Endgame (7 page)

It’s not that Bobby rejected the studiousness displayed by his sister and mother. Rather, he was bent on the acquisition of another skill: chess. The difference was that it was more important to him to study how to win with rook and pawn than to learn the three branches of government or where to move the decimal point in long division. The three Fischers, prototypes of Talmudic scholars, were always studying: Joan her textbooks; Regina her medical tomes; and Bobby the latest chess periodical. The apartment was often as silent as a library.

One of Bobby’s few non-chess interests emerged unexpectedly during his eighth year in the summer of 1951, when Regina sent him to the Venderveer
Nursery School, a day camp in Brooklyn. Despite its name, the school accepted older children for its summer camp, and the program provided a place for Bobby to go once the school year ended. Either Regina or Joan would drop him off in the morning and fetch him in the late afternoon. Bobby fully expected to hate the camp—or at least dislike it—but he found that he enjoyed many of the physical activities it offered. Most important to him was Venderveer’s large outdoor pool, where he learned to swim.

Thereafter every summer, when he was in one of the camps he attended and when he wasn’t studying chess,
Bobby would train to take various Red Cross swimming tests, easily qualifying as an “Intermediate” and then “Advanced” swimmer. A true Piscean, he loved the water, especially if swimming meant competing with the other children in races. He was fast, determined, and alert, and the instant the swimming coach blew the whistle Bobby would kick off, often landing in the water when the other swimmers were still in mid-dive. Swimming gave him the chance to move and exercise his body, to uncramp it from the stiffening stillness of sitting with a chessboard or a book. He discovered that he loved moving through the water, and he found that he loved competition itself, whether swimming or playing chess. There seemed to be virtually nothing else he enjoyed doing.

Regina began to fear for Bobby’s future if he didn’t take his schoolwork seriously. More than that, she was worried that his interest in chess was becoming obsessive. She believed he was so engrossed in the game that he was never quite in touch with the reality around him, so addicted to chess that he would not—could not—control it, and that eventually, because of the exclusion of everything else, this accidental interest might ruin his life.

For Regina, discussing Bobby’s overcommitment to chess with Nigro was a hopeless endeavor. If anything, Nigro was constantly encouraging him to play more, to study, to enter tournaments. Bobby became Nigro’s protégé and chess companion. A caring man who was aware of Regina’s strained financial state, he never charged her for the lessons he gave Bobby, whether chess or music. Nigro and Bobby began to play clocked games together, at two hours each—the official speed of tournament chess—and with each encounter Bobby seemed to become stronger, which made him study even more, until he was beating Nigro in the majority of games.

Much to Bobby’s consternation,
Regina insisted that he have a psychological
evaluation to determine whether something could or should be done to temper his relentless preoccupation with the game. When she brought the boy to Dr. Harold Kline at the Children’s Psychiatric Division of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, Bobby was less than cooperative. Sensing this, Dr. Kline didn’t give him any of the battery of personality, intelligence, or interest tests usually used to assess a child. He simply talked to the boy. “I don’t know,” said Bobby sullenly, when asked why he spent so much time playing chess and not on his schoolwork. “
I just go for it.” With just a word of advice to Bobby about not neglecting his schoolwork, he asked the boy to step outside. Dr. Kline told Regina that she shouldn’t worry about Bobby, that children often became intrigued, virtually obsessed, with games, toys, sports, and other things, and that after a while they either lose interest or step away from such heavy involvement. No, he didn’t think that Bobby was neurotic, and he didn’t recommend therapy. “Neurotic” was a word that really explained nothing, he added, pointing out that Bobby was not hurting himself or others, chess was probably stretching his mind, and she should allow him to play as often as he liked. Her son’s resistance to schoolwork was a mild disorder that many children go through, but his study of chess, an intellectual activity, was supplanting it. Perhaps, he added, she could fashion some of his schoolwork as a sort of game, which might pique his interest.

