Bobby Fischer Goes to War

To the rest of the chess world, Fischer’s conviction that the game’s elite could and should command the same respect and rewards as screen idols, boxing stars, golfing celebrities, or Formula One racing drivers was in the realms of fantasy. Up to the 1970s, chess was Western sport’s poor cousin, never quite shaking off its character as a strictly cerebral game for passionate amateurs, inevitably bespectacled and boasting bad haircuts, playing in the smoky back rooms of tenebrous, sequestered clubs or on the bare boards of dank church halls.

A decade before Iceland, Fischer complained, “Reshevsky and I are the only ones in America who try to make a living. We don’t make much. The other masters have outside jobs. Like Rossolimo, he drives a cab. Evans, he works for the movies. The Russians, they get money from the government. We have to depend on tournament prizes. And they’re lousy. Maybe a couple of hundred bucks.” Thousands enjoyed the game, but nobody could make a living wage from it. There was little prize money in tournaments, little demand for books and coaches. In 1962, when Donald Schultz, later president of the U.S. Chess Federation, was setting up a tournament in a small town in upstate New York, he thought of inviting the teenage superstar, Bobby Fischer. “I contacted the chess federation office in New York and they put up $500—which doesn’t seem much now but was a lot then, and certainly no one else was doing it. And we brought Fischer to our tournament.”

For those U.S. players whose life was chess, old age could be tragic. In December 1971, a stalwart of the American chess world, then in his seventh decade, Hans Kmoch, wrote to the mayor of New York, John Lindsay, with a desperate request for financial assistance for himself and his crippled wife. Kmoch had labeled the thirteen- year-old Fischer’s match against Donald Byrne “the Game of the Century.” He was at the time earning $1,000 a year from his chess, which even in 1970 was barely subsistence level. The letter to Lindsay ends, “We would greatly appreciate it if you could tell us to whom we could apply to get the necessary assistance to keep us alive.”

Yet nine months after that plea, chess was featured daily on the front page of the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times. All three major U.S. TV networks dispatched crews to Iceland. To the astonishment of television executives, when Channel 13’s afternoon show broadcast the games as they were relayed by a special telegraph hookup from Reykjavik, it was soon drawing over a million viewers, the highest ratings public television had ever achieved. The thirty-five-year-old presenter, Shelby Lyman, a Harvard dropout and former sociology lecturer, provided move-by-move analysis, often performing for five hours at a stretch. A guest would join him, and in between moves they would chat about various aspects of chess. “But the move was the most important thing. Whenever there was a move, a tiny desk bell would ring and I’d announce, ‘Okay, we have a move!’ A woman would come in and hand it to me, and I’d say, ‘You won’t believe it. Fischer has done something we didn’t even consider!’ It was very dramatic.”

One reporter did a tour of twenty-one bars during a game, to discover that eighteen of them had their televisions tuned to this program and only three were showing the New York Mets base-ball game that drinkers would normally have demanded. When, on one occasion, Channel 13 TV executives chose to show the Democratic presidential convention rather than the chess, they were quickly forced to reverse their decision when hundreds of people rang in to complain, some threatening to burn down the station. So successful were the broadcasts that Lyman began to command huge appearance fees for promotional campaigns. As the match moved into its second half, the multinational computer giant IBM stepped in with a $10,000-a-week grant to fund a nationwide broadcast of the Sunday game.

Some preferred to follow developments in the company of fellow enthusiasts, in clubs and other venues. At the Marshall Club, chess expert Edmar Mednis puzzled over the moves on a large demonstration board. He would be wearing the club tie adorned with blue-and-yellow pieces. You had to arrive early to guarantee a seat. Mednis described being in front of that audience as “an electrifying experience; when Bobby won a game, the place would erupt in cheers.”

In London’s West End, aficionados gathered at Notre Dame Hall just off Leicester Square. The venue seated 200 to 300 people. Moves would be relayed from Iceland over the teleprinter. There were two large magnetic boards, one showing the actual position, the other available for analysis. In Geneva, diplomats at an international conference on disaster relief followed the action in breaks between negotiations.

