Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  Again and again Victor had won positions, a few moves away from mating his overweight but speedy opponent, but would lose on time, and after an hour, when they decided to quit, he was several games behind. Before leaving the table, he slyly offered to triple the stakes if the fat man would agree to play with seventy-five seconds on each clock instead of sixty, but he knew that his opponent would refuse. The fat man had worked at his game for years, was brilliant within its crazy dynamic and had gained a reputation that gave his life meaning. He knew that even the great Fischer, rumored to eat sometimes in the Mexican restaurants nearby, might lack the hand speed and coordination to beat him in one-minute chess. If he gave Frias another fifteen seconds there would be moments in which he could think, the game would inch a little closer to real chess, and he wouldn’t have a chance in hell.

  ***

  RON GROSS WAS Fischer’s best friend in California from 1972 until their friendship ended in 1984, when he talked about Bobby in an interview with a reporter. They had been friends since Fischer was twelve years old. When they first met in New York, they spent their time playing, searching for chess books and studying the game together.

  Gross recalls an afternoon with his fourteen-year-old friend at the Manhattan Chess Club. “We were playing and I noticed the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky standing nearby watching. He had made an appointment with Bobby; he wanted to see the ‘game of the century’ that Fischer had played recently against Donald Byrne. I said, ‘There’s Piatigorsky, you ought to talk to him,’ but Bobby refused; he didn’t want to stop playing. He had me in an off-balanced position, down the exchange but up a pawn. With Piatigorsky waiting, Bobby got nervous and made a mistake, and suddenly he had the worst of it. This made him even more stubborn. We weren’t playing with a clock, and with Piatigorsky standing there Fischer thought about his position for almost an hour. I finally won the game, and afterwards Bobby got up from the table and started screaming at Piatigorsky, ‘Who are you that I have to show you my game?’ He blamed this world-famous artist because he’d lost a game to me, and after making Piatigorsky wait all that time, Bobby wouldn’t play out the game for him. By anyone’s standards he’d been outrageously rude, but that’s the way he was.”

  In recent years, according to Gross, Fischer was still studying as much as when he first met him, but the books had changed. A couple of years after the Spassky match he began to distrust Ted Armstrong and broke with the Church of God. Now, instead of hunting down religious tracts or collections of chess games, he coveted books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Myth of Six Million Dead. He was convinced that the Jews were controlling the country and that the Holocaust was a self-serving fantasy created by Zionists. He’d call up Gross at one or two in the morning to ask if his friend had read a new article about world control by the Jews. Usually Gross would lie and say he’d read it or would promise to do so soon. He didn’t want to upset Fischer and hoped he would forget this crazy preoccupation and return to chess.

  Perhaps if he met a girl it would help. Bobby had always been attracted to women but had little to do with them because he felt that they took his mind off work. It was rumored that his poor performance in Buenos Aires in 1960, when he was seventeen years old, was due to his passionate involvement with a prostitute during the tournament, and he had vowed never to let this happen again. After his retirement, friends often tried to get him dates. In his late thirties and early forties he was eager to meet girls, but these associations were like his recurrent fantasy of making a chess comeback; his pattern was to encourage friends to set up dates and then to reject the women—his relationships rarely got past the talking stage. Once Gross fixed him up with a buxom blonde. “They got on very well,” recalled Gross. “They spent the evening talking about blacks. Neither of them liked blacks much.

  “There’s an anti-Semitic bookstore near Inglewood,” Gross said. “We’d go in there to find an article or book he wanted to read, and it reminded me of going to chess bookstores in New York when we were kids. Once we drove to this Inglewood bookstore, but Bobby didn’t want to go inside because he didn’t want the owner to see him, so I had to go in and buy the books for him. He had a special discount at this store, and before I went in he reminded me to ask for his discount. Then when I brought out the books he got all excited. Bobby has great enthusiasm for whatever interests him. It was just like the old days, except that the subject was different. I’d talk to him about his ideas, but I had to be tactful because I didn’t want to tell him that he was out of his mind.”

