Searching for Bobby Fischer (26 page)

Using tactics many considered offensive or crazy, Fischer navigated himself through life to gain his loftiest objectives. During the match against Spassky, his antics were well documented in newspaper and magazine articles. In the days before the event he had the whole world wondering whether he would show up. From hour to hour he changed his mind about playing. To his friends, some of whom were convinced that he was afraid to play, he argued that he didn’t need to go to Iceland because everyone already knew
that he was the best. For several days, his friends reserved space for him on flights to Reykjavik and pleaded with him to go. Plane after plane, loaded with passengers, waited on the runway while Fischer took walks and naps or ate sandwiches with his frenzied, exhausted companions, musing like a hyped-up Prufrock over the merits of playing or not. Henry Kissinger called and asked him to go for his country’s honor, but still Bobby wouldn’t commit himself. While the urbane and melancholic Spassky waited in Reykjavik, playing tennis and going to the ballet, Fischer hid out in New York, demanding more and more money. He drove the organizers of the tournament to despair and showed up in Iceland only after he had convinced everyone, including Spassky, that he wouldn’t come.

Before the match Fischer had offended Icelanders by calling their country inadequate because of its lack of movie theaters and bowling alleys. He complained that Reykjavik was too far from his millions of fans. He wanted television coverage, but when a television deal was arranged and the match was about to begin he refused to play in front of the cameras, claiming that they were too distracting. He forfeited a game and threatened to leave unless Spassky agreed to play in a small room with no audience and no cameras. He argued about the choice of chess table, about his hotel room, about the noise in the auditorium, about the proximity of the audience to the players and about the lighting. He demanded that the organizers lend him a Mercedes with an automatic transmission and arrange for the private use of a swimming pool. He came late to each game and kept threatening to pull out of the match if his demands weren’t met.

None of this had anything to do with chess—and yet perhaps it did. How could Spassky feel like a world champion when his opponent blithely forfeited games, saying, in effect, “I can spot you and still win easily”—and then played the games themselves almost as afterthoughts, following furious bouts of bickering, bitching, accusing, haggling and threatening? How could the Russian not be distracted by this mad whirlwind who almost incidentally made brilliant moves? Perhaps Fischer dismayed Spassky as much by calculated mayhem as by his skill over the board. But more likely he was following his instincts, psyching himself by his outrageous
excesses, as John McEnroe does when he curses at referees. Throughout his career, Bobby had infuriated tournament directors with his financial demands and conditions for playing, had pulled out of tournaments when these weren’t met, had psyched many world-class opponents by not acknowledging their existence and had played the game as if he were playing against himself.

In sharp contrast to the gaucheness of his antics, his contradictory demands and insults, was Fischer’s deceptively simple, pure style of play. He was the monster of the chess world but the priest of play, an unrelenting chess moralist, appalled by fanciness and flair for its own sake, by moves that were inferior, even if they won.

Frank Brady’s biography of Fischer describes Bobby as a player:

Fischer’s force of spirit at the board is unnerving. He rarely leaves the table and when he does, unlike other players, he has virtually no interest in the games around him. His game, his struggle, his creation, consumes him. . . . [He] is mysteriously silent. . . . He
empathizes
with the position of the moment with such intensity that one feels that a defect in his game, such as a backward Pawn or an ill-placed Knight, causes him almost physical, and certainly psychical, pain. . . .

The simplistic beauty of his game is the element that confuses those he plays and produces paradoxical comments like Petrosian’s: “. . . he did not play that well,” referring to Fischer’s magnificent victory at Palma. . . . While his opponents are clamoring for grand schemes and intricate themes, Fischer gives them precision and clarity in an almost mathematical purity.
*

After the Spassky match, the public did not focus attention on Fischer’s playing style or, for that matter, on his personality. His quirkiness, crassness and offensive materialism were quickly forgotten as he achieved the celebrity of a rock superstar. He had become a larger figure in his sport than any other sports figure in history. Before Fischer, professional chess in the United States was ignored by the public and played for low stakes by impoverished men who usually had to work at other jobs to exist. Despite the obscurity of his sport, he could now command the same money as
a heavyweight boxing champion. He was pursued by the media and feted by statesmen, kings and despots around the world. Chess organizers stood smiling and ready to bend rules to accommodate his whims, and they began to plan tournaments that would command vast international audiences.

