Endgame (22 page)

Unfortunately, cultured or not, Bobby played poorly in the tournament at first. He was frustrated at being down two games to none against Tal, who never passed up a chance to annoy his younger opponent. Just before Bobby and Tal were to play a third time, Bobby approached Alexander Koblentz, one of Tal’s trainers, and said sotto voce, as menacingly as he could: “
If Tal doesn’t behave himself, I am going to smash out all of his front teeth.” Tal persisted in his provocation, though, and Fischer lost their third game as well.

It was a situation where a youthful player like Bobby could spiral down irretrievably, playing himself into an abyss. But he took momentary charge of his psyche, despite his losses, and began to feel optimistic. After defeating a cold, he placed himself in the abstract world of Lewis Carroll and the universe of reversal and wrote: “I am now in quite a good mood, and eating
well. [Like] in
Alice in Wonderland
. Remember? The Red Queen cried
before
she got a piece of dirt in her eye.
I am in a good mood
before
I win all of my games.”

“Let’s go to a movie,” Dimitrije Bjelica said to Bobby the night before he was to play Vasily Smyslov. Bjelica was a Yugoslavian chess journalist; he was also nationally known as a television commentator on soccer. He’d befriended Bobby in Portorož and was sympathetic to his complaints, and he thought a movie might take Bobby’s mind off his problems. As luck would have it, though, the only English-language film being shown in Belgrade was
Lust for Life
, the lush biopic of the mad nineteenth-century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh.

Bobby agreed to the outing, and right after the scene when Van Gogh cuts off his ear in despair following a foolish quarrel with Paul Gauguin, Bobby turned to his companion and whispered: “
If I don’t win against Smyslov tomorrow, I’ll cut off
my
ear.” Fischer, playing brilliantly with the black pieces the next day, won his first game ever against the Russian, a former World Champion. The parallels of Bobby’s life to Van Gogh’s go only so far, however. Bobby’s ear remained intact.

For Bobby, an unfortunate pattern emerged after that. If he managed to win a game from an opponent, on the next day he’d often lose to someone else. He defeated Benko then lost to Gligoric. After a win against Fridrik Olafsson, he lost to Tal again. Bobby saw his chance at a title shot fading away, and he didn’t want to end up like Terry Malloy—the character played by Marlon Brando in one of Bobby’s favorite movies,
On the Waterfront—
with “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”

Bobby lost games he should have drawn and drew contests he should have won. He dropped ten pounds, and not because he wasn’t eating. The hotel doctor prescribed a tonic that did nothing to improve his condition. His pocket money was running low after he lost seven traveler’s checks, and he was having trouble extracting more from his mother, at one point calling her a “louse” because she wouldn’t make up the shortfall: “You know I am very good with money,” he complained.
Larsen, whom Bobby described as “sulky and unhelpful,” kept discouraging him, telling him that he shouldn’t expect to place higher than the bottom rank of those competing. When Larsen repeated this line publicly and it was published in the Belgrade newspaper
Borba
, Bobby was enraged and humiliated. Larsen was his second, he was being paid $700—equivalent to about $5,000 today—and Bobby expected him to be something of a cheering squad, or at least not a public Cassandra.

He was losing to Tal, but some of his other games won accolades. Harry Golombek, the chief arbiter, said that Fischer was improving as the event progressed, and he surmised that “were the tournament [to go] 56 rounds instead of the ‘mere’ 28,” Bobby’s best days would lie ahead. “
He is no match for Tal but his two victories over Keres and his equal score with Smyslov are sufficient in themselves to prove his real Grandmaster class.”

World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik misdiagnosed the young American’s struggles when he wrote, “Fischer’s strong and weak points lie in that he is always true to himself and plays the same way regardless of his opponents or an external factor.” It’s true that Bobby rarely altered his style, which gave his opponents an advantage because they knew in advance what kinds of openings he’d play, but Botvinnik didn’t know of the rage that Bobby was experiencing because of the disruptive atmosphere being created by Tal.

Bobby began to plot. Tal had to be stopped, if not on the chessboard, then in some other way.
Tal, he said, had purposely made him lose three games in a row using unfair tactics, robbing him of first place: “He actually cheated me out of a match with Botvinnik,” he wrote in a letter to his mother.

Whether it was a clinically paranoid musing, malice aforethought, or merely a boyhood fantasy, no one can know, but
Bobby began to wonder and scheme and penned his plan of reprisal against Tal: “Should I poke him in the eye—both beetlely eyes, maybe—with my pen? Perhaps I should poison him; I could gain entrance to his room in the Hotel Esplanade and then put the poison in his drinking glass.” Despite his dreams of revenge, which he never put into effect, he played valiantly in the fourth game, a contest that he vowed to the press he’d win, no matter what sleight of chess Tal would deliver on or off the board.

Bobby tried a psychological tactic himself during that game, despite his oft-quoted demurral, “
I don’t believe in psychology—I believe in good moves.” Normally, he’d make his move on the board, punch his clock, and record the move on the score sheet. In this game, though, on his twenty-second move, he suddenly altered his sequence, and instead of first moving a
piece, he went to his score sheet and, in recording the move he was contemplating, switched to a Russian system of notation. He then offhandedly placed his score sheet on the table so that Tal could see it, and while the clock remained running, he watched Tal to gauge his reaction.

Tal, wearing an atypical poker face, recognized what he thought was a winning move for Fischer, and he wrote later: “
I would very much have liked to change his decision. So I calmly left my chair and began strolling the stage. I joked with someone [Petrosian], took a casual look at the exhibition board and returned to my seat with a pleased appearance.” Since Tal looked as if he were comfortable with the impending move, Fischer momentarily thought he might have blundered. He crossed out his move on the score sheet, made another move, and checked Tal’s king instead. It was a mistake.

