Bobby Fischer Goes to War

he arrived at and left a tournament or match location.

Yet it is tempting to see his demands over lighting and noise, in part, as a means to another end. It appeared that Fischer always needed to be in control. Forcing concessions on the part of organizers was an affirmation of his power, that play was going ahead under his terms, not theirs. Even when tournament organizers did their best to preempt Fischer’s objections by pledging conditions in advance such as that the audience would be so many feet from the stage and the like, Fischer would still manage to identify a fault or two. Every now and again he would test the patience of the organizers to the limit, and then, when they were on the brink of despair, he would suddenly, and without explanation, have a change of heart and either impose an additional condition or pass over his original complaint as though it had never been made.

^{Fischer in 1970: the will to win. UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL}

His attitude to money was equally mysterious. At one level, his insistence on high fees was straightforward. He believed he should be paid at appropriate rates, appropriate rates being those on a par with sporting superstars such as Arnold Palmer or Joe Frazier. Never mind that chess had never been in the same league as table tennis, let alone golf or heavyweight boxing. Never mind that, with few spectators and little sponsorship, chess had no secure financial foundations outside the Soviet Union.

Fischer always maintained that his ambition was to get rich. He would say so repeatedly and unabashedly, in a way that made even Americans blanch. “I am only interested in chess and money,” he told a journalist from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. His incessant financial demands came across still worse in Europe, where emphasis on money was considered embarrassing, even vulgar. In weighing up the bids for the Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian Candidates matches, Fischer declared that one consideration should outweigh all others: which city paid the most. In a letter to the up-and-coming chess prodigy Walter Browne in January 1971, inviting Browne to become his full-time manager and chess second, Fischer says he believes chess is merely a means of making money. Without any evident irony, he remarks that chess players did not become rich because their egocentric nature led them to work alone. But the moneymaking possibilities were limitless. In what he calls the chess business, he could make $100,000 in the first year and double that in the next.

But what, apart from his expensive taste in suits, did Fischer want money for? He had no dependants, he did not yearn for luxuries, such as going to the opera or collecting art. He did not own a car, he never traveled for the sake of travel, and as far as food was concerned, his preference was for quantity over quality. One has the impression with Fischer that money was not about material possession. He was always reluctant to allow any marketing of himself, whatever the financial windfall. He was appalled by the notion that anyone else might make money out of his name. When his mother wanted to market purses with his signature, he furiously jumped on the idea.

Cash itself was about status and again about control and domination: if he was offered five, he wanted ten; if he was offered twenty, he wanted fifty. Perhaps his unwillingness even to put his signature on a contract stemmed from the same need; an agreement took his control away. Somehow, the actual amounts were immaterial.

In the media, Fischer was routinely portrayed with a range of derogatory adjectives. He was insolent, arrogant, rude, uncouth, spoiled, self-centered, abusive, offensive, vain, greedy, vulgar, disrespectful, boastful, cocky, bigoted, fanatical, cruel, paranoid, obsessive, and monomaniacal. But what is so intriguing is that those who knew him best rarely had a bad word to say about him. “Oh, that’s just Bobby,” they’d say, smiling indulgently, when discussing one or other bizarre episode. Something in Fischer spoke to his friends as the perpetual lost teenager, to be helped, not punished; to be assisted in realizing his potential for stardom, not hindered. Even allowing for the natural desire to be part of the celebrity’s entourage, it is striking how they chorus, “He was a wonderful kid,” when they are talking about him as a man.

American chess player Jim Sherwin says Fischer was just a “rough kid” from Brooklyn. Lothar Schmid, the chief arbiter in Reykjavik, tried to understand the American as he tried to understand his children: “He was not a bad boy.” Boris Spassky saw him as “always seventeen.” “He was a boy all the time,” says the former captain of the U.S. Olympic team, Eliot Hearst. “I don’t want you to paint a negative image of him; he was very nice.” And they also all point out that Fischer was capable of great kindness. As a child he would play opponents for a dollar a game and would give twenty-five cents of each dollar to his wheelchair-bound mentor, Jack Collins. In Curacao, Fischer was the only competitor to visit Mikhail Tal when Tal fell ill and was hospitalized.

In his biography of Fischer, Brady points out that Fischer’s tantrums at tournaments were aimed always at organizers, not at players. Nobody has a single complaint to make about Fischer’s behavior once he finally sat down at the board. He was the perfect gentleman. There was no gamesmanship, he never deliber ately tried to distract or disturb his opponent. He followed the rules strictly and demanded the same of others. On one well-known occasion, when Fischer was playing Wolfgang Unzicker in Buenos Aires in 1960, he touched a pawn, intending to move it; his fingers then hovered as he suddenly spotted that the move was disastrous. Another less upright player might have announced, “J’adoube” (“I adjust”), a legitimate way of touching a piece when one merely wants to reposition it in the middle of a square. Fischer moved the pawn—and rapidly lost the game. Unzicker, who observed the whole thing, though he was away from the board, says, “If Fischer had moved another piece, I was determined not to protest. But ever since this moment I have known that Fischer is a gentleman at the chessboard.”

Perhaps the most curious insight into what drove Fischer—curious to the point of being uncanny—comes in Elias Canetti’s masterpiece of obsession, Die Blendung (The Blinding), in English entitled Auto-da-Fe, published eight years before Fischer was born.

A central character is a hunchback Jewish dwarf and chess fanatic—Fischerle. Fischerle is a thief who lives off his wife’s earnings from prostitution and who dreams of defeating the world chess champion Capablanca, reducing him to tears. He introduces himself with, “Do you play chess? A person who can’t play chess isn’t a person.” Fischerle passes half his life at the chessboard, and it is only there that people treat him as normal, or perhaps normally abnormal, with his potent memory for games and rampaging play.

During his games his partners were far too much afraid of him to interrupt him with objections…. He dreamed of a life in which eating and sleeping could be got through while his opponent was making his moves.

Fischerle has unusually long arms and total recall of any chess game he has studied. He imagines becoming world champion and changing his name to Fischer. “He’ll have new suits made at the best possible tailor…. A gigantic palace will be built with real castles, knights, pawns, just as it ought to be.” Bobby, who had long arms and total recall of his games, once said he wanted to hire an architect to build a house in the shape of a rook. Canetti wrote Auto-da-Fe in the turmoil of 1930s Vienna. The prophetic similarities between the fictional Fischerle and the real Fischer have their roots in the young Canetti’s attempt to make sense of the apparent chaos of human actions. Thus each of his characters holds a completely personal perspective—and, indifferent to externalities, is driven down one path, like a live one-man rocket. Fischerle’s/Fischer’s view of the world is unidirectional, expressing itself through chess, governed only by the game and the power and rewards it could bring.

Commentators have made much of the similarities between Fischer and Spassky, pointing out that Spassky too was a second child, had a single-parent upbringing, and spent his early years in poverty. In fact, challenger and champion could scarcely have had more contrasting personalities and attitudes to life. Nor were America’s prosperity and democracy remotely comparable with the Stalinist horrors among which Spassky grew up and where the chessboard provided protection, fame, and, in Soviet terms, a fortune.

4. CHILD OF DESTRUCTION

Chess provides indisputable proof of the superiority of socialist culture over the declining culture of capitalist