Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  This capacity to recall positions has led to staggering public feats, one from grandmaster Miguel Najdorf. Najdorf was born in Poland in 1910 but was in Buenos Aires for the chess Olympiad when German tanks crossed the border into Poland in 1939. He stayed in Argentina, and during the war he took up a challenge to play forty boards “blindfold.” The term blindfold is chess player’s argot; in practice, Najdorf sat with his back to his opponents as their moves were read out to him. This required keeping in his head the positions of 1,280 pieces (initially) on 2,560 squares. He had undertaken the challenge after losing all contact with his family, hoping they would read of his exploits in the press. He won the vast majority of games, but there is no evidence that this news reached home.

  Given the skills required of the chess player, and the repeated mental strain from playing game after game after game, it is small wonder that, in George Steiner’s words, “this focus produces pathological symptoms and nervous stress and unreality.”

  The image of the near insane chess champion must be approached with caution. For the vast majority of grandmasters, mastery of chess is combined with a normal social and emotional life. Spassky had a life outside chess recognizable to chess players and non—chess players alike, a family, hobbies and passions, feuds and friendships. Yet the number of great players whose behavior away from the board has been eccentric, bordering on the outlandish, cannot be ignored. Some champions have clearly lived on—and a few have crossed—the fine line between genius and insanity.

  Before Fischer, the United States had produced only one player with an unquestionable claim to being the world’s best, Paul Morphy, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family a century earlier. Morphy was Fischer’s favorite player of all time; he characterized him as “perhaps the most accurate chess player who ever lived.” As a young man, Morphy demolished the foremost players in the United States before traveling to Europe in 1858 in search of stronger opposition. There, too, he trounced everybody in sight. Like Fischer, who came to identify with him closely, Morphy’s exploits over the board captured the nation’s headlines and imagination. His name was used to market various products, such as cigars and hats. Although he did little apart from chess, Morphy loathed any suggestion that he was a professional, deeming it more respectable to live off an inheritance from his parents. He also despised the chess “scene.” Still only in his twenties he descended into a state of paranoia and depression and became a recluse. Occasionally he was seen wandering the streets of New Orleans, muttering to himself in French. At the age of forty-seven, he was found dead in a bathtub, surrounded by women’s shoes.

  The first official world champion, the Prague-born Wilhelm Steinitz, who did scratch a living from chess, became convinced at the end of his life that he could beat God, even if the Lord were granted a pawn and a move head start. Akiba Rubinstein, a Pole, one of the preeminent players in the early twentieth century, was certain that other players were out to poison him; he lived in an asylum from which he journeyed to the chessboard. In the same decade, the Mexican master Carlos Torre removed all his clothes while traveling on a public bus in New York. His breakdown may have been triggered by a relationship with a young woman that had gone sour. From that moment on, he never recovered sanity. Was chess partially responsible? International master Bill Hartston, a psychologist, says, “Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.” Clearly, it failed to do this for Morphy and several others. What about Fischer? His later life appears to supply the answer.

  The chess mentality offers rich pastures in which psychoanalysts may safely graze. Freudians in particular have delighted in speculating on what subconscious drives govern the average chess player. Ernest Jones, pupil and biographer of Freud, wrote a paper in 1930 entitled “The Problem of Paul Morphy.” He focused on the relative impotence of the central piece, the king, leading him to the startling deduction that chess is “adapted to gratify at the same time both the homosexual and antagonistic aspects of the father-son contest.” Grandmaster Reuben Fine, himself a psychoanalyst and author of a book about the Fischer-Spassky match, was also taken by the role of the king and the sexual connotations of the game of chess. Ignoring female players, he maintained that the king aroused castration anxiety among men, since it “stands for the boy’s penis in the phallic stage, the self-image of the man, and the father cut down to boy’s size.” Fine concluded, “Chess is a contest between two men in which there is considerable ego involvement. In some ways it certainly touches upon the conflicts surrounding aggression, homosexuality, masturbation, and narcissism.”

