Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  From Fischer’s point of view Lina had been unfaithful. He has told all his friends that their associations with him must be entirely private. It is basic to his life plan. When Lina described the breakup to me she was both sad and indignant. She had been responsible for the championship match continuing, so in a way she felt she owned a small piece of his success. Since he was a teenager, when he played in West Coast tournaments and sometimes during periods of estrangement from his mother, Bobby had lived in her house. She had covered for him a hundred times, fending off interviewers and people who came over to meet him, while he was alone upstairs studying. She felt that she had a right to a little piece of recognition, but to Fischer this was like stealing part of his genius.

  ACCORDING TO HIS West Coast friends, since his break with Lina Grumette Bobby has lived for much of the past sixteen years in downtown Los Angeles, near the Union Depot. It is the seediest part of the city, Skid Row, and he has moved from one grungy hotel to the next, usually registering as “Mr. James.” A couple of days after I arrived in Los Angeles, Victor Frias and I walked along Main and Hill streets, past boarded-up hotels, porno shops, the Cum Again Theater, past junkies and drunks in doorways, broken glass under our feet. Frias was spending a month in California playing in tournaments and had some time between events to take me to Fischer’s old neighborhoods and to visit some of his friends. Victor was on a hot streak, coming in first or second in each of his California tournaments. His wife was pregnant, and he was hopeful that his prize money would cover his expenses for the trip. During the past several months, he had been playing as well as any player in the country, but he knew that he couldn’t make it financially in the United States as a professional player and was planning to take a full-time job when he returned to New York after this last tournament binge.

  One of Bobby’s friends used to drop him off in the evening in front of one of the sleazy hotels in this area after they’d spent the day together looking at girls on the beach, going to bookstores or analyzing chess. Bobby rarely invited his friend up to his room, and he would step out of the car and walk past the drunks, pushers and whores without noticing them. The neighborhood was a war zone of misery, but he was living in a different orbit. According to friends, usually he rode the buses or walked around the city when he woke up in the afternoon; then, late at night, he would go over chess games on the worn pocket set he had gotten in Argentina in 1960. Now, as Victor and I walked along Hill Street, Bobby was probably no more than a few blocks away, sleeping late in a shabby little room.

  I looked at my watch and remembered that Josh had played in a scholastic tournament that morning at Hunter College Elementary School, and the thought of it made my neck stiffen. It was the first time he had ever played in a tournament without my watching over his shoulder or standing vigil outside a closed door. I began to imagine that he had done poorly. Lately, Pandolfini had been telling him that he was playing the opening too mechanically; in the beginning of the game, he’d just throw his pieces out as if he didn’t consider this stage a legitimate part of chess. Josh never really clicked into gear until he was a little behind. Then the fear would get to him and he’d start to see patterns and begin calculating like a computer in order to ward off disaster. Against kids he could get away with this, but he would have to start concentrating on the openings, memorizing thousands of variations, if he ever was going to be good against strong adults. Did I want him to spend the rest of his childhood memorizing variations? Would such concentration on chess leave him isolated and disfigured like Bobby? The old questions kept cropping up. Maybe Josh resisted learning the openings because he knew in his heart that he didn’t want to be a player, and I wasn’t listening. If he lost his games against Marc Berman, Matthew Goldman and David Arnett, I’d feel terrible and wouldn’t care much about finding Bobby Fischer.

  WHEN BOBBY COULD afford it, he sometimes lived in a nicer neighborhood on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, an area like much of Miami Beach, with small residential hotels, populated by old people sitting on porches or looking blankly out their windows. It didn’t seem to matter to him where he lived or who his neighbors were. He was on the run, hiding out from reporters and old friends, but mostly making it as hard as possible for the KGB to track him down and kill him. He was certain that the Russians were afraid of him because he was the only one who could take their championship away.

  Or sometimes he lived in Pasadena. In the spring of 1981, he was spotted by the district police wandering along a highway like a derelict, and when he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell them his address, he was jailed for vagrancy. Fischer wrote a pamphlet about the incident, entitled “I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse,” which was a best seller in chess clubs even though it never says a word about chess.

  Despite all his demands for big purses and appearance fees—he consistently campaigned for material rewards for players—Bobby never really cared much about money or what it could buy. After pressing for bigger and bigger guarantees, at one point before the Spassky match he offered to play for nothing, which panicked his financial advisors. Once when he was going to play a big exhibition he was given the largest and most elegant suite at a hotel but turned it down because the view was too engaging; he wanted a little room with no view so that he could study. Fancy rooms, views and cultural sideshows like school, poetry and concerts are contemptible distractions when you are trying to accomplish more than anyone else in the history of your art.

  In this respect, Fischer’s life hasn’t changed at all. He still studies many hours a day, so what does it matter if his window looks onto an alley and there are roaches crawling in the sink? What people tend to forget about him is that his genius was buttressed with more knowledge than that of any other player in the history of chess; no one has ever memorized as many opening variations and whole games as Bobby. He ate chess day and night and had been doing so since he was a kid. In high school he studied chess books while his teachers lectured on other subjects, and when they told him to put away his books he studied games in his head. He dropped out of school at sixteen in order to have more time to study. Later, after the break with his mother—his father had left the family when Bobby was two—he would spend most of the day and night inside his room studying. He’d analyze until two in the morning, then sleep late, and when he woke up he often went out to find more chess books.

