Endgame (24 page)

In March of 1960 seventeen-year-old Bobby flew to Mar del Plata, the seaside resort on Argentina’s Atlantic coast, south of Buenos Aires. Known for its art deco architecture and expansive boardwalk, the city had a proud tradition of hosting international tournaments. Argentinean players were as enthusiastic about the game as the Russians and the Yugoslavs, and Bobby was treated with respect wherever he went. The only downside of being in Mar del Plata was the incessant rain and the cold wind from the sea.
Regina, ever irrepressible and somehow aware of the adverse weather, shipped a pair of galoshes to her son and admonished herself for not insisting that he take his leather coat when he left the States.

Bobby thought he’d easily walk through the Mar Del Plata tournament until he learned that David Bronstein and Fridrik Olafsson were also going to play, in addition to the twenty-three-year-old grandmaster from Leningrad, Boris Spassky. But it wasn’t Spassky or Olafsson who really worried Fischer. It was Bronstein.

A week before he left for Argentina, Bobby and the author of this book had dinner at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, hangout of avant-garde artists and Abstract Expressionists, and one of Bobby’s favorite eating places. The night we were there Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline were having a conversation at the bar, and Andy Warhol and John Cage dined at a nearby table—not that Bobby noticed. He just liked the pub food the restaurant served—it was a shepherd’s pie kind of a place
—and
the anonymity that came from sitting among people who preferred gawking at art celebrities to taking note of chess prodigies.

We slid into the third booth from the bar and ordered bottles of beer—Lowenbrau for Bobby, Heineken for me. The waitress didn’t question Bobby’s age, even though he’d just turned seventeen and wasn’t legally old enough to drink in New York State (eighteen was then the age limit). Bobby
knew the selection without looking at the menu. He tackled an enormous slab of roast prime rib, which he consumed in a matter of minutes. It was as if he were a heavyweight boxer enjoying his last meal before the big fight.

He’d just received in the mail the pairings chart and color distribution from Mar del Plata. Bad news: He was to have black against both Bronstein and Spassky.

During a lull in the conversation—lulls were typical while spending time with Bobby, since he didn’t talk much and wasn’t embarrassed by long silences—I asked, “Bobby, how are you going to prepare for this tournament? I’ve always wanted to know how you did it.” He seemed unusually chipper and became interested in my interest. “Here, I’ll show you,” he said, smiling. He then slid out of his side of the booth and sat next to me, cramming me into the corner. Next, he retrieved from his coat his battered pocket chess set—all the little pieces lined up in their respective slots, ready to go to war.

As he talked, he looked from me to the pocket set, back and forth—at least at first—and spat out a scholarly treatise on his method of preparation. “First of all, I’ll look at the games that I can find of all of the players, but I’m only going to really prepare for Bronstein. Spassky and Olafsson, I’m not that worried about.” He then showed me the progression of his one and only game with Bronstein—a draw from Portorož two years earlier. He took me through each move that the two had made, disparaging a Bronstein choice one moment, lauding another the next. The variety of choices Bobby worked through was dazzling, and overwhelming. In the course of his rapid analysis, he discussed the ramifications of certain variations or tactics, why each would be advisable or not. It was like watching a movie with a voice-over narration, but with one great difference: He was manipulating the pieces and speaking so rapidly that it was difficult to connect the moves with his commentary. I just couldn’t follow the tumble of ideas behind the real and phantom attacks, the shadow assaults: “He couldn’t play
there
since it would weaken his black squares” … “I didn’t think of this” … “No, was he
kidding?
”

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.