  Fine used his psychoanalytic tools to analyze Fischer. He saw particular import in Fischer’s statement that he would like to “live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.” According to Fine, the libidinal undertones expressed in this desire are impossible to ignore. The preference offered “a typical double symbolic meaning: first of all it is the strong penis for which he apparently finds so little use in real life; second, it is a castle in which he can live in grandiose fantasy, like the kings of old, shutting out the real world.”

  The Freudian view remains ultimately unfalsifiable and so not, in the view of many philosophers, scientific: certainly in this extravagant form, it is difficult to take seriously. What a survey of great players tells us is that all human life is there: drunks and womanizers, the happily married and the lonely, the businesslike and the otherworldly, the religious and the atheistic, the democratic and the totalitarian, the honorable and the treacherous. But alongside their brilliance, at their competitive acme they share one other quality—an uncommon steeliness of character.

  In no high-level sport does a player need to be tougher psychologically than in chess. In most sports, nerves dissolve in the flow of the action; in chess there is a deadly surfeit of time for brooding. Most professional games last several hours. A match against the same opponent can go on for several weeks. A whole hour can pass waiting for an opponent to make a move, while the inevitable question nags insistently: Has a weakness been found?

  If panic, doubt, or defeatism creeps in, the affected player may begin to see less clearly, begin to adopt too cautious an approach or, in desperation, too cavalier a style. The conviction may grow that an opponent is seeing further and deeper. Inspiration becomes impossible. The British journalist and chess fan Dominic Lawson puts it vividly:

  In all sports confidence is important. In chess, a game which, unlike all those others, is entirely in the mind, with no trained limbs to take over when the brain is in crisis, a collapse of confidence is terminal. Above all, across the board the opponent can sense this mental bleeding, as clearly as a boxer can see blood oozing from his adversary’s head.

  As in all walks of life, in chess there are various mechanisms for handling the stress. It is possible that Fischer coped in part by channeling it into rage. Certainly some players (notoriously, for example, Mikhail Botvinnik) have a talent for loathing an opponent, a loathing that improves their performance at the board, sharpens their sense of competition, and channels their aggression. Korchnoi is in that class, too, capable of whipping up antipathy for a single game.

  Though very competitive by nature, Spassky belonged to a far rarer breed. Like Smyslov and Tal, he wanted to befriend his opponents, to create an atmosphere conducive to weaving creative magic. For him chess was more artistry than slow-motion Sumo wrestling. And like Taimanov, as an artist he needed the stimulus of spectators.

  Of course, Spassky had learned to control his emotions and to stifle any expression of feeling, though in earlier days he was often ill after a tournament, afflicted by tonsillitis and a high temperature. But later on, the German grandmaster and psychologist Helmut Pfleger measured the stress levels (blood pressure and so on) of a number of grandmasters in a major tournament in Munich. He discovered that Spassky was the calmest. Spassky’s serenity was an asset: any champion would have had his nerve tested by the manner in which Fischer stormed his
way to the final.

  The unrepentant Bolshevik. In 1961 Botvinnik (on left) takes his revenge on Tal and wins his third world title. NEW IN CHESS MAGAZINE

  7. BULLDOZER TO REYKJAVIK

  As far as world championship events are concerned, Fischer is in some danger of becoming the Yeti of the chess world. Indeed, to organizers of such events, he must seem as elusive and as fearsome as the abominable snowman.

  — HARRY GOLOMBEK, THE LONDON TIMES, OCTOBER 1970

  In the world championship cycle, the Zonal, the Interzonal, and the Candidates, the United States, like the USSR, was considered a zone in its own right, Zone 5. The U.S. Championship doubled as the U.S. Zonal, with the rules stating that the top three placed players would qualify. However, for several years Fischer had boycotted the tournament. His grievance was that it was too short: with only eleven rounds, a player who suffered a loss of form for one or two days could be put out of the running. The organizers said they could not afford a longer tournament. In 1969, Fischer was absent again; the three players to qualify for the Interzonal were William Addison, Samuel Reshevsky, and Pal Benko.