Bobby closed his eyes to counter any further Talian shenanigans—he didn’t have to see his position, since it was imprinted in his mind—and tried to block out any other distractions. He concentrated his energies on finding a single move, or a variation, a tactical feint that would help him emerge from the dark waters of his position, all the while trying to avoid the temptation to move a piece or pawn to a fatal square.

Alas, nothing worked. He was lost. Tragically, emotionally, existentially, it was chess death. He cried, and didn’t attempt to hide his tears. Tal won the fourth and final encounter, and with it the tournament. It would lead to the Championship of the World.

“
I love the dark of the night. It helps me to concentrate,” Bobby once remarked. With his sister now married and his mother off on a peace march from San Francisco to Moscow, the Brooklyn apartment was all his—deliciously so, he felt. He only had his dog, Hoppy, a quiet mutt who limped, to keep him company. Alone, the teenager could think and do whatever he wanted, without familial or social constraints. So that he didn’t have to change the sheets in the apartment’s beds so often, and to give himself a different perspective, he rotated where he slept.
Next to each bed, resting on a chair, was a chess set. Flopping down on the selected bed of the evening, he’d glance at the board and muse: Should he look into the Four Pawn
attack against the King’s Indian, which presented him with difficulty in speed games? Should he study endings, especially deceptive rook-and-pawn configurations? Maybe he should just go over some of the thirteen hundred high-level games played at the 1958 Munich Olympiad.

Questions like these arose every night before he fell asleep, only to be interrupted for forty-five minutes on most nights when his favorite radio program was being broadcast.

“The Bahn Frei Polka”
by Eduard Strauss—with the trumpet call to the racetrack starting gate that blasted as a preamble—would jolt him awake if he’d begun to nod off. This
Jean Shepherd Show
theme song had been recorded by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops orchestra, and the equestrian feel to the piece made Bobby feel good the instant he heard it. “
It sounds like circus music,” he once said in a joyful mood, and it was one of the liveliest dances ever composed by Johann’s son. But it wasn’t the music that was so important to Bobby. It was the cantankerous, curmudgeonly talk show humorist Jean Shepherd who entranced him.

More than a loyal follower of the show, Bobby was a fanatic. When the broadcast—variously described as part kabuki, part commedia dell’arte—started in 1956 on WOR Radio, Bobby listened to almost every show when he was in New York. Shepherd was an acquired taste: He told tales in novelistic form about his childhood in the Midwest, his life in the army, and his adult misadventures in New York City. He cracked jokes, wailed old barroom songs (he had a terrible voice), and played the toy kazoo, the lowliest of musical instruments. Most of his shows were hilarious, others so dark that they sounded maniacal, and he had a studied laugh, not quite a cackle—more a pseudo chuckle—that made him sound deranged. Still, he emerged as if he were a modern-day Mark Twain or a J. D. Salinger. His tales had a bite and a message and could be delivered over and over again.

Bobby sent Shepherd notes, attended live performances that the radio host gave at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse called the Limelight, and visited him at his studio at 1440 Broadway. After the show, the two would engage in a New York City ritual. They’d walk two blocks north and eat hot dogs at Grant’s on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, at the edge of “the Crossroads of the World,” Times Square. Shepherd remembered
that they didn’t converse much, just ate. Once, Bobby did talk about a player he was to face in a tournament and kept saying over and over again, “He’s stupid,” without revealing who the player was or explaining why he felt that way.

Sporadically, Shepherd would mention Bobby on the air. While Shepherd didn’t play chess, he admired the
idea
of Bobby Fischer and what he was accomplishing.
“Bobby Fischer,”
he’d whisper conspiratorially as if he were just talking to one person, not tens of thousands. “Just
imagine
. This really nice kid, this great chess player, maybe the greatest chess player who
ever
lived. When he plays chess he is … 
mean!
I mean,
really
mean!” On a few occasions Shepherd helped fund-raise for the U.S. Chess Federation, the non-profit membership organization. He did it for Bobby.

Bobby preferred listening to the radio rather than watching television. One advantage of the former was that while he was listening he could also be glancing at a board. He’d also heard that television emitted possibly harmful electronic rays and he was skittish about spending too much time in front of the ubiquitous tube. He loved the intimacy of radio. When Shepherd was on the air, Bobby would darken his room and have a one-way conversation that eased his loneliness. There, beside the glowing yellow night-light of his radio dial, chessboard at his side, chess books and magazines spread around the room, he’d let his thoughts drift.

When Shepherd went off the air, Bobby continued to twist the dial searching for other broadcasts and shows. Sometime he’d settle for pop music, which, if the volume was turned down low, still allowed him to concentrate on his board analysis. At other times, he’d hear late-night preachers, often of a fundamentalist bent, giving sermons and talks, usually about the meaning and interpretation of the Bible.

Intrigued, Bobby began listening more and more to religious radio programs, such as the revivalist Billy Graham’s
Hour of Decision
, which featured sermons calling for listeners to give up their lives and be saved by Jesus Christ. Fischer also followed
The Lutheran Hour
and
Music and the Spoken Word
, a performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that contained inspiring messages. On Sundays, Bobby made a habit of listening to the radio all day, flipping up the dial and back. During one of these
electronic perambulations he found what he was searching for: a broadcast by the charismatic Herbert W. Armstrong, on what was called the
Radio Church of God
. It was a condensed church service that included songs and hymns as well as a sermon by Armstrong, often about the naturalness and practicality of the scriptures. “
He seems so sincere,” Bobby later remembered thinking. “He has all the right principles: dedication, hard work, perseverance, never giving up. He’s dogged; he’s persistent.” These were the same qualities Bobby brought to the game of chess. He wanted to know more.