Endgame (32 page)

T
O KEEP
B
OBBY
F
ISCHER HAPPY
, the American Chess Foundation provided him with a room at the Henry Hudson Hotel in early 1972.
As Fischer goes, so goes the chess nation
, organizers believed. Also, since he was preparing to play Boris Spassky for the World Championship, his lawyers and U.S. Chess Federation officials needed to know where he was at all times.
Questions arose almost daily about such details as the prize money, the schedule, and the venue. Decisions had to be made.

Up to that point, much of Bobby’s life had been nomadic because he spent so much time traveling from one competition to another. Whenever he returned to Brooklyn to prepare for the next tournament or match, he tended to sequester himself in his apartment. He’d often disconnect the telephone and render himself incommunicado—sometimes for weeks. This modus operandi wouldn’t have been workable as officials scurried to arrange a host of details for the World Championship match. So the Henry Hudson Hotel made sense, and it had the right atmospherics. It was where Bobby had won several United States Championships, and should he grow lonely in his room or want to play or talk chess, all he need do was take the elevator down a few floors and enter the Manhattan Chess Club. As its most eminent member, he was always given the red carpet treatment whenever he entered.

So it was that one night, shortly after taking up residence at the hotel, Bobby found himself stretched out on his bed, his heels locked over the edge, unself-consciously talking with two of his closest friends. The 1970s were the years of Nixon’s visit to China, the advent of Transcendental Meditation, cigarette advertising being banned from the airwaves, and fast-food chains
multiplying.
But none of those topics interested the three men in the room that evening. They were there to talk about chess and the anxiety Bobby was feeling.

Sam Sloan was a reed-thin stockbroker, with a slight Virginian drawl. A year younger than Bobby, his notable accomplishment wasn’t in chess—he was a tournament player but not of championship caliber—but in law. Aided by an eidetic memory, he was the last non-lawyer to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court—a case he won. Bobby trusted him.

The other man in the room that night was Bernard Zuckerman, only twenty-two days younger than Bobby, a fellow Brooklynite, and an international master. He was called “Zuck the Book” because he was considered by many—including Fischer—to have studied the literature on chess so thoroughly (“booked up,” as it is known in chess circles) that he was the most up-to-date opening theoretician in the country. However, he claimed that Fischer knew more. Zuckerman had soulful eyes, immensely long lashes, and shoulder-length hair, a residue of the ’60s. At tournaments he often arrived a half hour late for games, played rapidly, and usually offered a draw, which was invariably accepted. Bobby respected him. Both Sloan and Zuckerman were intensely interested in chess, Bobby, and women—interests that Bobby resoundingly shared in the first two cases and peripherally in the third.

That night the two men were being true friends and trying to calm down Bobby about his impending match. Although he’d just accomplished one of the greatest feats in the annals of chess by defeating Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian with a combined score of 18 ½–2½,
Fischer was concerned about the strength of
Spassky, who, he believed, had a “dynamic, individual style.” Bobby had never beaten him, and he revealed to his friends that he thought he might have trouble. “Why don’t you think you can beat him easily?” asked Zuckerman gently, pointing out that Spassky was no better than Petrosian, for example. “Spassky
is
better,” said Bobby somewhat woefully. “Not much better, but better.” Little did he know that Spassky, comparing his own performance to Bobby’s in 1971, judged Bobby the stronger player.

So much was at stake in the upcoming match that conflict was almost bound to result.
Eventually, internecine warfare erupted between the United States and Soviet Chess federations and FIDE. The Soviets spared no energy
in maneuvering for every advantage they could. They’d held the World Championship title for thirty-four years and had no intention of handing it to an American, especially an “uneducated” American. There were financial considerations as well. The six-figure purse that was being discussed would be the richest prize ever for a head-to-head confrontation in any sport other than boxing.

When Iceland submitted a bid to host the match, Bobby flew to its capital city, Reykjavik, to inspect the site.
He was encouraged to play there by Freysteinn Thorbergsson, an Icelandic player in his early forties who’d drawn with Bobby in a tournament in Reykjavik in 1960. But the president of the Icelandic Chess Federation, thirty-two-year-old Gudmundur Thorarinsson, a soft-spoken engineer and Shakespearean scholar, was wary of Bobby. A man who carried a big stick and had political ambitions (eventually, he became a member of parliament), Thorarinsson wanted the match in his country but had a low tolerance for Fischer’s shenanigans.

While negotiations as to the venue and the prize fund continued, both players went to the mountains to train.
Spassky ensconced himself in the Caucasus while Fischer settled in the Catskills, more than seven thousand miles away. Grossinger’s, a mammoth hotel complex in Ferndale, New York, the heart of the “Borscht Belt” where much of the New York City Jewish population had been vacationing for more than half a century, served as Fischer’s training camp for the four months preceding the match. Since Fischer’s Worldwide Church of God faith observed the same dietary and many of the Sabbath laws as the Judaic tradition, Grossinger’s was an ideal selection. There was no pork served in the dining room, and from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, the devout observed a sabbatical decorum.

Grossinger’s removed Bobby from the pressures of New York City, where he was just a ten-cent telephone call away from anyone who wanted to reach him, and it prevented people from dropping in for a casual visit and disturbing his concentration and study. The hotel was also renowned for catering to famous guests. Bobby loved being there and was in a perpetually good mood, with thoughts of growing rich from the impending match. He was saving money from his book royalties, tournament winnings, and exhibitions, and he informed his mother that he was doing “real well financially.”

At that time it looked as though the match with Spassky would have a
total prize fund of $138,000, the highest amount ever for a chess match. Bobby was trying to not get too excited about the money that would be coming his way. In spite of all the money and acclaim, he wrote with a certain humility that he was doing his best “not to forget who I really am, and to keep my mind on the eternal values.”