  Fischer had not played competitive chess for eighteen months, and many thought he would never return. Then, to general surprise and delight, he agreed to participate in the Soviet Union vs. the Rest of the World in 1970 in Belgrade. To even greater amazement, when the Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen demanded that he play on Board One for the Rest against the leading Soviet, pointing out quite reasonably that he had achieved the best tournament results over the previous two years, Fischer yielded the point and agreed to step down to Board Two. It meant that he played Petrosian rather than Spassky.

  Despite his voluntary concession, Fischer was fuming. Knowing how he could take his anger out on tournament organizers, the press monitored his every movement. Soviet grandmaster Mark Taimanov says reports on Belgrade Radio were akin to battlefield dispatches: “Fischer has left the room,” “Fischer has ordered dinner in the restaurant.” However, the American’s humor soon improved; though handicapped by a lack of practice, he beat Petrosian in the first two rounds and drew with him in the last two. Meanwhile, Spassky and Larsen shared the honors with a win apiece. (Spassky’s win became famous—achieved in seventeen moves; it was one of the quickest in grandmaster history.) The Soviet Union edged to victory overall by a single point.

  Representing their countries, Fischer and Spassky were to meet at the chess Olympiad at Siegen in West Germany in 1970. Naturally, there was great pressure on both men. Spassky was spotted puffing away tensely on cigarette after cigarette before they faced each other. Hundreds gathered in the hall to watch the game; Fischer had ensured that the table was kept several yards away from the spectators.

  Those who could make out the position were not to be disappointed: it was a truly fabulous game. Fischer, with the black pieces—a minor disadvantage—quickly gained equality with one of his favorite openings, the Grünfeld Defense, and, as is common in the Grünfeld, sniped away at white’s center. The American then planted a knight on a secure square, c4, on which it was both safe from attack and, within its surrounding area, a dominating presence. Yet Fischer seemed to underestimate Spassky’s attack, involving rook, knight, and queen, on the other side of the board. The winning combination was delightfully elegant, an unexpected rook sacrifice, winning Fischer’s queen. The chess correspondent of the London Times, Harry Golombek, praised Spassky for having played “in true world champion style.”

  When Spassky emerged victorious after five hours and thirty-nine moves, the Soviet ambassador to West Germany, Semion Tsarapkin, kissed him with joy. Spassky was lucky: according to then West German chancellor Willy Brandt, Tsarapkin was nicknamed “Pincers.” “The ambassador’s powerful jaws sometimes snapped with a force suggestive of the intention to pulverize his words.” Tsarapkin was given the chessboard on which the match had been played, signed by all the grandmasters there save one—Fischer.

  In an interview later, Spassky said of this win that he had succeeded in working himself up “into that special state of élan without which any tour de force is impossible. Fischer himself may have unwittingly contributed to my high spirits. It has always been a pleasure to play against him.” Spassky told the interviewer that he regarded Fischer as the most likely challenger for his crown and that he held him in high esteem as a man who loved chess passionately and for whom the game was everything. In a display of empathy, he described Fischer as “very lonely. That is one of his tragedies.”

  So Fischer was back, and a series of impressive tournament results followed; he was apparently growing stronger with each game. As he once again approached his best form, to the neutral chess observer it began to seem a catastrophe that the self-destructive American had disqualified himself from the world championship cycle. But help was at hand from Fischer’s guardian angel, Ed Edmondson.

  Colonel Edmondson had a bearing that could only be American: square jawed, upright, solid. He had entered the byzantine world of chess administration in the twilight of his military career in the U.S. Air Force, where he edited its Navigator magazine. The United States Chess Federation was in chaos when he took over in 1967 as the first ever executive director. Run from a shabby office in Greenwich Village in New York, the USCF had few members and no money. He turned it around, seeking donations, building up the membership base, and moving to new headquarters.