  Despite a shared passion for chess, the two men couldn’t be less alike. Gross is a gentle, well-mannered, neatly dressed real-estate salesman who taught junior high school until recently and lives in a pleasant middle-class home in Cerritos. He is an affectionate, doting father to his adolescent daughter and an affable man who watches pro football on Sunday afternoons. It’s hard to imagine Bobby coming over on weekends, sitting on the sofa in his filthy clothes, shoes falling apart, spewing his newest ideas about Hitler and the Jewish global conspiracy or chortling about an anti-Semitic Spanish comic book he’d found in Tijuana. It was embarrassing to be around him, Gross recalls, “because when he got started on the Jews, whether he was in the house or at a restaurant, he’d bang the table and curse.”

  Bobby made Gross’s wife and daughter uncomfortable, and Gross seems to be relieved that the relationship is over. Nevertheless, he genuinely liked Fischer and enjoyed his boyish enthusiasm for the outdoors and for physical fitness. Mostly, however, he was captivated by Fischer’s chess. For hours after he had tired of describing Bobby’s quirks, he and Frias analyzed games that Gross had played against Fischer. For each of them it was a special time, and they behaved like two writers looking through a cache of unpublished manuscripts by Tolstoy. Gross seemed to remember every game he had ever played against Fischer, even positions from speed games played more than thirty years before. “I’d have prepared a line to play against him, something he couldn’t have seen,” Gross said, “because I always knew what chess periodicals he was reading, but he’d find moves you’d never see in a book.”

  Chess players around the world, from Kasparov to rank beginners, are curious to know how the present-day Fischer compares in playing strength to the one who defeated Spassky in 1972, and how he would stack up against Karpov or Kasparov now. Grandmaster Peter Biyiasas claims that Fischer is a much stronger player today. Over the course of several weeks in 1981 Fischer lived with Biyiasas and his wife, Ruth Haring, in their home in San Francisco, and the two grandmasters played well over a hundred speed games. “If anything, Bobby’s gotten better,” said Biyiasas. “He’s like a machine. There was a feeling of inevitability about those games. Fischer saw too much and was too fast. While he played, he made comments and joked, as if he were playing against an amateur. I didn’t win a single game.”

  Even more impressive to Biyiasas was Fischer’s ability to analyze chess positions. “We looked at Karpov-Kasparov games and he’d say, ‘But look at these blunders. Karpov could have drawn this game, but he lost it.’ They didn’t look like blunders to me, but when Bobby took the time to explain, I saw that he was right every time. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s still the best in the world.”

  Listening to Biyiasas, one has the impression that Fischer has been incubating for years, growing stronger and stronger, spiraling off into his own chess universe. According to several Fischer friends, former world champion Boris Spassky arrived at the same conclusion after losing the vast majority of speed games he played against Fischer in a secret meeting in 1987.

  Ron Gross, who is a strong master, has a more measured opinion. He played forty or fifty speed games against Fischer in 1984 and lost them all save for one win and two draws. He described the games with loving detail. “One day Bobby won seventeen in a row, and then I drew a game in which he allowed a perpetual check. I had played the Hennig-Schara and I was killing him on the queen-side. I had a check over there, and he allowe
d it, and I couldn’t figure out why. Afterwards he said, ‘Why didn’t you win the piece? You had a won game.’ I’d been so overjoyed to get a draw that I hadn’t looked for a win.”

  According to Gross, Bobby doesn’t study as much chess as he used to and has declined in strength slightly from his 2780 rating in 1972, but he is certain that Fischer is still strong enough to beat Karpov, and perhaps Kasparov. “His anti-Semitism gets in the way of his chess,” Gross said. “Whatever we talked about, chess or physical fitness or history, he would eventually guide the conversation back to the Jews. He believes that the Russian Revolution was engineered by some old rabbis, and that the Bolsheviks were Jews. He won’t read Chess Life because he believes that it’s run by Jews. He’s certain that the U.S. Chess Federation and FIDE are controlled by Jews. This way he can believe that the Jews have cut him off from playing or from making money at chess.”

