Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  Finally I couldn’t bear the stairwell and went outside to walk around the block. When I returned twenty minutes later, it was all over. The awards ceremony was finished, and my Josh was joking and playing speed chess with another boy. They were having a good time, in between moves making plans to get together. The tournament was old news. When Josh caught my eye and lifted up the big first-place trophy, I made a gaudy high five from across the room. My son was a little embarrassed, but it was impossible for me to be casual. At such a moment, a parent is truly the child, giddy and dancing like a fool with fantasies of glory and immortality that he will carry to his grave.

  2

  FISCHER’S LEGACY

  As a young man, I thought of chess as cerebral and boring, and I had no interest in learning to play. But on many summer afternoons in 1972, when Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky for the world championship, I found myself sitting in front of a television set with a few friends, rooting and even screaming at an outsized chessboard as if it were a basketball court rather than the evolving chess positions of two men sitting motionless thousands of miles away. At the beginning of the match I didn’t even know how the pieces moved, and yet these slow-moving esoteric battles filled me with passion and a yearning that at first I didn’t understand. I imagined the pressure the champion and the challenger must have felt as they tried to outwit each other, searching for the most intricate and subtle nuances of advantage while millions looked over their shoulders and second-guessed them. It must have been like trying to compose a sonnet with a guillotine blade poised to fall if the verse didn’t come up to Shakespeare’s. Each man bore the responsibility for his country’s national honor. Spassky would be Russia’s greatest hero if he won, and would fall into disgrace and lose his privileges if he didn’t. Fischer wanted to annihilate the Russians, whom he had hated since he had decided as a teenager that they cheated in international tournaments. If he won he would instantly become a legend; if he lost he would be dismissed by many people as a crackpot. Henry Kissinger gave his moral support to Fischer, and Brezhnev nervously awaited the results of each game. For many viewers, communism and capitalism were fighting it out on afternoon television. Fischer’s precise style of chess was charged with innuendos of violence and irrationality; like a Rambo of the mind he talked of crushing his opponent’s ego. Spassky, on the other hand, was urbane, ironic, intellectual, an aesthete and an exquisite foil for Fischer’s crude excesses. That summer of 1972, chess became monumental, a game unlike any other, and everyone wanted to play.

  I HAVE ALWAYS loved sports even though I was never exceptionally good at them. But in 1972, along with millions of other Americans, I discovered the sport of thinking. It seemed tailor-made for me. I have patience and good reasoning ability and am happy sitting for hours working on a paragraph or turning over an idea. In the flush of Bobby’s winning, I decided that chess might be my sport. During the course of the match I learned the moves and a few simple tactics. I bought elegant wooden pieces and began to play games against my friends. I watched how slowly the moves came in from Reykjavik, Iceland, and at least to that extent I patterned my games after those of the championship contenders. I thought about each move for a long time, sometimes for half an hour, like Fischer and Spassky, which drove my friends to distraction. They urged me to move faster, made fun of me, threatened to quit, but I tried to ignore their ill humor and to concentrate on the position. I recalled what Bobby had said: “I don’t think about the man, only about good moves.”

  Each game I listened attentively to National Master Shelby Lyman and to Bruce Pandolfini, another master who appeared regularly on the show, and tried to guess the next move from Reykjavik. Spassky might have played your move, Lyman suggested hundreds of times, he might have played mine, but he chose something else, not necessarily stronger. Sometimes I was smugly convinced that my idea was better than the one selected by the grandmaster. Lyman was young and charming, with a gift for democratizing chess, for clouding distinctions between ability and ineptitude. Riding the coattails of Bobby’s charisma, he became a celebrity overnight, the Johnny Appleseed of chess. Without actually saying so, he was persuading the United States that chess genius was within reach of all of us; it was a tour de force of showmanship. By the end of the match, I still understood virtually nothing about the game, but I could feel it welling up in me like a calling.