  There must have been an undercurrent of despair in this singular and fanatical dedication. Perhaps at times Fischer felt the frustration of a young mystic straining to make objects levitate, to make the squares talk to him. The stakes were high and the culture was against him. In the early fifties, a child chess prodigy was perceived as odd rather than gifted. It would have been easier for him if his genius had been for an admired endeavor like mathematics or playing the piano; in devoting his life to chess from the age of eight, he typecast himself as a weirdo and outcast. He must have felt tremendous pressure from his mother, from his teachers, who said he was wasting his life on a game, and from his schoolmates, who were learning about girls, Shakespeare and football. All this must have driven him further and deeper, and made him greater.

  FISCHER FIRST BECAME interested in the Church of God in 1961. During a visit to a friend’s home in Reno, he locked himself in his room for most of the night analyzing, sometimes taking a break to study the Bible. Once in a while he’d come out and talk about his ideas on religion, then return to his room. Other chess players there who hung around watching television—Bobby was convinced that the set emitted deadly rays—thought that his involvement with the Church of God would come to no good, that he was being taken in by the smooth speaking style of Ted Armstrong and that his ideas about religion and the world at large were childish or misguided. Still, no one criticized him; “We didn’t want to crush his point of view,” said one of them, “because he was such a great genius.”

  When Bobby was a teenager, people said that he might be the greatest chess player who ever lived; certainly he thought so
himself, and he was the champion of his country at the age of fourteen, a unique achievement. But perhaps there’s a price to be paid for such precocity. When a man is the best at what he does for his entire life, there is little room for self-questioning or doubt. Cultivated by unprecedented success, with virtually no outside editing, Fischer’s ideas grew wild. Well-meaning friends who argued with him were usually dropped. Others accepted his strangeness as an aspect of genius and were on guard not to contradict him. When he was a teenager, little was said about his affection for a color photograph of Adolf Hider. Friends reasoned that politically he was naïve; he was the ultimate prodigy with a limitless future; what did it matter that he had a few strange ideas? It was more important that his game was developing so rapidly. During a trip to the Soviet Union when he was fifteen he won a number of blitz games from the great Tigran Petrosian but was disappointed that the world champion, Vassily Smyslov, wouldn’t play him.

  When I asked Lina Grumette about Fischer’s attraction to Nazism she instinctively brought a finger to her mouth: “Sssshhh.” Then in a hushed voice she said, “You know, he thought that Hider was a great man.” She had no idea why Bobby idolized the dictator and despised Jews. When he was seventeen, she recalled, he had made anti-Semitic remarks. “But I thought that he just didn’t understand. I didn’t think it was serious until much later.”

  I asked a number of Fischer’s old friends to try to explain why Nazism appealed to him, but the question made them nervous and none of them had a plausible theory. After their break with Bobby these people seemed to feel a little guilty about having listened to so much filth.

  Although he has never met Bobby, clinical psychologist Lou Cassotta, a Fischer fan since the early seventies, is willing to speculate about the origins of this peculiar second and all-consuming love affair in Fischer’s life.

  “For most of his life, Fischer has worked in opposition to the rest of the world. If you ask him to behave in a socially acceptable manner, he instinctively says no. He has to; he must resist any attempt to be socialized. That’s how he knows himself, by defining himself in opposition to others. That’s why he doesn’t commit himself to a woman, why he rejects the people who are closest to him. He is afraid of intimacy. His friends know how fragile he is, and so they pander to him. Anybody who says anything to him that doesn’t suit him, he writes off. In this way he has created a world that reflects back to him whatever he wants. If he consciously wanted to make himself as unlike everybody else in the world as possible, he probably couldn’t have done a better job. But he does it instinctively. He knows himself to be a person who takes the path that no one else will take. He has done this his whole life. Even in quitting at the pinnacle he was doing it. A normal person in his shoes would take advantage of his position by defending his title, writing books, making all the money he could. Instead, Fischer chose the life of an impoverished recluse. There is something admirable about his way; it captures the imagination.

  “My guess is that it all started with a control issue early in his life. Perhaps a battle with his mother. Possibly he had to act in opposition to her power, intelligence and appetite for the arts, her Judaism, in order to hold on to his own identity and not be subsumed by her. Then he discovers chess, which is respected neither in society nor in his home. But he is so fantastic a player that he makes it respectable, even fashionable. It’s an unbelievable achievement, but in looking at the history of his life, it seems almost inevitable that he’d choose something that wasn’t accepted and go out and try to make it work. That alone was a large part of his triumph.

  “So when he’s finally on top, and the game is recognized, why does he leave it? Maybe for the same reason. Now everybody thinks it’s fine to be a chess player, and he can’t stand that. His game is now mainstream and it makes him uncomfortable. So he involves himself in something—Nazism—which every decent, normal American thinks is horrible, and he’s going to try to make it respectable. He must believe that he’ll triumph again, just as he did before. He must be convinced that he has become involved in something that is more important than chess, that he will be the one who finally exposes the Jews.