  While we talked, Gross’s pretty daughter, who sometimes participates in scholastic tournaments around Los Angeles, came into his study to speak to her father. I asked her about the top young players in the area and learned that she has competed against Yvonne Krawiec and her brother Daniel, kids Joshua has also run across in national events. Somehow this indirect connection seemed intimate, as if I had happened upon a California friend of Joshua’s. In the chess world it seems that talented players know about one another regardless of where they live or how young they may be. Nine-year-olds in California stay abreast of the careers of their contemporaries in New York; there are pockets of children all around the country studying and competing, kids whose parents were turned on by Fischer and want their children to be great players. I began to describe a game Josh had played against Yvonne at the nationals in 1985, when he blundered an exchange but still managed to win in the endgame. In the telling I was at least as wrapped up in this contest between two eight-year-olds as Gross had been while demonstrating a brilliant Fischer game.

  I described the children’s chess world in New York to Gross and mentioned my theory that many of these kids, including my own, might not be playing today if it were not for Fischer. “I don’t think Bobby had much awareness of his role in chess and the impact he had on other people,” Gross responded. “It didn’t seem to matter to him. People are always telling me how great it would be for American chess if Fischer played again. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean anything to him. What he did for the game doesn’t interest him at all, and he doesn’t like anyone who helped him along the way. He fired all his lawyers; he fired his mother. No one could do enough to please him. All he cares about is his place in chess history. Once I realized that, I knew he’d never risk playing again.”

  Gross asked his daughter if she had done her chess homework. She answered in a way that made it perfectly clear that on a beautiful sunny afternoon chess was the last thing she would choose to do. Gross desperately wants her to be a player, but she resists him. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head fetchingly; who wants to study openings? Apparently this has been going on for some time, and by now Gross’s ambition for her chess is tinged with realism. “She’s into other things,” he said with a sigh.

  Maybe I will be like Gross in three or four years, when Josh has drifted out of the children’s chess wars, thinking nostalgically of all the talent he had, of all the great games he wasn’t playing, of how far he might have gone if only he had kept at it.

  I NEVER DID meet Bobby, of course. No one knows of anyone who has run into him for more than a year, and he is referred to as “the ghost of Pasadena.” More and more, rumors have replaced verifiable fact. There are stories about him handing out political pamphlets on street corners, attending chess tournaments in disguise, traveling to New York to make a quick visit to the Manhattan Chess Club, living in a swanky hotel in Mexico for six months, flying to India to arrange a match with a grandmaster, spending an hour discussing chess with a truck driver and playing a private match with Spassky, but nothing is known for certain.

  In 1987 the woman in New York who claimed to speak to Bobby regularly on the phone flew to California to meet him for the first time. “He’s so fast,” she said, referring to the games they played against one another in her hotel room. “He’s better than ever. No one could beat him.” But she is so intoxicated with her relationship with Fischer, her face rapturous as she talks about him, that one can’t help wondering if it is all a fantasy. “He’s so pure, like Jesus,” she said to me.

  IT IS SAID that Bobby has Nazi friends in San Francisco. But one of his old acquaintances assured me that Fischer’s anti-Semitism is nothing serious. Some say his chess is phenomenal and others claim he rarely plays anymore. He has become shifting sand. He is whatever people want him to be. Apparently Fischer has created his disappearance with as much care and depth as his most complicated chess positions. For a time after the Spassky match, he wasn’t hiding so much as living a private life. His circle of friends was large, and people could contact him quite easily. Important players like Karpov, for example, traveling to California, would meet with Bobby and discuss the possibility of a match with him. But over time he narrowed his circle and became more difficult to track down. Old acquaintances who had bragged publicly or had agreed to be interviewed about their relationship with him received one last phone call with the curt message that their friendship was over. During the last several years, his life seems to have become devoted to hiding. He has put passion and cunning into living invisibly, and private investigators hired by magazines have been unable to track him down.

