by Frank Brady
Bobby took the elevator to the thirtieth floor of the skyscraper at 110 West Fortieth Street, on the edge of the garment district, and when he disembarked, the elevator operator pointed to a doorway. “It’s up those metal stairs.” Bobby started climbing the spiral staircase, up and up, four flights. “Is that you, Bobby?” came a disembodied voice from above. It was Ralph Ginzburg, the journalist who’d scheduled an interview with Bobby for Harper’s magazine.
Bobby was guided into a strange round office, about the size of a small living room and positioned in the tower of the building, with windows on all sides. Everything was battleship gray: the floor, walls, filing cabinets, a desk, and two chairs. The tower room swayed ever so slightly as the wind whistled through the spires outside.
Ginzburg, thirty-two, wore horn-rimmed glasses and was going prematurely bald. A risk-taking journalist, he’d previously worked for Look magazine and Esquire, and was the author of two books, including a history of lynching in America. Clever, extremely industrious, he talked loudly and rapidly with a Bronx accent and was proud of his bent for sensationalism. Later he went to prison on an obscenity conviction for publishing a magazine called Eros.
It’s important to know this background about Ginzburg, not just because his article about Bobby has been used for more than forty years as a source for other writers and biographers, but also because of the negative effect it had on Bobby’s life and the consequent role it had in making him forever suspicious of journalists.
In preparation for the interview, Ginzburg had read Elias Canetti’s classic work Auto-da-Fé, written eight years before Bobby was born. The story, which helped Canetti earn the Nobel Prize in literature, includes a character named Fischerele who aspires to become chess champion of the world. When he wins the title, he plans to change his name to Fischer, and after becoming rich and famous, he will own “new suits made at the best possible tailor” and live in a “gigantic palace with real castles, knights, pawns.”
Ginzburg quoted Fischer as saying that he bought his suits, shirts, and shoes from the best tailors all over the world and was “going to hire the best architect and have him build it [my house] in the shape of a rook … spiral staircases, parapets, everything. I want to live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.”
The article, which also included provocative material, caused a sensation, coloring many of the interview questions that would be fired at Bobby for years after. When, on the heels of Harper’s, widely read British magazine Chess published the article in full, Bobby turned livid and screamed: “Those bastards!”
Bobby insisted that most of the article had twisted what he said and used his quotes out of context. For example, he never told Ginzburg that he had to “get rid of his mother.” It’s true that Regina Fischer left the apartment to go on a long peace march, met a man, got married, and settled in England. She did say that Bobby, a highly independent adolescent, was probably better off without her living with him; like many mothers, she was doting and continually trying to help her son, sometimes to the point of exasperating him. She and Bobby both realized that living alone gave him more time to study according to his own time and pace, but Ginzburg’s negative interpretation of their relationship was totally incorrect. Bobby and his mother loved each other.
Listening to the tapes or reading the transcripts of Ginzburg’s interview with Bobby would have proven what the teenager did or didn’t say, but Ginzburg said he destroyed all of the research materials that backed up the article. If so, this was unusual: Most professional journalists retain interview transcripts lest what they’ve written generate a charge of libel or invasion of privacy. One can never know the full truth, of course, but even if Ginzburg merely reported verbatim what Bobby had said, it was a cruel piece of journalism, a penned mugging, in that it made a vulnerable teenager appear uneducated, homophobic, and misogynistic, none of which was a true portrait.
Previous to this, Bobby had already been wary of journalists. The Ginzburg article, though, sent him into a permanent fury and created a distrust of reporters that lasted the rest of his life. When anyone asked about the article, he would scream: “I don’t want to talk about it! Don’t ever mention Ginzburg’s name to me!”
To exorcise the disgruntled feeling he still had from l’affaire Reshevsky, and to shake off the Harper’s article affront, Bobby wanted to get away from New York and just get back to doing what made him happy: He wanted to play chess—without lawyers, without publicity, without threats and counter-threats. He accepted an invitation to play in Yugoslavia in a month-long, twenty-player event in Bled that promised to be one of the strongest international tournaments conducted in years. But first he had to prepare, and he had only three weeks to do so.
Normally, Bobby’s schedule consisted of five hours per day of study: games, openings, variations, endings. And then, of course, he’d play speed games for an additional five or more hours with the Collins cluster or at one of the clubs. He loved to play fast chess, since it gave him the opportunity to try out dubious or experimental lines through an instant gaze of the board. It honed his instinct and forced him to trust himself.
But to play in an international tournament of the caliber announced, he had to spend much more time at careful, precise study, analysis, and memorization. He stopped answering his phone, because he didn’t want to be interrupted or tempted to socialize—even for a chess party—and at one point, to be alone with the chessboard, he just threw some clothes in a suitcase, didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and checked into the Brooklyn YMCA. During his stay there, he sometimes studied more than sixteen hours per day.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes how people in all fields reach success. He quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chessplayers, criminals and what have you, the number comes up again and again [the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours of practice].” Gladwell then refers to Bobby: “To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” A fair estimate is that Bobby played one thousand games a year between the ages of nine and eleven, and twelve thousand a year from the ages of eleven to thirteen, most of them speed games. Although all of these games could be considered “practice,” not all were particularly instructive. Specific moves or positions reached, however, could be highly enlightening and might even remain locked in his unconscious mind—in the same way, for example, that one remembered chord or even a single note can be of value to a musician. Bobby’s study of the nuances of others’ games had the same effect: He paid careful attention to the accumulation of fine detail.