He was also happy to learn that Regina had passed the examination that would allow her to practice medicine in the United States, and he was hoping that she would consider moving back from Europe.

To prepare for the strenuousness of the World Championship match, Fischer trained his body as well as his mind, with workouts in the hotel gym, fast laps in the pool, and a few games of tennis each day. He seemed to dominate the tennis court while he was at Grossinger’s, and other than his games with the resident pro, Fischer usually won all of his matches. His serve was graceful and forcibly delivered, as were his return volleys. While waiting for his opponent to serve, he rapidly twisted the racket, bounced from foot to foot, and swayed his body, always ready to move to either side of the court. Walking back to his cottage or off to the swimming pool, he often swung the racket at an invisible tennis ball, just as he did as a boy when he’d swing an imaginary baseball bat while gamboling along Flatbush Avenue. All this physical activity kept him in great shape. He wrote to his mother that he was feeling “real fine” and that everyone was saying that he looked good because of his daily training.

Only after hours of exercise would he sit down at his chessboard. In the evenings, in a state of quiet contemplation, he began his exhaustive inspection of Spassky’s games.
This microscopic analysis often continued until the early hours of the morning. The reference text he consulted most frequently was what journalists were quick to describe as the “Big Red Book”—number 27 of the excellent
Weltgeschichte des Schachs
series—the games of champions—containing 355 games of Spassky’s, conveniently typeset with a diagram at every fifth move. Bobby never let the book out of his sight and carried it everywhere. It contained his own notes on Spassky’s games, jotted in pencil, with comments and question marks designating poor moves, exclamation marks designating good ones.
Almost as a parlor trick, he would often ask someone to pick a game at random from the book, tell him who played it against Spassky and where the game was played, and he would
then recite the game move by move. He had memorized more than 14,000 moves!

Although Bobby said in his letter to his mother that he was “studying a bit” for the match, in reality he was spending as much as twelve hours a day, seven days a week, going over such issues as what openings he would or wouldn’t play against Spassky and what kinds of games he felt Spassky was most uncomfortable playing. He was buoyed when he played over Spassky’s games in the recently concluded Alekhine Memorial tournament in Moscow. Bobby told an interviewer: “They were atrocious games. He was really lost in half the games in that tournament; really bad games on his part.”

While Spassky was supported by a small army of helpers, Fischer basically toiled alone. A British player, Robert Wade, supplied Bobby with a detailed analysis of Spassky’s openings in two loose-leaf books, one marked “Spassky: White” and the other “Spassky: Black.” Other than that, Bobby relied on his own efforts. To the press, however, he displayed nothing but confidence. “I’m not worried,” he said. And in a Muhammad Ali–type quote, destined to be picked up by the press, he added: “
The odds should be twenty to one [that I will win].”

During the months Fischer spent in training at Grossinger’s, he was visited by several other players, but while chess was the topic du jour, no one really contributed to Fischer’s preparatory efforts. Larry Evans and then Bernard Zuckerman visited, helping Bobby in any way they could, but even though he respected them, he sometimes asked them to sit away from the board so he could think things through himself.

Later, Lombardy fought the notion of Fischer as a player who was totally self-sufficient, an island unto himself. “
It’s true that he works alone, but he is learning from the games of other players all the time,” he said. “To say that Bobby Fischer developed his talent all by himself is like saying that Beethoven or Mozart developed without the benefit of the music … that came before them. If other chess players had never existed for Bobby Fischer to learn from, then there would
be
no Bobby Fischer today.”

Since Bobby’s suite had two bedrooms, he liked to have guests from time to time. Jackie Beers was his most frequent visitor. Bobby had known Jackie since childhood and they were an odd pair. Jackie was a rated expert, an excellent speed player, but he was always finding himself in trouble at chess
clubs, usually because of his ferocious temper. Once, a fight at the Manhattan Chess Club resulted in a lawsuit against him that was eventually settled out of court, and there were stories of his chasing people in the street or their chasing him because of altercations. With Bobby, Jackie acted meekly and respectfully.
He often stayed overnight in the Fischer apartment in Brooklyn and later was Bobby’s houseguest when Fischer lived in California. Jackie was no sycophant or whipping boy, as he’s been described by other writers. He recognized that Bobby was the “chief” of their friendship, but he wasn’t afraid to speak up and disagree. While Bobby knew of Jackie’s reputation for truculence and tolerated him nevertheless, he was careful not to include him in all areas of his life, knowing instinctively when Beers wouldn’t be welcomed by others.

At the beginning of May, Bobby’s Iceland acquaintance Freysteinn Thorbergsson made the journey from Iceland to America and checked in at Grossinger’s. At first, Bobby was a little reserved with him, but as they talked—for about seven hours—he warmed up. Though Bobby had always pushed for Belgrade as the site of the championship match, a tentative understanding seemed to have been worked out to at least split the match between Belgrade and Reykjavik. Thorbergsson clearly favored the idea of all the games being staged in Iceland. Going back to Bobby’s chalet, the two analyzed some games, and Thorbergsson continued his volley of subtle arguments for why Bobby should play exclusively in Iceland.

A gentle man, Thorbergsson had lived in Russia and was a rabid anti-Communist. He saw Bobby’s playing for the World Championship as a political act as much as a cultural one; and he used that line of reasoning with Bobby, maintaining that it would be morally wrong to allow the championship to be played within the Soviets’ sphere of influence. In an essay, he’d later write: “The Russians have for decades enslaved other nations and their own nationals. They use their victories in various sports, chess and in other fields to fool people and make them believe their system is the best.” He added that a Fischer victory would “
strike at the uplifted propaganda fists of the Communists.”