Then Fischer made a wholly original and unexpected move by refusing to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov. Turning his back on millions of dollars, he retired into the protective fold of the Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, a fundamentalist Christian sect that observes Saturday as the Sabbath and believes in the Second Coming. He gave the organization most of his prize money and became a recluse. No one knows precisely why.

AS I LEARNED
more about Bobby Fischer’s underground life, I began to wonder if he had made a kind of existential mistake, a whimsical decision that had taken on unexpected power and permanence. Perhaps over the years since his disappearance he has gradually forgotten who he once was, or else the memory has become shaky, less relevant than the forlorn life around him. Earlier in his career, he had disappeared from the chess world, once for eighteen months. It was a gambit he occasionally played, part of the larger game plan of his life. At these times, when he refused to play in tournaments and dropped out of public view, people predicted that he would never play again. He seemed to need these periods out of the public eye to replenish his fire, and he enjoyed teasing the chess world, making them beg, before surprising everyone again with the magnitude of his genius. Always he returned smoldering with fury and armed with greater strength than before. He couldn’t bear to be taken for granted, to be merely the best of the lot; he needed to know that without him the game was barely surviving.

Indeed, after the Spassky match Fischer told friends that he was going to keep the championship for thirty years, and while the public slowly awakened to the fact of his disappearance, chess in the United States languished; sponsors weren’t interested in putting up money for tournaments without his magical lure. Fischer had made chess and he had taken it away.

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FOR MORE THAN
fifteen years Fischer has walked the streets of Los Angeles in various disguises. Often he has a mangy red beard, but sometimes he is clean-shaven, like the charismatic young man on the cover of national magazines in 1972—except that now his hair has receded and the warts on his face have grown large. He won’t allow a doctor to remove them; he doesn’t trust doctors. Many days he rides buses, listening to talk shows through the headset of a transistor radio, gathering evidence for his political theories. Many afternoons he goes to the library to read political science and history books and to work on position papers. Late at night he works on chess.

Friends say that Fischer has tried to become more well-rounded. Sometimes he plays softball. He likes to look at the mountains and to breathe clean air. He loves Chinese food just as much as when he was the world champion, and his appetite remains astonishing. When he has the money, he goes to Mexico to practice his Spanish, but more often than not he has been broke—sometimes so broke he can’t pay for coffee. His trousers and coat have become stained and baggy, and he frequently wears the shoes he bought just before his crushing match against Tigran Petrosian in 1971.

IN NEW YORK
I had occasionally met with old friends of Fischer’s who said they had received letters and phone calls from him. One of them proudly brandished a crumpled letter he claimed was from Bobby, showing the wrinkled sheets to friends as proof of his own celebrity, but not letting anyone read it. A woman who said that Fischer spoke to her regularly on the phone claimed that he had become infatuated with her after studying her games that had been published in
Chess Life
. She said that during their conversations he frequently tore into Kasparov’s games, referring to him derisively as “Weinstein, the Jew,” which she found odd, considering that his mother was Jewish. Softly, careful not to make him angry, she sometimes reasoned with him about his hostility to Jews or urged him to play again, but for the most part their relationship was a love affair through chess—an exchange of moves and positions that left her feeling light-headed and filled with yearning. When
she discovered that Fischer had had a brief affair with another woman, she was deeply hurt and considered flying to California to confront him.

According to his New York friends, Fischer would talk periodically about making a comeback—perhaps even allowing one of them to make some inquiries—and then would change his mind: “I’ve been thinking . . .”he would begin when he was about to veto a deal. Always there was a problem: not enough money, or the organizer was Jewish and was going to make too much profit, or the playing site was too public, or he wanted a television deal—or he didn’t want a television deal.