Bobby loved Yugoslavia because of the superstar status accorded him by its chess adherents, and, on a delightful autumnal day, he entered the tournament hall at Lake Bled primed to play. Now eighteen and dressed in an impeccably tailored suit with a white handkerchief deftly positioned in his breast pocket, he looked somewhat older and carried himself with an athletic swagger. He looked a little like a budding movie star. Many of the Yugoslavs didn’t recognize him at first.
Walking in the streets, he’d be besieged by autograph seekers. From his experience at the Interzonal and the Candidates tournament in 1958–59, both held in Yugoslavia, he’d grasped enough of the language to at least autograph his name in Serbo-Croat. Fans went wild when he inscribed their scorecards in their own language. When a spectator from Moscow asked for an autograph, Bobby signed it using the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, needing to change only a few letters.
For Bobby, the highlight of the tournament was his game against Tal in the second round. Tal, who was much better behaved than the last time he played Bobby—doing less staring and snickering—seemed to suffer a lapse of chess logic on the sixth move, and
he blundered again on the ninth move, becoming enmeshed in the opening that Bobby had prepared against him. Tal’s spotty play was blamed on the fact that he wasn’t feeling well. Bobby’s own play was not at its sharpest, but he exploited the weak moves of his opponent and pressed home the advantage until Tal lapsed into a hopeless endgame and resigned. The applause was tumultuous. “A charmer,” piped Chess Review. Bobby was almost giddy with delight at notching his first win against one of the strongest players in the world, a former World Champion, the man he’d fantasized about murdering during the 1959 Candidates.
As Tal and Fischer left the stage, journalists rushed to them begging for a comment. The two combatants, both a little playful, performed for the crowd:
Tal [Sighing]: It is difficult to play against Einstein’s theory.
Fischer [Exulting]: Finally, he has not escaped from me!
Bobby was not happy with his eventual second-place showing in the tournament, and like Tal, he blamed some of his draws on illness. By the end of the competition, he was feeling mild discomfort in the lower right part of his abdomen, and he was also having difficulty keeping food down. When the pain worsened, and he mentioned it to some of the players, they insisted he see a physician.
Suspicious as always of doctors, Bobby was also concerned about communicating in Serbo-Croat. Would he be able to understand what was being said to him? A doctor was summoned to the Hotel Toplice, and one of the Yugoslavian players served as translator. As soon as the doctor touched his abdomen, Bobby flinched in pain. “It seems like appendicitis,” the doctor warned. “You’ll have to go to a hospital. If the appendix ruptures, you may get peritonitis, and the infection will spread.” Bobby asked if there was anything that could be done without going to a hospital. “No,” the doctor answered emphatically. Bobby reluctantly agreed, and he was driven from Bled in Slovenia to Banja Luka in Bosnia for treatment at a large university hospital. He begged the doctors not to operate, even though they told him that it was a relatively simple procedure and cautioned him of the dangers involved in not operating. They assured him he’d be up and walking around in a few days, but he was still resistant. Not only was he philosophically opposed to surgery, he was frightened of anesthesia. He didn’t even want to take medicine to stop the pain. The doctors prevailed on that point and also insisted that he take a regimen of antibiotics. Eventually, the pain lessened and within two or three days he was feeling himself again. He was effusively thankful to the doctors for not insisting he be put under the knife.
After the appendicitis scare, the British Broadcasting Corporation invited him to London to appear on a show called Chess Treasury of the Air, and he spent about ten days in England. Christmas in London was a charming experience for Bobby. It seemed to be what he imagined New York City might have been like around 1890 or 1900. He admired the gentility of the city’s citizens and the cleanliness of its streets. Pal Benko was there for a while with him and noticed that though he himself had a thick Hungarian accent, he could be more easily understood by the Londoners than Bobby with his pronounced Brooklyn dialect. Bobby spent a British Christmas with his mother and her new husband, Cyril Pustan, who’d heard him on the BBC show.
As he continued to prepare for upcoming tournaments, Bobby was also being drawn closer to the Worldwide Church of God, and he began to face a time conflict between his two commitments: religion and chess. “I split my life into two pieces,” he told an interviewer later. “One was where my chess career lies. There I kept my sanity, so to speak. And the other was my religious life. I tried to apply what I learned in the church to my chess career, too. But I was still studying chess. I wasn’t just ‘trusting in God’ to give me the moves.” Bobby’s pragmatic philosophy was similar to the old Arabic saying “Trust in Allah but tie up your camel.”