  For years, the ever cheerful director of the U.S. Chess Federation acted as Fischer’s unpaid agent, standing between Fischer and the potential consequences of his extreme conduct. Now the colonel and Pal Benko hatched a plan. Rules had been bent for Fischer before; they could be bent for him again. If FIDE agreed, and the other players in the U.S. Zonal agreed, Benko would give up his Interzonal place to Fischer. Some reports suggest this was Edmondson’s idea; Benko says it was at his initiative, since only Fischer had a realistic chance of the title. The prospect that one of the three American Interzonal contenders might make way for Fischer had been the talk of the chess world as early as the Siegen Olympiad. In any case, Edmondson persuaded FIDE to accept the deal. As for Benko, he received a modest payoff from the U.S. Chess Federation of $2,000. Fischer’s place in the world championship had been bought for him—and bought cheaply, given the potential rewards.

  Fischer’s rapture was modified: as usual, there was a last minute hiccup when he expressed his dissatisfaction with the money on offer. His threat not to take up his Interzonal spot after all provoked this anguished plea from Colonel Edmondson:

  More than anything else, I want to help you to become World Champion. I can only do so if there is a high degree of cooperation and faith between us. I strongly urge you to play in the Interzonal and in the Candidates Matches, trusting me as you progress to fight every step of the way for the best possible playing and financial conditions on your behalf.

  I believe you appreciate this fact and ask that we again confirm agreement on the following.

  Honorariums

  A. Interzonal $4,000

  B. Candidates Match, Quarter-Final $3,000

  C. Candidates Match, Semi-Final $3,000

  D. Final Candidates Match $4,000

  E.World Championship Match $5,000

  Total guaranteed honorariums $19,000

  The honorariums, Edmondson pointed out, were in addition to the prize money. Then there would be expenses. “I will also guarantee that your ‘pocket money’ will be twice that given to other contestants in each event.” In addition, he promised that Fischer would be put up in the most luxurious hotels and that the conditions at every stage in the world championship cycle would meet Fischer’s high standards. The plea worked, and Fischer was off to the walled city of Palma de Majorca in the Balearic Islands—and the Interzonal.

  So Fischer began a miraculous year in the history of chess. As the scale of the miracle became apparent, a burgeoning wave of press and public interest emerged that would swell all the way to Reykjavik.

  The November/December 1970
Interzonal took place in the concert center in Palma, the Sala Mozart, overlooking the bay, the cathedral, and the old fort. There were twenty-four competitors; many were already famous names in the world of chess, including Efim Geller, Vasili Smyslov, Mark Taimanov, Lev Polugaievskii (USSR), Lajos Portisch (Hungary), Bent Larsen (Denmark), Wolfgang Uhlmann (East Germany), Svetozar Gligoric (Yugoslavia), Vlastimil Hort (Czechoslovakia), Henrique Mecking (Brazil), and Robert Hübner (West Germany). But it was Fischer who drew the spectators. Crowded onto the dark yellow carpet, they strained to glimpse his board.

  The top six would advance to the knockout stage, where they would be joined by former world champion Tigran Petrosian and Viktor Korchnoi, the latter having qualified as the losing finalist in the Candidates match against Spassky in 1968. Fischer began well but hit a bad patch, losing to Bent Larsen. In the second half, he abruptly stepped up a couple of gears and, in a stupendous run, eventually won the last seven games, taking first place by the huge margin of 3.5 points. Grandmaster Uhlmann, who also qualified for the Candidates, said, “It’s simply unbelievable with what superiority he played in the Interzonal. There is a vitality in his games, and the other grandmasters seem to develop an inferiority complex.”

  While the Soviets relaxed and played bridge between rounds, Fischer barely emerged from his room at the plush Hotel Demar. The list of conditions he had placed on his attendance at the tournament was as long as ever and included glare-free fluorescent lighting and a schedule that took account of his religious practices, meaning the strict observance of his Sabbath. To fit in with that, Larsen had to rise early for his rendezvous with the American. “Many of us have decided that this will be the last time that Fischer gets such special treatment. What he wants, he gets. But no more!”