t want to play burdened by such a massive disadvantage; the forfeited game could possibly decide the match’s outcome.
Reshevsky nervously paced the stage, once again waiting for the absent Bobby to arrive, this time to play the disputed thirteenth game. About twenty spectators and as many journalists and photographers also waited, staring at the empty, lonely board, and at Reshevsky, who never stopped his pacing.
When an hour had elapsed on the clock, I. A. Horowitz, the referee, declared the game forfeited. Then Walter Fried, the president of the American Chess Foundation, who’d just burst into the room, noticed that Fischer was in absentia and declared Reshevsky the winner of the series. “Fischer had a gun to our heads,” he later said, explaining the abrupt termination of one of the most important American chess matches ever played.
Bobby ultimately sued Reshevsky and the American Chess Foundation, seeking a court order to resume the match and asking to have Reshevsky banned from tournament play until the matter was settled. The case lingered in the courts for years and was finally dropped. Although the two men would subsequently meet over the board in other tournaments, the “Match of the Century,” as it had been billed, was the unfortunate casualty of Bobby’s ingrained sleep habits and the long shadow of patronage in chess.