  When Lyman went off the air, I decided that it was time to get serious. I bought chess books and memorized a few openings. I went over the game that thirteen-year-old Fischer had played against Donald Byrne, in which he had sacrificed his queen to win twenty-four moves later, and I wondered how many more weeks it would take before I would be making such moves. I pestered my friends to play, and to my delight, I won more than I lost. My style was the waiting game. I took a long time to move and never attacked, always looking for safe, protected harbors for my pieces. The longer I took to make my passive decisions, the faster my friends responded, as if to say, “Look, you’re killing the game and boring me to death; play faster.” Usually, moving quickly and petulantly, they blundered, and slowly I would grind out a win. Despite my meager experience, when friends who had played the game since high school decided they didn’t want to play me anymore, I concluded that I must be too good.

  ONE DAY IN 1972 I discovered the chess coffee shop on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, where years later on winter afternoons I would take Josh to play. On that first occasion, I played against a pimply adolescent who after twenty minutes caught on to my methodical bob-and-weave style and began to read a newspaper. I was annoyed by his lack of concern, then astounded when he mated me, barely looking away from his reading.

  During the second game, he read from the beginning, but this time it lasted longer. After a couple of hours I was muddled. The more I looked, the less I saw. All of his pieces were attacking, and soon I was out of safe hiding squares. I was sweating and feeling humiliated while he read and glanced at other games. I would have to engage, but I knew I’d be crushed. I moved a piece ahead, half-expecting him to laugh in my face; instead, he put down the paper, stared at the position with concern and then knocked over his king and put out his hand. Even after he left the table and I had studied the position, I could see no possible reason why he should have resigned. Finally I asked another player, who briskly demonstrated that I had forced mate in three. He had to show it to me twice before I could follow the moves.

  After this victory I walked home, packed my Staunton pieces in their wooden box and shoved it to the back of a shelf, where it remained without interruption for the next ten years until six-year-old Josh begged me to take it down. That day in the chess shop I had realized that just as surely as I lacked the running and leaping ability for professional basketball, I didn’t have what it takes to be a good chess player.

  Still, the game was in my blood, and over the years Bobby Fischer has occupied much time in my fantasy life. Like many fans of the Fischer-Spassky match, I have wondered what happened to Fischer after winning the championship, and often I have had shivery daydreams about his comeback, his blustery late entrance on stage, barely noticing Karpov or Kasparov as he sprawls into his swivel chair and contemptuously pushes ahead the king pawn. I have waited for Bobby as if his disappearance were no more than a tease, to be followed by greater victories than anyone had ever dreamed possible.

  CHESS CLUBS PROLIFERATED during the early seventies, inspired by Bobby’s success and charisma. Mothers pulled their sons out of Little League and ferried them to chess lessons. Talented young players with dreams of Fischer, television immortality and big chess money spurned college and conventional career choices to turn professional. For a brief time shy, introverted chess players basked in national glory, along with running backs and rock stars.

  “There were even chess groupies,” recalls Bruce Pandolfini. “The chess world has always been essentially sexless, but these girls studied the U.S. Chess Federation rating chart and began working their way up. They were
playing their own kind of chess game. They seduced the most ascetic grandmasters. They all wanted Fischer.”

  In 1972, before Shelby Lyman put him on television, Pandolfini was an impoverished tournament player who subsisted on a variety of part-time jobs. “One week I was sorting mail at the post office and the next I was on television. A few days after the show began, I was walking along Sixth Avenue when suddenly a big limousine screeched to a halt. A beautiful woman whom I had never seen before stepped out. She shouted, ‘Bruce! Bruce Pandolfini! Oh, wow!’”

  Overnight this cerebral, slow-moving board game became supercharged with American glitz. Fischer was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Life, Time and Newsweek; he appeared on the Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson shows. “Chess is like war on a board,” he told us. “The object is to crush the other man’s mind. . . . I like to see ’em squirm.” It was as if he had invented a new game.

