cut an imposing figure. Don Schultz, the former president of the U.S. Chess Federation, says that “just watching him sitting at the board you’d think, Gee, that guy’s going to win.” The fact that Fischer never looked for a draw and rarely agreed to a draw while there was still some uncertainty in the position, increased the mental exertion required to play him.
In Reykjavik to cover the match, the novelist Arthur Koestler famously coined the neologism “mimophant” to describe Fischer. “A mimophant is a hybrid species: a cross between a mimosa and an elephant. A member of this species is sensitive like a mimosa where his own feelings are concerned and thick-skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of others.”
There is no doubt that, like a psychopath, Fischer enjoyed that feeling of complete power over his opponent. Like a psychopath, he had no moral compunction about using his power. In a letter to a chess-playing acquaintance about the 1962 Olympiad in Bulgaria, he describes a game he played against the great Mikhail Botvinnik. Ultimately the game was drawn when Fischer fell for a Botvinnik trap (after which, according to Fischer, Botvinnik puffed out his chest, and strode away from the table like a giant). But Fischer had held the initiative for much of the game, and in the letter he is gleeful about the discomfort Botvinnik appeared to suffer, mocking the Soviet for changing color and looking about to expire.
Yet here was a paradox. Chess players are often described as either objective or subjective, those who play the board and those who play the opponent. In the thin air at the summit of grandmaster chess, where each player’s style and opening repertoire are familiar to all, there can be no such precise division; a mixture of the two approaches is inevitable. Within this spectrum, however, Fischer certainly occupied the board end. Fischer relished his opponent’s suffering but did not require it to take pleasure in the game. Indeed, some gibed that from his perspective the only thing wrong with chess was the necessity of having another human being on the other side of the board to play the moves.
According to his biographer, Frank Brady, Fischer’s intelligence quotient was estimated at Erasmus Hall High School to be in the 180s, and clearly he was capable of great mental feats in chess. He had a prodigious memory. He could remember all his games, even most of the speed games he had played. He would amaze fellow grandmasters by reminding them of some casual speed game they had played more than a decade earlier. This recall could be applied beyond chess. There are anecdotes about how he could listen to a foreign language with which he was completely unfamiliar and then repeat an entire conversation.
It was an intelligence distinct from knowledge or wisdom. He was not “educated,” he was not well-informed about current events, he was not “cultured”—and showed no desire to be. Nobody would describe him as mature. Indeed, those who knew him best were struck by his lack of social and emotional development.
He had little sense of humor in any of its forms; he never deployed irony or sarcasm or games with language such as punning. He appeared always to take remarks literally. The Yugoslav chess journalist Dimitri Bjelica remembers once traveling in a car with Fischer and the future world champion Mikhail Tal in Zurich in 1959. The driver was speeding along in a reckless fashion. “Fischer said, ‘Careful, we could crash.’ And I joked, if we died now, the world headlines tomorrow would say, ‘Dimitri Bjelica killed in an automobile with two passengers.’ Tal laughed, but Fischer said, ‘No, Dimitri, I am more famous and popular than you in America.’”
Many of Fischer’s views seemed to be locked in to his adolescence—for instance, his attitude to women: “They are all weak, all women. They are stupid compared to men.” His lifelong awkwardness with the opposite sex was legendary, his natural gaucheness particularly pronounced in the company of those women who knew little and cared less about the sixty-four squares. He believed women were a terrible distraction and that Spassky should have remained single: “Spassky has committed an enormous error in getting married.”
Fischer never had girlfriends, though he did express a crude preference. “I like vivacious girls with big tits,” he once said.
In 1971, Fischer went to Yugoslavia, where he stayed with Bjelica, who was directing a series of television programs on great chess players of the past. Bjelica used Fischer to analyze some of their games. On a day off, they decided to go and watch a beauty pageant in Sarajevo, for which they had been offered front-row seats. As Bjelica recalls, halfway through the event “Fischer suddenly whipped out his pocket set: ‘What do you think of queen to
Hate was among Fischer’s mechanisms for dealing with the world beyond the board; indeed, he was capable of being a grandmaster of hate. This hate could spring from the most trivial personal slight or from a worldview most would find bizarre. Once formed, it was unshakable; he had no concept of forgiveness.
After the Curacao tournament, his wariness and dislike of the Soviet Union slowly and inexorably descended into a state of delusion. He said his aim for the world championship match against Spassky was to teach the Soviets “a little humility.” Soviet players were not only “cheats” who were unfairly privileged by the support they received from the state, but they were out to get him personally. This conviction took Fischer into a land of fantasy. He had to be vigilant in case they tried to poison his food. He worried about flying in case the Soviets had tampered with the engine.
Fischer also hated Jews. Long before Reykjavik, he made anti-Semitic remarks and expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler to Lina Grumette, a chess player who had arranged a simultaneous match in Los Angeles, when Fischer was seventeen, and in 1967 put him up for a couple of months after he had moved to the West coast. As his mother was Jewish, under Jewish law he was Jewish himself, although this was a label he always rejected. When he discovered that he had been included in a list of famous Jews in the
Perhaps his rejection of his Jewishness was part of his rejection of his mother, though she appears to have been religiously unobservant (while turning to Jewish charities for help in looking after her children). However, Fischer was able to separate his hatred for Judaism as a religion and Jews as an ethnic group from Jewish people as individuals. He was on perfectly amicable terms with Jewish chess masters in the United States and the USSR.
We have already touched on a final aspect of Fischer’s personality. Naturally, all grandmasters want the playing environment in tournaments to be as good as it can possibly be. But in the history of chess competition, nobody had ever imposed the preconditions insisted upon by Fischer, or risked all to gain them.
He was acutely sensitive to noise, light, the color of the board, and the proximity of the audience. Noise or disturbance in the audience was not, as for most players, a mere irritant; it could, and increasingly did, cause what seemed a searing distress. (Fischer would, no doubt, have approved of a German book,
And yet, Fischer’s powers of concentration were legendary. Sometimes he would stare angrily when there was a whisper or rustle of a sweet wrapping. But on other occasions, a door would slam or there would be a commotion in the hall and he would be oblivious. At restaurants, he would take his pocket set to the table, shutting out the rest of the world entirely. In tournaments, other players might stretch their legs between moves, perhaps wander over to observe another game, engage in small talk with a fellow competitor. Fischer would for the most part remain seated, hunched forward over the board, or assume his alternative pose, leaning back, head cocked to one side, with his long legs and his size fourteen feet stretched out under the table, but always with his eyes boring deep into the squares, pieces, and patterns.
If it was pointed out, as often it was, that other competitors in a tournament had to play under identical conditions to Fischer’s, he would reply, justifiably, that it was he who attracted the most attention: Unless the audience were held back, they would jostle around his table. The press wanted pictures not of Smyslov or Geller or Petrosian or Larsen or Olafsson or Portisch, but of Fischer—photographers were constantly snapping away at him as
