Endgame (2 page)

We may not—and perhaps
should
not—forgive Bobby Fischer’s twisted political and antireligious assaults, but we should never forget his sheer brilliance on the chessboard. After reading this biography, I would suggest that the reader look to, and study, his games—the true testament to who he was, and his ultimate legacy.

I
CAN’T BREATHE!
I can’t breathe!” Bobby Fischer’s screams were muffled by the black hood tied tightly around his head. He felt as if he were suffocating, near death. He shook his head furiously to loosen the covering.

Two Japanese security guards were holding him down on the floor of the brightly lit cell, one sitting on his back and pinning his arms to his sides, the other holding his legs—Lilliputians atop the fallen Gulliver. Bobby’s lungs were being compressed, and he couldn’t get enough air. His right arm felt as if it had been broken from the scuffle that had happened moments before; he was bleeding from the mouth.

So this is how I’ll die
, he thought.
Will anyone ever know the truth about how I was murdered?

He pondered in the darkness, incredulous that a supposedly revoked passport had turned him into a prisoner. The scenario had evolved rapidly. It was July 13, 2004. After spending three months in Japan, he was about to embark for the Philippines. He’d arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport about two hours before his flight. At the ticket counter, an immigration officer had routinely checked his passport, entering the number: Z7792702. A discreet bell sounded and a red light began to flash slowly. “Please take a seat, Mr. Fischer, until we can check this out.”

Bobby was concerned but not yet frightened. He’d been traveling for twelve years between Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Philippines, Japan, Austria, and other countries, clearing customs and crossing borders without incident. Extra pages had to be added to his passport because there
was no room left to stamp the dates of his entries and exits, but this task had already been completed at the American embassy in Bern, Switzerland, in November 2003.

His worry was that the U.S. government might finally have caught up with him. He’d violated State Department economic sanctions against Yugoslavia by playing a $5 million chess match against Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro, in 1992, and an arrest warrant had been issued at that time. If he went back to the United States, he’d have to stand trial, and the penalty, if he was convicted, would be anywhere from ten years in prison to $250,000 in fines, or both. A friend had called the State Department in the late 1990s and asked if Bobby could return home. “Of course he can,” said the spokesperson, “but
as soon as he lands at JFK, we’ll nail him.” As a man without a country, Bobby eventually chose to settle in Hungary, and he had never heard another word from the American government. With twelve years having passed, he figured that as long as he stayed away from the United States, he’d be safe.

He sat where he was told, but fear began to take hold. Eventually, an immigration official asked Bobby to accompany him downstairs. “But I’ll miss my flight.” “We
know
that” was the peremptory reply. Escorted by security guards down a long, dark, and narrow hallway, Bobby demanded to know what was going on. “We just want to talk to you,” the official said. “Talk about what?” Bobby demanded. “We just talk” was the answer. Bobby stopped and refused to move. A translator was called in to make sure there was no confusion. Bobby spoke to him in English and Spanish. More security guards arrived, until approximately fifteen men surrounded the former chess champion in a grim, silent circle.

Finally, another official appeared and showed Bobby an arrest warrant, stating that he was traveling on an invalid passport and that he was under arrest. Bobby insisted that his passport was perfectly legal and had two and a half years to go before it expired. “You may call a representative of the U.S. embassy to assist you,” he was told. Bobby shook his head. “The U.S. embassy is the problem, not the solution,” he muttered. His fear was that a State Department representative might show up at the airport with a court order and try to have him extradited back to the United States to stand trial.
He wanted to call one of his Japanese chess friends for help, but Immigration denied him access to a phone.

Bobby turned and started to walk away. He was blocked by a guard. Another guard tried to handcuff him, and he started twisting and turning to thwart the process. Several of the guards began hitting him with batons and pummeling him with their fists. He fought back, kicking and screaming, and he managed to bite one of the guards on the arm. Eventually, he went down. A half dozen guards hoisted him into the air and began carrying him by his arms and legs. Bobby continued squirming to get loose as the guards struggled to take him to an unknown destination. He kicked frantically, almost yanking his hands free. It was then that they put the black hood over his head.

Since Bobby knew that his passport was valid, what was going on? His comments about Jews and the crimes of the United States had stirred things up, but as an American citizen wasn’t he protected by the First Amendment? Anyway, how could his opinions have anything to do with his passport?

Maybe it was the taxes
. Ever since his unsuccessful 1976 suit against
Life
magazine and one of its writers for violation of a contract, he’d been so disgusted with the jurisprudence system that he refused to pay any taxes.

Gasping for air, Bobby tried to enter a Zen state to clear his mind. He stopped resisting and his body became relaxed. The guards noticed the change. They released his arms and legs, stood up, ceremoniously removed the hood, then left the cell. They’d taken his shoes, his belt, his wallet, and—much to his dismay—the buffalo-leather passport case that he’d bought in Vienna years back. But he was alive … at least for the moment.