  Chess sets became a best seller at Brentano’s. Fischer’s two books on chess sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and his good fortune trickled down to other chess professionals. Pandolfini said, “I began charging up to a hundred and fifty dollars an hour for private lessons. Some of the Wall Street lawyers and rich doctors I taught were just terrible. They had no talent or appreciation for the game. Sometimes I fell asleep during lessons, but it didn’t matter. They thought they’d catch chess genius just being around the guy who’d talked about Fischer on television.”

  BOBBY FISCHER WAS born in 1943. From the time he was a six-year-old living in Brooklyn until he won the world championship at twenty-nine, he was totally preoccupied with chess. At the age of fourteen, he won the United States championship, an unparalleled feat. But he was already becoming bitter about the shabby treatment of chess in the United States. He was incensed, for example, that while the Russians spent lavishly to field a well-coached team for the Olympiad, Americans were hard pressed to raise the airfare to compete. In his biography of Fischer, Frank Brady suggests that the reason for Bobby’s grandiose financial demands after his rise to fame was as much the desire to give chess in the United States recognition and stature as the wish for personal enrichment.*

  In 1977, Bobby Fischer was offered a quarter of a million dollars to play a single game at Caesars Palace but turned it down: it was not enough money. President Marcos offered to sponsor a three-million-dollar championship match in the Philippines, and Bobby was said to have ten million lined up in commercial offers. Then, turning his back on fame unprecedented for a chess player and tremendous potential wealth, he surprised his fans by retiring from the game and becoming a recluse. He has not been seen in public for years.

  With his disappearance, Fischer created a chess wasteland. The new clubs of the seventies disappeared along with him, and many of the old ones withered in membership and grew shabby. For example, the Marshall Chess Club has become badly run-down and is so financially depleted that frequently there are no chess pieces available for its members. It is empty most of the day, except for a few old men who snore in their armchairs, and its membership has shrunk from more than seven hundred in 1974 to only about two hundred today. Directors of both the Marshall and Manhattan chess clubs have speculated that without an unexpected infusion of money and interest in chess soon—perhaps the reemergence of Bobby or the coming of a new Fischer—New York City may not be able to support a clean and respectable chess club.

  During the past fifteen years, the parents of some of America’s strongest young players have forbidden them to pursue the game lest it become a dead-end preoccupation. Noted chess teachers have become computer programmers, art dealers and bookies. To survive as weekend players, some of the talented young men who were lured to chess by Fischer fifteen years ago now drive cabs, unload trucks or hustle chess in the parks. One international master who for many years has supported himself by working at menial jobs says, “I can’t make a living from chess, but I’ve devoted so much time to the game that I have no other marketable skill. Sometimes when I look back, I wish I hadn’t seen Shelby Lyman on television. I would have done something else with my life.”

  * Frank Brady, Profile of a Prodigy (New York: David McKay, 1973), p. 211.

  3

  WASHINGTON SQUARE

  The crooning of a saxophone mixed with the uneven click of plastic chess pieces on marble chess tables in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. Vinnie, a thirty-four-year-old black man, sat at one of the tables, nursing a paper cup of coffee. He was wearing a torn maroon sweater, soiled corduroy pants and unmatched socks rolled at the ankles. Seated beside him was a junkie, mumbling and swaying. In front of Vinnie, on a table stained with Coke and dried pizza sauce, chess pieces stood poised. A young man approached. He had a strong athletic build, which drew attention to the sickly pallor of his boyish face. In a tremulous voice, he asked if Vinnie wanted to play for a dollar a game. Vinnie tried to hide his smile as he reached into a shopping bag for his chess clock. He’d found a fish and was already tasting the Chinese dinner he’d eat that night. Vinnie is a master-level player, but he’s often short of change for a subway token.

  The young man sat on a green park bench, and almost immediately the two players were surrounded by a crowd of kibitzers. Among them was my six-year-old son, chewing bubble gum and leaning familiarly on Vinnie’s arm. Although Josh could barely read, he sometimes beat some of the adults here and watched intricate speed-chess games by the hour with the same pleased expression as when he looked at cartoons on television.

  “Two minutes a game?” the young man asked in a Germanic accent, suddenly confident and contemptuous.