  CLAUDIA MACAROW, WHO many believe now takes care of Fischer, is reputed to work two full-time jobs in order to support him. Lina Grumette was a friend of Macarow’s for several years, and I asked her why Claudia worked so hard to finance Bobby’s invisible life. “No reason,” said Lina. “She has nothing to gain except that she likes the idea of being around him.” In many ways Macarow has replaced Lina. “I found out that she looks through all of his mail before showing it to him,” Lina complained. “She used to take his messages, and I’ve always suspected that she never gave him the ones she didn’t want him to see. She manipulated him.” Despite her soft speaking voice, Lina was upset and perhaps a little jealous. These days Claudia’s phone is disconnected, and it is rumored that she has moved out of state. If so, who is taking care of Bobby?

  TOWARD THE END of their friendship, Gross and Fischer traveled together to Mexico. “He looked terrible,” Gross recalls, “clothes all baggy, wearing old beat-up shoes. We went down to Ensenada to go fishing. I remember that out on the boat one afternoon Bobby was green with seasickness. I tried to get him to take a pill but he wouldn’t consider it. But though he was sick, he was in good spirits. Everyone was catching rock cod, dolphins were swimming under the boat and we saw whales and flying fish. He was as excited as a little kid at seeing these things. He was fun to be around sometimes, because he had such enthusiasm. Then I noticed that he was favoring his mouth, and he told me that he’d had some work done on his teeth; he’d had a dentist take all the fillings out of his mouth.

  “I said, ‘Bobby, that’s going to ruin your teeth. Did you have him put plastic in the holes?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t have anything put in. I don’t want anything artificial in my head.’ He’d read about a guy wounded in World War II who had a metal plate in his head that was always picking up vibrations, maybe even radio transmissions. He said the same thing could happen from metal in your teeth.

  “I thought about what he’d done for a while, and a month or so later when we were at a spa, I asked him, ‘What are you gonna do when you lose your teeth?’ And Bobby said, ‘I’ll gum it. If I have to, I’ll gum it.’”

  * George Steiner, Fields of Force (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 28.

  * Brad Darrach, Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World (New York: Stein and Day, 1974), pp. 13–15.

  * Frank Brady, Profile of a Prodigy (New York: David McKay, 1974), pp. 180–81.

  22

  THE NATIONALS

&nb
sp; In the opinion of many experts, the United States today has the strongest group of preteen players of any country in the world, including the Soviet Union. Among them are approximately a dozen children between the ages of seven and twelve who have the potential to be world-class grandmasters. These kids have approximately the same playing strength as did such world champions as Anatoly Karpov, Gary Kasparov and Bobby Fischer when they were the same ages. Another dozen children play only slightly below this lofty standard.

  Social and cultural realities dictate that in the future most of these young players will devote their energies to pursuits other than chess, but if one of them were someday to become a world champion, this period of competing prodigies may be remembered as the most curious remnant of the Fischer legacy. While American chess professionals suffer from lack of respect and an inability to make a living, the children’s chess world thrives, and each year more and more parents who once rooted for Bobby Fischer as fervently as they cheered the Beatles are captivated by the idea of their kids’ becoming chess champions, or at least young chess champions.

  Each spring, the emotional odyssey of the chess parent comes to a head at the time of the National Scholastic Chess Championship. If a child is one of the highest-rated players, with a realistic chance of winning his division, the pressure on him and his parents during the weeks prior to the event can be horrible. Parents keep trying to reassure themselves and their kids that winning doesn’t matter, that chess must be kept in perspective, that life will quickly return to normal; the summer is coming up, after all, with camp, baseball and lots of other distractions. But an inner voice blasts these arguments apart with the crazy but unshakable moral conviction of Vince Lombardi, who proclaimed, “Winning is the only thing.” Despite love for the artistry of chess and the hundreds of little pleasures and pains during the preceding year of study and play, in the weeks before the nationals all the effort that has been expended over the previous year is weighed against the child’s performance during this single two-day event.