Not fully comforted, Regina sought a second opinion. She learned of a psychiatrist who was a chess master, Dr. Ariel Mengarini, a nonanalytic neuropsychiatrist who worked for the government. Mengarini was so in love with chess that he identified with Bobby’s passion. He confessed to Regina his own fanaticism for the game and also something else she didn’t want to hear about Bobby: “
I told her that I could think of a lot worse things than chess that a person could devote himself to and that she should let him find his way.”

Gradually, Bobby’s performance at the Brooklyn Chess Club began to improve. It took him a few difficult and sometimes discouraging years, but eventually he was winning the majority of his games. For their part, his opponents were impressed with his tenacity and clear signs of progress. “
I’d already gone through most of the books in the public library near us and was beginning to want chess books of my own,” Bobby said later, reflecting back on the period. Nigro gave or loaned him books, and Regina permitted him to
purchase a book now and then, whenever she had some spare cash. Bobby’s allowance of 32 cents a day didn’t afford him much of an opportunity to buy books—and even as he grew older and his per diem was raised to 40 and then 60 cents,
the money was spent on chocolate milk for lunch and a candy bar after school.

Whenever Nigro was finished reading his copies of
Chess Review
and
Chess Life
, he gave them to Bobby, who became fascinated with both periodicals, not only for their multitude of engaging and instructive games and descriptions, but because they gave him the chance to read about the great champions in chess. Sitting with those magazines, it was as if he were studying the chess equivalent of Plutarch’s lives of the Roman generals or Vasari’s lives of the artists. Quite simply, they inspired.

Then, in the summer of 1954, Bobby had an opportunity to see in action some of the greats he’d been reading about. It turned out that the Soviet team would be playing for the first time on United States soil.

In that era of anti-Communist hysteria, when anyone in America who read Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital
or wore a red tie was thought to be a Communist, the president of the U.S. Chess Federation, Harold M. Phillips, a lawyer who’d defended Morton Sobell in the Rosenberg espionage case, confided almost with relish that
he expected to be called in front of Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and accused of being a Communist simply because he’d tendered the chess invitation to the Russians. It never happened.

It’s important to stress the difference between Soviet and American chess teams at that time. The Soviets were all not just professional players, but grandmasters, the designation given to the highest-rated chess masters who have distinguished themselves in international tournaments. Tsar Nicholas II originally bestowed the title in 1914; it was being used in 1954 and is still awarded today.

The Soviet players were subsidized by their government and in many cases given dachas as retreats where they could study and train for matches. Back then, these grandmasters commanded as much prestige in Soviet society as a movie star or an Olympic athlete does in contemporary America.
When Mikhail Botvinnik, who became World Chess Champion, arrived at the Bolshoi
Opera House, he was given a standing ovation. In the mid-fifties, the Soviet Chess Federation had four million members, and playing chess wasn’t just required in elementary schools but compulsory in after-school activities; youngsters who possessed talent were given special training, often working one-on-one with grandmasters who were tapped to groom the next generation of world beaters.
One Soviet tournament registered more than seven hundred thousand players. In the USSR, the playing of chess was considered more than just a national policy. It was deeply ingrained in the culture, and it seemed that everyone—man, woman, and child; farmer, civil servant, or doctor—played chess. The impending clash between the Soviets and the Americans thus had Cold War implications.

Three days before the match an editorial in
The New York Times
observed: “It has become painfully obvious to their opponents that the Russians bring to the chessboard all the fervor, skill and manifest devotion to their cause that Foreign Minister Molotov brings to the diplomatic conference.
They are out to win for the greater glory of the Soviet Union. To do so means public acclaim at home, propaganda victories abroad.” Chess was not merely a game to the Soviets; it was war, and not as cold as might have been thought.

The U.S. Chess Federation then had only three thousand members, no national program to promote chess or train children, and only boasted one grandmaster, Samuel Reshevsky. His status netted him a grand total of $200 a month, a stipend meted out by a few admiring patrons. In addition, he made approximately $7,500 a year giving exhibitions and lectures. It was falsely rumored that he didn’t even own a chess set.

