easy and friendly.” With Schmid and Thorarinsson frantic to save the match, one to safeguard Fischer, the other to safeguard his reputation and all the hard work and money that had gone into the championship, not to speak of his political future, the Soviet player became the sportsman or, rather, the pawn. The Americans broke the rules, and the ICF colluded with them. For Iceland, continuing the match was simply too vital; comparatively, too much was at stake. A larger country might have shrugged off Fischer’s wayward behavior and his lawyer’s aggressive gambits —“It’s his loss, not ours.” Iceland could not afford that, and the Americans knew it.
For Spassky, as for Schmid, worse was yet to come.
The board had been reset in the unwelcoming, bare back room behind the stage, used normally for table tennis. It was small, about seventy-five feet by thirty feet, with a sloping roof. On one side were windows that looked out over a grassed area toward the main road. The noise of passers-by and children frolicking could be heard.
Spassky arrived in time for the start and sat down at the board. Lothar Schmid was opening a window. Anxiously, Spassky looked around for Fischer. The challenger arrived and was immediately possessed by rage. Wrapped in blankets, a closed-circuit television camera had been installed to carry the action to the thousand- strong audience in the hall and the journalists and commentators in the press room. Fischer roared at Schmid: “No cameras!” He prowled the room, turning switches on and off. Schmid protested that Spassky was being disturbed. Fischer yelled back at him to shut up.
White-faced, Spassky stood. Lothar Schmid recollects, “When Bobby started to fight again, Boris became upset and he said, ‘If you do not stop the quarreling, I will go back to the playing hall and demand to play there.’” With the challenger turning the World Chess Championship into a verbal brawl, Schmid, panic-stricken, pleaded with the champion to continue the game. “Boris, you promised.” He turned to Fischer. “Bobby, please be kind.” Schmid remembers: “I felt there was only one chance to get them together. They were two grown-up boys, and I was the older one. I took them both and pressed them by the shoulders down into their chairs. Boris made the first move, and I started the clock.”
So on 16 July 1972 at nine minutes past five in the afternoon, the World Chess Championship match was finally saved.
Schmid is unrepentant about his unorthodox tactics. “I could have said to Bobby, ‘If you’re disputing the conditions, you don’t have to stay here in this closed back room. You are within your rights to lodge another complaint.’ But I thought—and I think that’s how it would have been—he would have gone away and never come back. This was the decisive moment in the match.”
Fischer was two down to the champion. He had never beaten Spassky, and now he had the black pieces. Nonetheless, early in the game he went into furious attack; at last the spotlight was where it was meant to be, on the chessboard. “This is wild stuff,” exclaimed a spectator. Fischer’s eleventh move, Nh5, was a shock; it left his pawn structure in a mess and removed a pawn from the defense of his king. One expert in Reykjavik described the move as “an entirely new conception”; Spassky spent half an hour studying it.
Grandmaster Reuben Fine, a psychoanalyst, thought Fischer’s ambiguous feelings toward women could be read off from moves like Nh5. Fischer, he maintained, liked to attack his opponent’s center from the side. Applying his professional insights, he concluded that Fischer’s tendency to hug the edge was “most likely the chessic equivalent of the running away that he was always threatening” and that this running away had to do with his apprehension about females.
Another grandmaster marveled, “Bobby’s attacking as though his life was involved.” Spassky was being outplayed. At the adjournment, Fischer wrote a move that, according to Frank Brady, left him exultant. “‘I sealed a crusher!’ he crowed, smashing a fist into his palm. ‘I’m crushing him with brute force! Haaaaaa!’”
Following a night’s analysis of the position, and assisted by grandmaster Isaac Boleslavskii, a new arrival on a brief visit, Spassky opened the sealed move—B-Q6 check—thought for five minutes, and resigned. Schmid apologized to the audience for the brevity of the show. They had paid the equivalent of a dollar a minute and seen one move. Ten minutes after Spassky had left, Fischer rushed in to claim his victory. He had beaten Spassky for the first time.
This second session of game three—that single move—was held on the stage in the main hall. Overnight, Spassky had written a letter to Schmid, a not quite official protest, delivering it just before midnight. He said that the back room was unsatisfactory: there was too much noise, from the air-conditioning, the traffic, children. (Curiously, the children had not disturbed Fischer.) The rest of the games must take place in the auditorium, in accordance with the match rules. Fischer, no doubt buoyed by victory, agreed to return to the auditorium provided there was no filming. Thorarinsson went along with this, leaving Fox stranded and muttering about legal action. It was not a difficult decision for Thorarinsson. “The filming is not the first priority. The chess match is the first priority. If this is the only way the match can go on, then we must take it.”
Because of Spassky’s letter, the organizing committee and representatives of the delegations met the next morning—a little late, under the circumstances—to discuss the legality of moving the game into the closed room. Golombek, an elder statesman of the chess world, told the committee that he could recall only two occasions when games were transferred to an alternative site because of a problem in the original venue: in the matches between Botvinnik and Smyslov and between Botvinnik and Tal. In both cases, the substitute venue had held spectators.
Schmid then spoke. He said Spassky had shown admirable sportsmanship in agreeing at such short notice to move to the back room. For future reference, the chief arbiter added: “I saved the match, but I’m not going to take this sort of decision again.”
Schmid’s praise for Spassky’s sportsmanship provoked bitter comments in the Soviet camp. Ivonin noted in his diary that Fischer’s behavior had taken a heavy toll on the champion. Spassky told him that his previous image of Fischer was shattered: “I idealized Fischer. The third game broke my idealism.” He had also seen something deeply disturbing in Fischer that he described as “an animal.”
That evening, the Soviet delegation held a meeting with the ambassador Sergei Astavin. They agreed there should be no more “charity” toward Fischer; the Americans did not go in for charity. The group believed that the Americans had acted deliberately to drag Spassky down and distract him—and that they had succeeded.
Later, Anatoli Karpov remarked that Fischer’s game two forfeit was “a stroke of genius, a stroke tailor-made for Spassky. It proved that Fischer knew Spassky inside out. Had it been Petrosian instead of Spassky, he would simply have licked his chops and swallowed the extra point.”
It was not the Soviets alone who recognized how destructive these events were for Spassky. Brady wrote that Fischer’s win brought the challenger’s gestalt into place—he had drawn blood, and it would become, says Brady, “a torrent of energy streaming out of Spassky’s psyche.”
In all this, what motivated Fischer? Many Fischer observers, including a few in the Soviet chess establishment, believed he was frightened of the chessboard. For Fischer, leaving Iceland proved as difficult as arriving. Marshall believed that when it came to a decision, “he was less afraid of playing than he was of the unknown. But make no mistake, he was terrified of playing.”
The Icelandic grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson, who was a friend and admirer of the challenger, also located the source of his behavior in that fear. “Why did Bobby not turn up? I tell you one thing. He had something really sick inside him. He had a terrible fear of losing.” Losing was for other players; “Bobby Fischer” could not afford to lose.
14. EYEBALL TO EYEBALL
