Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Moscow, the correspondent for the Soviet state newspaper Izvestia, Yuri Ponomarenko, located the move’s source in sheer greed. Bondarevskii commented that the move was “a vivid example to smash the myth of [Fischer] as a computer.” Anatoli Karpov, the twenty-one-year-old Soviet star in the making, had a psychological theory involving both players: Spassky was afraid of the American and had sought to prove to himself that he could always draw with the white pieces. Fischer, annoyed, at tempted to disprove this. “So he sacrificed a piece without rhyme or reason.”

Years later, in twenty pages of exhaustive analysis, British grandmaster Jonathan Speelman concluded that even after Fischer captured the h pawn, totally accurate play could have earned him a draw. And to be charitable to Fischer, perhaps he recognized this intuitively. But that is hardly an explanation. For such a gambit had only a downside, offering no chance of victory. At best, with extreme care, it gave him the same result—a draw—that he could have achieved without any effort at all—indeed, probably by simply asking for one.

The game was adjourned after five hours, with Fischer’s position in a hopeless mess. Only The New York Times could conjure up a spirit of generosity: “Even if Fischer does lose the first game, he has achieved the respect of every player here by rising to Spassky’s dare and throwing away a sure draw for a speculative attack.” In 1992, when Fischer and Spassky played a rematch, a journalist, still intrigued by the move two decades earlier, asked Fischer whether he had been trying to create winning chances by complicating a drawn position. “Basically that’s right. Yes,” he replied.

At the time, however, he offered a different explanation, claiming to Lombardy that he had reacted too fast because the cameras distracted him. Soon after his first move, he protested ferociously to Schmid about the noise coming from the camera towers and repeated his complaint several times as the game wore on. No one particularly approved of the towers Chester Fox had constructed, ugly contraptions designed to conceal the film cameras and cameramen. They had been wrapped in black hessian, under which the cameramen sweated in saunalike conditions. But overnight the problem appeared to have been resolved when the two camera towers were removed from the hall. A third camera remained, looking down on the game from the back of the set.

Viktor Ivonin had arrived during the first day of the game and had gone straight to the hall, attempting with relish to predict the moves. (In his notebook, he jotted down that at the thirty-fifth move, when Spassky captured Fischer’s bishop, the American left the stage with “his trousers hung under his stomach.”) Despite the intellectual stimulation, he had a number of anxieties. There were some irregularities, some abnormalities, he noticed. There was Fischer’s luxury black leather American chair. The Soviet embassy had told him they were uneasy about it, without explaining why. Ivonin thought that the way the challenger constantly swiveled and threw himself around in it must surely distract the world champion. Spassky’s chair, by contrast, was a regular office model, firmly upright, with arms. Another worry was that when Spassky wrote his sealed adjournment move, his action was picked up by the closed-circuit camera and displayed on the big screen at the back of the stage. (At the end of a session, if a game was ongoing, one player was required secretly to seal the next move.) Ivonin later told Spassky that he had seen him write “pxp,” pawn takes pawn, and warned him in the future to make sure he concealed his move from the camera before committing anything to paper.

However, at dinner the mood was positive. Victory the following day looked assured. Ivonin quoted the Soviets’ first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, to Spassky: “Poekhali!”—“Let’s go!” meaning “We have lift off!” At some point, Spassky took a call from Lothar Schmid. Was he happy with everything? “Yes,” replied Spassky, “everything is fine.” Schmid said that there was something Fischer did not like, but he was not at liberty to say what.

As the experts had foretold, the next afternoon Fischer quickly capitulated; he struggled on for only sixteen more moves. A player other than Fischer might not have bothered to see it through that far. Geller remarked that if Fischer was doing so petty a thing as continuing with the game—not resigning when he was definitely going to lose—he was not that strong. It showed how the Soviet team had failed to understand the American’s character: that he would never give up, so long as there remained even a glimmer of a chance.