In many ways the looming match was analogous to a team of National Basketball Association all-stars playing a college team. There was always the possibility that the collegians would win, but statistically their chances would be much lower than a thousand to one.

On Wednesday, June 16, Bobby, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt, arrived at the Roosevelt Hotel escorted by Nigro, to witness the first round of the historic match. It was the first time the boy had ever been in a hotel, and he looked up at the large clock at the head of the stairs, then noticed some familiar faces entering the Grand Ballroom. He recognized various members of the Brooklyn Chess Club and also a few regulars from Washington Square
Park.
He dutifully took his seat in the auditorium, as though he were at the Academy Awards of chess, scanning the stage “wide-eyed with amazement,” as Nigro noted.

On the stage, in front of a velvet curtain, were two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the unmistakable and portentous crimson Soviet banner with its hammer and sickle. Beneath them, spanning the breadth of the stage, were eight demonstration boards, where the moves of the games were to be displayed. The eight tables, with chess sets and boards, were at the ready for the players. There were eleven hundred spectators, more than for any previous chess event in U.S. history.

And then there were the players, gathering onstage, waiting for the signal from the referee to take their places and commence their games. Soviet player
David Bronstein asked for a glass of lemon juice—no, not lemonade, but real lemon juice, he insisted—which he downed in what looked like one gulp. Someone remarked that the Americans looked nervous, as indeed they should have: Aside from their previous two defeats to remind them of the odds against victory,
there was the Soviets’ recent routing of the Argentine team in Buenos Aires and the French team in Paris. Donald Byrne, the United States Open champion, said he was so on edge that he spent the entire day before the match trying not to think of chess, reading the romantic prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Eventually, after some speech making about the contribution of chess toward a possible détente between the Soviet Union and the United States, play got under way.
Nigro noted with proud amusement that his protégé was watching carefully and absorbing everything he could.

Did Bobby fully comprehend the political implications of the match? Did feelings of patriotism surge within him and was he rooting hard for his country to win? Did he wish—dream—that one day he’d be up on a similar stage playing against the world’s finest players? He never made a statement about the match, but it’s likely that the answer to at least the latter question was yes.

Aside from the games themselves, which he followed assiduously, Bobby noticed other things: chess players congregating in all the corridors and public rooms of the hotel discussing and analyzing the games, chess books and portable sets at the ready, and many people leaving observation posts only
briefly to buy tuna fish and ham-and-cheese sandwiches at a small newsstand in the lobby. When Bobby spotted Reuben Fine—perhaps America’s second strongest player—in the audience, he became especially excited, since Fine’s books had become almost chess bibles for Bobby.
Dr. Fine wasn’t playing for the United States because he had retired from play in 1948. But there was Dr. Max Pavey up on the stage—
the man Bobby had played in a simultaneous exhibition three years previously—ready to play for his country.

When Nigro introduced Bobby to writer Murray Shumach of
The New York Times
, the boy shied away and just looked down at his shoes. Allen Kaufman, a master player, also met Bobby for the first time that day and more than a half century later reminisced: “
He seemed to be a nice kid, somewhat shy, and I had no idea that I was talking to a future World Champion.” The next day, Shumach wrote humorously of the assembled onlookers at the match: “
Chess spectators are like Dodger fans with laryngitis—men with rampant emotions but muted voices.”

Not
totally
voiceless, as it developed. As the games became more complex, the spectators, many of whom followed each game with their tiny pocket sets or leather chess wallets, discussed the vagaries of the positions in whispers. The cumulative effect of the sound was that of a mild winter wind or the roll of a summer surf. At times, when a dubious or complex combination was played, or when the diminutive American Reshevsky took one hour and ten minutes
on one move
, twenty-two hundred eyebrows seemed to rise in unison. If the noise in the hall became too intrusive, Hans Kmoch, the ultraformal bow-tied referee, would stare angrily out at the audience and issue a stern, Dutch-accented
“Quiet, please!”
Stung by the rebuke, the spectators would look momentarily embarrassed and quiet down for a few minutes.