  “Of course the difference is that as a chess player Bobby was a genius and that as a political thinker he’s a schmuck. But anti-Semitism is perfect for him because it is built on opposition. Nazis are the bad boys of the world. Fischer identifies with that; he was a bad boy who never did what he was told.”

  ***

  ONE CHILLY AFTERNOON Victor Frias and I went to McArthur Park, within walking distance of Bobby’s downtown L.A. neighborhood. It is big, with winding paths and a nice lake where kids fish and a few brown ducks swim around. There used to be a larger population of ducks, but five or six years ago they began to disappear. Hungry Vietnamese who lived nearby were fishing for them at night with hook and line.

  McArthur Park sits between two worlds. One side is the western perimeter of L.A.’s thriving industry and affluence—expensive condominiums, art galleries and tall, modern office buildings in the distance. But to the east and south the park is bordered by a poor, predominantly Latin neighborhood with delis, bars blaring Rancheras music and cheap Mexican restaurants. Sandwiched between the bars and restaurants are what seem like dozens of health clinics, enough for an entire city, each with a big sign advertising the end to your physical woes.

  In the southwest corner of the park fifteen or twenty down-and-out men played chess. As we approached them, I whispered to Victor that since no one here knew him it might be fun to get into a money game. Victor didn’t reply but within a few seconds I realized how preposterous my suggestion was. The first player who looked up broke into a broad smile. Victor Frias, international master from Chile, was a celebrity in McArthur Park, and he was quickly surrounded by a dozen men slapping him on the back, asking about where and whom he had been playing and about the successes of other Latin American masters.

  Twenty feet away, a stout man hunched over one of the tables. He didn’t seem to notice us, and for a time Victor ignored his game, which was the only one still going on. But as Frias joked with old friends and the man moved his pieces and hit his clock, you could feel that the lack of contact between them was filled with tension. After a time they nodded at each other. Without saying a word, they had agreed to play.

  The heavyset man was the star of McArthur Park. He commanded respect among the players there in the same way that Israel Zilber is the acknowledged “Sheriff” of Washington Square and Valentin Arbakov is known throughout the Soviet Union as the king of Sokolniki Park in Moscow, where he spends much of the day drinking vodka and taking on all comers for kopecks. The chess world is remarkably tight, and though these men often sit and sleep in the cold waiting for a game and work their craft for nickels and dimes, they have reputations that cross oceans. Susan Polgar of Hungary had known about Zilber in Washington Square and made it a point to go there to play blitz with him when she came to New York. Arbakov has beaten many top grandmasters who come to Sokolniki Park to test themselves against him. The stout man in McArthur Park has also beaten many grandmasters, but what makes his success more surprising is that until recently he was merely an expert and now his rating is only that of a weak master; as a tournament player he is not in the same class as Zilber and Arbakov, who both play at the grandmaster level.

  Without asking, Victor Frias knew the rules of the game they would be playing, and he looked a little unhappy. Normally in blitz each player gets five minutes on his clock, and for a player unfamiliar with speed chess, the action is too fast to follow. But the stout man in McArthur Park had made his reputation as a one-minute player; each man began with sixty seconds on his clock, and unless someone was checkmated, the one who first used up his minute lost, regardless of his position.

  Frias is tough-looking, with a thick black beard and the build of Roberto Duran when he fought as a middleweight. Sitting at a chessboard, he smolders with intensity. He is a great five-minute player, one of the best in the Uni
ted States, but from the beginning it was clear that against the fat man he was at a decided disadvantage. His opponent had an incredibly fast and powerful right hand built up from years of practice; it moved like Ali’s jab, and in one flowing cobra stroke he grabbed a piece and smacked the clock. He played only a few openings, but he had practiced the sequences of moves for rhythm and speed. In only three or four seconds he moved through the opening fifteen or twenty moves of each game, hand flashing from piece to clock, and invariably by the time they were in the middle game, Frias was eleven or twelve seconds behind.

  In one-minute chess there is no time to pause and consider; it is absolutely instantaneous and instinctive, and watching the action is like seeing the film of a prizefight that has been put on fast forward. There is no following its logic. It is hard to discern whose hand is moving what piece; chessmen fly in the air and fall to the ground. The fat man had memorized thousands of one- and two-move traps, the kinds of moves good players scorn as cheap shots and that don’t work in slower games. But this man had no time for depth or art; he had devoted much of his life to learning the best shortcuts in a game that doesn’t allow its participants time to think. He was a grandmaster of cheap shots.

  As the two of them played they breathed heavily, as if they were running; sweat dripped from their faces. The fat man would never agree to begin the next game until he had fully caught his breath. He knew precisely the energy he needed for the next sprint. His clock had dents and gouges from the force with which he pounded it with his thick fingers. Even more remarkable than his hand speed were his eyes. While Victor occasionally cost himself a second to glance at the clock, his opponent smacked it without looking. He knew the precise angle from rook to clock, from queen to clock, and uncannily, at the exact instant when Frias ran out of time, without looking away from the position, the man would announce, “You lose.”