  Playing at this speed, the men raced through this most deliberate and cerebral game as if it were pinball. Paced by the nerve-racking snap of the clock, chessmen flowed into lines of attack. Captures were made with a snatch, and sometimes, during last-second flurries, knights and bishops were knocked to the ground. Vinnie talked while he played. “To kill a vampire you gotta put a stake into his heart. Josh, I said you gotta put a stake in his heart. Remember that,” Vinnie repeated, playing to the crowd with operatic bravado. Then he announced, “Mate in three.”

  Speed chess is thrilling to watch, and the onlookers were as tense and giddy with excitement as a fight crowd. Someone whispered that the pale young man was a grandmaster named Eric Lobron, one of the top chess players in the world. Vinnie the hustler was being hustled. Lobron blushed at being recognized and for a moment tried to pretend he was someone else.

  “Let’s see what you know, Mr. Grandmaster,” Vinnie taunted while they set up the pieces for the next game. “What d’ya know, Grandmaster?” he chanted after each move, using his rap like an extra rook. “Whad they teach ya in Germany, Grandmaster. You wanna exchange queens? Okay, let’s go.” BAM. BAM. The pieces snapped against the marble table like caps. Lobron, who was used to playing in the sacred quiet of international tournaments, was disconcerted by Vinnie’s mouth and couldn’t play up to his strength. “Ya got nuthin’, Grandmaster. I said you got nuthin’. What you think you’re gonna do to my black ass? You think you’re gonna come into my office and take my money? Get outta here.”

  Like Vinnie, Lobron had come to the park to hustle a few dollars for his dinner. As it turned out, each player won three games, and no one made a nickel.

  JOSH DISCOVERED CHESS in Washington Square Park when he was six years old. It was a cold March afternoon, with dirty clumps of snow on the ground. We paused to watch two men who were sitting at one of the tables. One of them was rocking back and forth as if he were reciting the Kaddish. The other man wore only a light nylon jacket and from time to time shivered violently. He was concentrating so hard on his game that he didn’t seem to notice how cold he was. It was hard for me to pull Josh away. The next day he asked a teacher in his after-school play group to show him how the pieces moved.

  Several weeks later on a sunny Sunday morning, while crossing the chess corner on the way to the swings on the other side of the park, Josh broke away from his mother and ran up
to a distinguished-looking man with a beard and asked if he could play. The man, David Hechtlinger, who was waiting for a friend, was willing to give him a game. He was fond of children who want to play chess because his son had been a young master, and he had often wondered how good his son might have become if he had continued to work at it. After the game was over, he explained to Bonnie that Josh had used pieces in combination to launch an attack, a sign of chess talent in a beginner. Hechtlinger wrote Josh’s name on the masthead of his newspaper. “I’ll look for your name someday,” he told our son. After that game, Josh began to pester his mother to take him to watch the men in the park after school. He said he liked the way the chess pieces looked.

  WASHINGTON SQUARE IS six blocks from our apartment, and now it became Joshua’s chess playground. Many afternoons after school, while other little boys played touch football under the trees or jumped bicycles over the nearby asphalt mounds, he played chess with school dropouts, retired workers, talented winos and down-and-out masters. Some days he’d look up mournfully at the kids on their bikes and lose his concentration, but mostly he didn’t seem to notice them and would surprise adults by winning a few games.

  Chess players greet each new young talent with curiosity and expectation; it’s almost as if they are waiting for the messiah. Josh was affectionately referred to as “young Fischer” by some of the old-timers, who recalled the games Bobby played in Washington Square as a little boy in the fifties.

  If Josh ever becomes a grandmaster, he’ll owe a lot to the guys in the park who helped him. These early teachers couldn’t have been more caring, enthusiastic or perceptive. For example, Jerry, a short black man who wore a bandana and played without a shirt whenever it was warmer than fifty degrees, pestered Josh to be an aggressive player, reminded him not to make passive moves and emphasized that even when his position was difficult he should try to attack and defend at the same time.