Spassky was not fooled by his victory, describing Fischer’s blunder as “a present to the Sports Committee.” When he and Fischer parted at the adjournment, Fischer had spoken to him in Russian, saying, “Do zavtra” (“Till tomorrow”). The Russian interpreted this as a mark of Fischer’s resilience, understanding immediately that he had a fight on his hands and that this was merely an opening skirmish for the battle ahead.

On stage for the adjourned first game, Fischer had appeared satisfied. But after thirty-five minutes and three moves, he leaned far back in his swivel chair and caught sight of the camera. Incandescent, he hurled himself off the platform, pursued by the chief arbiter. Schmid, he spat out to the arbiter’s face, was a liar for telling him the cameras had been removed. Unless the backstage camera was ejected at once, he would leave the match. Crushed by the force of the challenger’s vehemence, Schmid complied, ordering the camera to go. The cameras, the cameramen, and their producer, Chester Fox—all had become the object of Fischer’s rage.

Chester Fox was already an isolated and unpopular figure. The Icelandic camera team thought him unprofessional and his planned approach ludicrous, using miles and miles of film on a visually static scene when the action, and the profits, were outside the playing hall. (Of course, it is the traditional role of film cameramen to dismiss the director as being risibly ignorant and incompetent and for wasting their talent and time.) There were also cultural barriers. Fox was the New Yorker’s New Yorker. Thirty-one-year-old Icelandic cameraman Gissli Gestsson, who supplied the crew and equipment, took against him:

He was a funny character—a typically New York Jewish character. I didn’t trust him because after a time I realized he promised more than he could deliver. He was noisy, and he and his colleagues had some odd ideas about Iceland. They complained that everything was primitive. I think they expected the atmosphere in Iceland to be like that in Manhattan.

Nor did the Icelander have much sympathy for Fox’s problems inside the hall:

He could claim he didn’t have the access that he was promised, but he had access to so many other things that gave him a good source of revenue. For a few weeks, this was the biggest event going on in the world. I think his loss in the auditorium was compensated for by what he was able to sell from outside the auditorium to all over the world.

In fact, Fox could have been right. With the longueurs edited out, a move-by-move film of the match would still be selling today. Gestsson was under tremendous stress, and perhaps this partially accounts for his impatience with Fox. The Icelandic film and television industry was negligible, and the cameraman made his living by representing two of the biggest British worldwide film agencies. They had pressed him to cover the match for them; he had to bar his regular customers from the hall.

The Icelandic Chess Federation also faced a dilemma. They were contractually bound to Fox, and he was now in conflict with Fischer’s representatives, the very people who had suggested him. Gudmundur Thorarinsson remembers that although the Americans had been so keen on granting Fox exclusive rights, “once the problems started, they came to me and said, ‘You have to tear up the agreements with Chester Fox.’ I said, ‘We don’t do that in Iceland. Here we make an agreement and it’s an agreement.’”

Like Gissli Gestsson, Thorarinsson was struck by the “Jewishness” of the New Yorkers. (The number of Jews in Iceland was negligible: historically, they came and went as traders or merchants, and the Icelandic word for Jew, Gyoingur, was used to mean cunning or sharp.) “Fox was one of the Jews—they were all Jews around him,” notes Thorarinsson. “I think he was rather a simple guy, and he had nobody to support him; he seemed quite alone.” In a fight between Fischer and Fox, saving the match was always going to come first.

In any case, the legal position was not clear-cut. From Fox’s viewpoint, the Icelandic Chess Federation had sold him all picture rights. Film and video exploitation was permitted under the match rules and was a significant part of the budget. But the rules also stated that the players had the right to demand the end to any disturbance. And Fischer complained that the cameras disturbed him.

The Amsterdam agreement, in which all the rules were laid out, was not drafted to be watertight. Edmondson had done his best to cover Fischer in all eventualities. Approached by Schmid after the adjournment of the first game and handed a copy of the Amsterdam agreement, Paul Marshall demonstrated the approach that had