One South American grandmaster, a friend of Bobby’s for more than twenty years, has spent considerable time and money trying to arrange a match in Mexico between himself and Fischer. This confrontation would be the high point of the grandmaster’s life, and seeing it come to fruition has become an obsession. He has traveled across the country dozens of times to talk with Bobby, has spent months in Mexico making arrangements and has ignored his own chess career and personal life to set up this match that Fischer quibbles about and rejects time after time.

Fischer has been changing his mind and vetoing plans since 1972. It is interesting that even while he volleys back lucrative options, his friends keep trying, beseeching and humoring him, starting all over time after time to find new ways to please him. These contacts with Fischer at this phase of his life—now so tragically stunted, repetitive and predictable—are for his friends the most compelling part of their own lives. Their little secrets are so precious that I have never been sure whether they are real or totally fabricated. But their need to say what they know about him, to broadcast their friendship, is more revealing than the tidbits they whisper about his life.

The same might even be said of Boris Spassky, the former world champion, a highly cultured man. “Of course Bobby was the stronger player,” he says without the slightest trace of jealousy. Year after year, he tells the same Fischer anecdotes and refers to a brief phone conversation they had as though it were a major moment in his life. Spassky has accepted his place in history as the
man who lost to Bobby Fischer. Despite all of his accomplishments, it is as if his life finally achieved greatness as Fischer’s foil, and that something went out of him after Bobby disappeared.

I FLEW TO
California with the phone numbers of Fischer’s old West Coast friends, who I hoped would put me in touch with him. For years he has refused to talk to writers; he won’t read a letter unless he is paid five thousand dollars, and even then the chances are that he won’t answer it; friends say he has turned down fifty thousand dollars for an interview. Still, I had the naïve idea that I would be able to find him in Pasadena or L.A., and that he would agree to talk with me. Sometimes, I reasoned to myself, a stranger can help you see things from another angle when friends screaming in your ear can’t get through. I had spoken to players in both the United States and the Soviet Union who were confident that Fischer could still beat Kasparov. I had talked to businessmen and organizers in New York who said that Fischer could make millions if he would play again. Why not try? I would ask him. Is this musty little room so special? Would money and adulation be so terrible? I knew that before his disappearance he’d had differences with FIDE over the structuring of the world championship format, but Bobby and I are the same age and I also know that at forty-three I don’t find the issues that consumed me at twenty-nine as important. I would suggest that it was time to change his life and that it was easier than he might think. A casual yes, and the labyrinthine arguments and obstacles that had entombed him for years would give way to some of the greatest chess creations of all time.

Sometimes it only takes a little nudge. I would tell him about Josh and the other little kids who study chess in order to be like him. You’re an inspiration for some of the most talented little players in the world, I’d tell him. I could just see Josh, Bobby Fischer and me walking into Svetozar Jovanovic’s chess class at Dalton.

LINA GRUMETTE
’
S HOME
in West Hollywood is a chess salon, dark in the afternoon because of the tall shady trees that surround the two-story house that she calls a shrine to Bobby Fischer. On the
walls are pictures and newspaper cartoons of him during his playing days. Often games are going on in one or more of the rooms, which are silent except for the creak of a chair and the occasional moving of a piece. Lina wanders from one game to the next to see how they are going. Here, as in chess enclaves everywhere—Jack Collins’s apartment in New York, the Franklin-Mercantile Chess Club in Philadelphia, Hal Bogner’s house in Alhambra or Sokolniki Park in Moscow—one feels the importance of this intense, brooding activity without being able to say exactly why. In such places men, and occasionally women, spend considerable amounts of their lives within a game. In the darkening light of late afternoon the players in Lina’s house have solemn faces, and as they nod their heads over puzzling combinations, they might be davening in shul.