In addition to his Bible correspondence course, listening to Reverend Armstrong’s sermons, and his in-depth study of the Old and New Testaments, Bobby was reading the Plain Truth, the Church’s bimonthly magazine, which claimed to have a circulation of more than 2,500,000. Articles in the magazine were, as the title implies, written plainly and seemed as much political as religious. Bobby read every issue cover to cover, though, and much of what he ingested made sense to him. Forty years later he’d still be espousing ideas put forth by Armstrong and the Plain Truth.
One issue outlined horrific prophecies, graphically illustrated, of what Armstrong predicted would be World War III, when the United States and Great Britain would be destroyed by a United States of Europe. Armstrong said that before the war began, he’d lead his church members to Jordan, where they’d be saved because they were “God’s People.” Bobby, too.
Bobby wrote a preachy letter to his mother, enthusiastically discussing Armstrong’s teachings and his intense biblical studies, which had “changed my whole outlook on life.” He’d become convinced that only by following Armstrong’s interpretation of the Bible could he find health and happiness, become successful, and gain eternal life, and he urged her to read the Bible and Armstrong’s writings. Regina wasn’t buying his sales pitch and wrote back that Armstrong and his church were feeding Bobby a line of mumbo jumbo and engaging in fear mongering. A good and tolerant life was the best life, she said; call it a religion if you like. After that, they both agreed not to discuss his religious views or hers. Neither mother nor son was willing to try to make a convert of the other.
Bobby tried to live and practice his beliefs; he felt truly born again, and he was applying the same sense of discipline and reverence to the Bible that he had all his life to chess. He began making donations to worthy causes; he wouldn’t have sex, because he wasn’t married; he scorned profanity and pornography; and he attempted to follow the Ten Commandments in every detail. “If anyone tried to live by the letter of the law, it was me,” he said later, in an interview published by the Ambassador Report.
But eventually his religious commitments began tearing him apart. He couldn’t spend ten or twelve hours a day studying chess and another six to eight hours on Bible studies; and the constant surfacing of impure thoughts and other minor sins was plaguing him. “The more I tried [to be obedient] the more crazy I became,” he noted. “I was half out of my head—almost stoned.” Without giving up on Armstrong, he realized that Caissa (the patron goddess of chess) had more meaning for him than the Worldwide Church of God. Focus, focus, focus! Chess had to become paramount again; it had to be his first priority, or his dream of achieving the World Championship would be just that: a dream.
January 1962
Spending two months in Sweden in the middle of winter, Bobby found the weather less cold than he’d thought it would be: Temperatures remained close to fifty degrees Fahrenheit. He wasn’t in Stockholm, though, to stalk the cobblestoned streets of Old Town, or walk through the underground tunnels, or ready himself for a cruise on the Baltic Sea. Rather, he was there to, once again, try to become the player the whole chess world should pay homage to. Aside from the accolades that would flow to the winner of the Stockholm tournament, the real prize for Bobby was to qualify for the Candidates tournament, which, in turn, could give him a chance at the World Championship.
Chess Life, on its front page, wrapped up the eventual Stockholm results this way:
Stockholm, 1962, may come to be recognized as the event which marked the beginning of a decisive shift of power in world chess. For the first time since the Interzonal and Candidates’ tournaments began as eliminating contests for the World’s Championship in 1948, the Soviet grandmasters failed to capture first prize. Bobby Fischer’s margin of 2 ½ points reflects his complete domination of the event. It owed nothing to luck: he never had a clearly lost position.
What Bobby achieved in going undefeated in both Bled and Stockholm was the chess equivalent of pitching two successive no-hitters in baseball’s World Series. Most would have thought the feat impossible. Less than a week shy of his nineteenth birthday, Bobby Fischer had just established himself as one of the most extraordinary chess
players in the world. But this wasn’t the time to gloat or preen, or even to relax. Bobby’s goal was the World Championship, and the next step toward that objective was almost upon him.
The economics of chess enforced a certain humility anyway. Before Bobby left Sweden, he was given a small white envelope containing his earnings from the tour-de-force playing he’d just demonstrated. The envelope contained the cash equivalent of $750 in Swedish krona. Bobby could only shake his head ruefully.
He now had barely six weeks to prepare for the Candidates tournament to be held on the island of Curaçao, thirty-eight miles off the coast of Venezuela. The winner of the Curaçao tournament would earn the right to play the current World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, in the next world title match.
Home in his apartment in Brooklyn, Bobby went through what was becoming his routine: elimination of social engagements, long periods of solitary study, analysis of games, and a search for innovations in openings. He classified the lines he studied into stratifications of importance, always eliminating the not-quite-perfect continuation and seeking what he called the “true move,” that which could not be refuted. A Socratic dialogue raged within him: How unusual was the resulting position if he followed that particular line? Would his opponent feel at sea? Would he (Bobby) feel comfortable playing it? How would he ground himself if he had to continue to play that variation until the endgame?
Grandmaster Pal Benko, a former Hungarian freedom fighter who became a U.S. citizen and, like many other chess players, an investment broker, entered Bobby’s room at the Hotel Intercontinental in Curaçao shortly after Arthur Bisguier, Bobby’s second, had arrived.