BBC editors initially vacillated over whether the match justified its own television slot. Producer Bob Toner recalls, “What sold it as a news story was the cold war. The single U.S. figure pitting himself against the Soviet chess machine.” The corporation eventually decided to broadcast a weekly show from its Birmingham studios in the English West Midlands; like its American counterpart, this rapidly gained popularity, pulling in a million viewers. Leonard Barden was the regular chess expert, although the young and articulate international master Bill Hartston often co-commentated: the BBC regarded him as steady in a crisis (the show went out live on a Sunday night).

Around the world, the contest captured headlines. The prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, courted popularity by professing a fascination for chess to local journalists. The Bangladesh Observer says he became so absorbed by a game of chess at the National Press Club that he pulled up a chair and began to watch it—there is a photograph to prove it. Egypt’s official paper Al- Ahram reproduced a photograph of Fischer swimming in the pool at his hotel, the Loftleidir. The Yugoslav grandmaster Svetozar Gligoric reported daily for Radio Belgrade. In Belgrade itself, the games were replicated on a large display screen in Republic Square. During the weekend, a thousand people would be there to watch. In the main Argentinean newspaper, Clarin, the match was front-page news for almost two months, until it was superseded by a massacre of political prisoners in a jail in Patagonia. Grandmaster Miguel Najdorf was covering the event for the popular radio show El Fontana.

In the Italian daily La Stampa, a doctor made a neurological analysis of Fischer’s and Spassky’s brains. The more conservative Milan-based Corriere della Sera carried an exclusive interview with Fischer—after their correspondent had bumped into him at a restaurant. For journalists in Britain, where headline writing had long been turned into an art form, the match provided fertile subject matter. After one Fischer victory, the mass circulation tabloid Daily Mirror bellowed, SPASSKY SMASHKI.

Chess moved out of dilapidated back rooms to become part of consumer and commercial society. Advertisers and marketing managers called on it as a brand image to add allure to their products. To anyone wanting to identify the match as one between two political systems, the gleeful speed with which capitalist America responded to the business possibilities of the game should have been proof enough.

In New York, just up the road from the UN, the Metropolitan Museum put on an exhibition of chess pieces collected from all around the world. Department stores like Macy’s placed full-page advertisements in the press for chess courses as well as for chess books. Chess was now in fashion—and, like glamorous models, could be used to sell. An upmarket men’s clothing store encouraged custom with a picture of a board and the slogan YOUR MOVE, GENTLEMEN. The Dime Savings Bank also had a chessboard in its advertisement, this time with the slogan SMART SAVERS MAKE THEIR MOVE TO THE DIME. A sports shop used a picture of chess sets with the headline NOW IT’S AN AMERICAN SPORT!

And it was. With the transformation in the visibility and appeal of chess, there was a sudden thirst for information on the game—articles appeared on other grandmasters, on former world champions, on chess terminology. There was a bonanza in the sale of chess sets; in Britain, shops sold out of traditional wood sets, and plastic sets had to be imported from abroad. Booksellers reported with astonishment that chess books, once the slowest-selling items in their stores, were now leaving their shelves faster than romantic fiction.

Across the United States, during lunch breaks and after work, boards would be set up in public squares. The chess epidemic infected all generations and classes: the old played the young, business suits looked across the board at blue collars. An article appeared about two construction workers who had played each lunch break since the Fischer-Spassky match began. A photo shows them concentrating on the game, still wearing their hard hats. African Americans took up the game in increasing numbers—a lasting legacy of Reykjavik. Kibitzing decamped from the obscure club to the park bench: “Come on, patzer, even Fischer would resign in your position.”

In bars and saloons, people who barely knew the moves began to place bets on the outcome of the Reykjavik games. The bookmakers Ladbrokes of London established official betting odds, with Fischer as favorite at six to four. In Atlanta, the owner of a basement snack bar, Anita Chess, discovered that misled chess fanatics were swamping her cafe, the Chessboard. A composer of politically inspired songs, Joe Glazer, found he had caught the mood with his seven-minute paean to Robert Fischer. The lyrics, composed well before Reykjavik, opened