When he looked up, he saw a nondescript man with a video camera quietly filming him through the bars. After a few minutes the man vanished. Bobby spit out a piece of a tooth that had been chipped, either from one of the punches or when he was thrown to the floor. He put the remnants in his pocket.

Lying on the cold cement floor, he felt his arm throb with pain. What was the next move and who would make it? He drifted off to sleep.

Forty-eight years earlier, August 1956

Visualizing his white pawn two squares in front of his king on an imaginary chessboard, thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer announced his first move to his opponent, Jack Collins: “Pawn to king four.” Bobby was using a form of chess notation that described the movement of the pieces to various squares. As he spoke, he made a slight, unconscious movement of his head, an almost imperceptible nod, as if pushing the unseen pawn forward.

Collins, a diminutively proportioned man whose stunted legs had left him unable to walk, was propelled in a wheelchair along the crowded New York City street by a black manservant named Odell. The man was so strong that, in the days before handicap ramps, he could lift Collins and the chair all at once—up and down the stairs of homes or restaurants. Odell never talked much, but he was friendly and fiercely loyal to Collins, and from the time he met Bobby he’d felt a deep affection for the young boy.

Walking next to Collins was his slightly younger sister, Ethel, a plump but pretty registered nurse who was almost always by his side. She adored her brother and gave up everything—even marriage—to care for him. Although Jack and Ethel had just met Bobby that summer, they were fast becoming parental substitutes for him.

The Fellini-esque quartet spoke in an arcane language and made references to people with feudal titles who lived centuries ago. As they walked the long Brooklyn block from Lenox Road and Bedford Avenue to sometimes clamorous Flatbush Avenue, they attracted the curiosity of passersby. But they were unembarrassed, involved in a world of their own, one that bridged many continents and thousands of years and was inhabited by kings and courtiers, rajahs and princes.
The group’s destination was the Silver Moon Chinese restaurant.

“Pawn to queen bishop four,” responded Collins in a basso profundo that could be heard across the street.

Just as an accomplished musician can read a score and hear the music in his head, a master chess player with a strong memory can read the record of a game and see it in his mind’s eye. Composer Antonio Salieri was moved to tears of joy by reading some of Mozart’s scores before they were performed. In the same way, some chess players can be emotionally stirred by mentally replaying a brilliant game by a great master.

In this case, Fischer was not only visualizing a game without benefit of board, pieces, or printed score; he was creating it, composing it as a motion picture in his mind. As he and Collins strolled down Flatbush Avenue, they were playing what is called “blindfold chess,” a form of the game practiced throughout the ages. There are accounts dating back to
A.D
. 800 of nomadic Arabs playing a kind of boardless and sightless chess while riding on camels. For many chess players—and especially for those people who don’t know the game—witnessing two players competing without sight of a board can evoke astonishment. The uncanny feats of memory on display can seem almost mystical.

Collins was more than well schooled in strategic theory. He was the coauthor of the then latest edition of the modern bible of chess,
Modern Chess Openings
, which contained thousands of variations, positions, analyses, and recommendations. Bobby, who was becoming Collins’s pupil, had been studying past and present chess games for years and had begun to dip into Collins’s library of hundreds of books and periodicals.

It was humid, threatening to drizzle. Earlier in the year Fischer had become the U.S. Junior Champion at a tournament in Philadelphia, and he’d
just returned from the U.S. Open Championship in Oklahoma City, the youngest player, at thirteen, ever to compete in the event. Collins was a former New York State Champion, a veteran tournament player, and a renowned teacher of the game. He was forty-four years old.

The odd couple continued to play their invisible game. Bobby mentally controlled the white pieces, Collins the black. As the contest seesawed, each player acted the role of predator and prey.

Bobby had always been short for his age, and still only stood five-four, but he was just beginning to stretch out of his clothes and sprout up. By the time he was eighteen, he’d reach a height of six-two. He had bright hazel eyes and a shiny, toothy smile with a slight gap between his two front teeth. His beaming grin was that of a happy child who wanted to be liked, or at least to be engaging. On this night he wore a polo shirt, brown corduroy slacks—even though it was August—and battered black-and-white, $5 sneakers. His voice was slightly nasal, perhaps because he needed to have his tonsils and adenoids removed. His hair was a tufted brown crew cut, as if his mother, Regina, or his sister, Joan, had clipped it one day and a comb hadn’t
touched it since. Bobby looked more like a farm boy from Kansas than a kid from the streets of Brooklyn.

He usually stayed a few steps ahead of Collins and the others, wanting to go faster but grudgingly slowing up to announce his moves or to receive his teacher’s reply. Bobby’s answer to Collins’s move was always instantaneous, his response bursting from somewhere deep in his unconscious as he visualized bishops speeding along the diagonals, knights catapulting over pieces and pawns, and rooks seizing crucial squares. Occasionally, he’d split his mental gymnastics, leaving his imaginary board to swing a fantasy baseball bat and knock an invisible ball into the left-field stands of the Ebbets Field in his mind. Even more than a chess champion, young Bobby Fischer wanted to be Duke Snider, the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers baseball player.