Endgame: Chapters 5–9

With his deep brown, almost black eyes, he’d glare so intently at his opponents that some said he was attempting to hypnotize them into making a vapid move.

Twice champion of the USSR, he’d won the 1958 Portorož Interzonal, becoming a front runner to play the incumbent titleholder, Mikhail Botvinnik, for the World Championship in 1960.

Lanky, with a loping gait, and dressed in what some Europeans thought was Western or Texan clothing, he was described as being “laconic as the hero of an old cowboy movie.”

During the contest, Fischer habitually dressed in a ski sweater and unpressed pants, and left his hair matted as if unwashed, while the other players donned suits, shirts, and ties, and were scrupulous about their grooming.

Bobby’s second, the great Danish player Bent Larsen, who was there to help him as a trainer and mentor, instead criticized his charge, perhaps smarting from the rout he’d suffered at Fischer’s hands in Portorož.

Bobby, for his part, was livid at the seeming collusion: “I will teach those dirty Russians a lesson they won’t forget for a long time,” he wrote from the Hotel Toplice.

He became annoyed at Tal's comportment at and away from the board.

Bobby was fast gaining a reputation as a constant complainer, the Petulant American, a role most of the players found distasteful.

It was the cantankerous, curmudgeonly talk show humorist Jean Shepherd who entranced him.

It was the cantankerous, curmudgeonly talk show humorist Jean Shepherd who entranced him.

He’d also heard that television emitted possibly harmful electronic rays and he was skittish about spending too much time in front of the ubiquitous tube.

“He has all the right principles: dedication, hard work, perseverance, never giving up. He’s dogged; he’s persistent.”

One of the tenets of Armstrong’s creed was that you can’t trust the role that doctors have assumed.

And it didn’t matter if he rebuffed or rejected a person, because someone else was sure to phone with yet another offer to play chess, see a movie, or eat a fish dinner.

Such potshots, he felt, diminished him—however subtle they might be.

He introduced Bobby to his tailor in the Little Hungary section of Manhattan so that the teenager could have some bespoke suits made.

Regina, ever irrepressible and somehow aware of the adverse weather, shipped a pair of galoshes to her son and admonished herself for not insisting that he take his leather coat when he left the States.

In the course of his rapid analysis, he discussed the ramifications of certain variations or tactics, why each would be advisable or not.

Kashdan responded to Bobby’s overture and later commented: “I had no real problem with him. All he wants to do is to play chess. He is a tremendous player.”

Then, with a look on his face that promised he was going to reveal the meaning of life, he said in stentorian tones: “I can see in your palm, Mr. Tal, that the next World Champion will be...”

A short while later, Chess Life, in describing the incident, chose to find in it an augury of things to come.

There was only one problem with Chess Life's semi- hagiography: Reshevsky didn’t agree with it, nor did many of his supporters.

For many years Reshevsky had enjoyed a reign as America’s “greatest,” and now all the spoils and baubles seemed to be going to Bobby, whom many thought of as simply a young, irreverent upstart from Brooklyn.

He was a tall, gangly, intense, quarrelsome teenager, a quixotic chess prince who exhibited occasional flashes of charm and grace.

He maneuvered for tiny advantages and exhibited an obdurate patience.

Ginzburg quoted Fischer as saying that he bought his suits, shirts, and shoes from the best tailors all over the world and was “going to hire the best architect and have him build it [my house] in the shape of a rook...spiral staircases, parapets, everything. I want to live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.”

He was effusively thankful to the doctors for not insisting he be put under the knife.

Forty years later he’d still be espousing ideas put forth by Armstrong and the Plain Truth.

And yet Bobby failed to mention that neither he nor anyone else ever proved a threat to the three leading Russians throughout this tournament, so the question of why the Russians would have colluded as flagrantly as Bobby maintained remains unanswered.

Perhaps because of Fischer’s intransigent article in Sports Illustrated, the Soviets and the rest of the chess world were shocked into accepting a new FIDE dictum: A radical reform of the Candidates was instituted.

Forgetting that he’d ever been way behind the fashion curve, he was appalled, in some priggish, nouveau riche kind of way, that certain passengers appeared in the dining room in slacks and sneakers.

During the nine-day voyage from New York to Rotterdam in September 1962 he slept as much as he could, played over some games, and sat on the promenade deck to take in the bracing sea air.

Bobby’s diatribe about cheating by the Soviets was being discussed all over the world, and the chess hierarchy in Russia was incensed.

As Fischer’s losses and draws mounted, it became clear that he was having the most disastrous tournament of his adult career, perhaps even worse than his Buenos Aires debacle.

His reaction was a study in ambivalence. He was overjoyed that he’d pulled himself out of the abyss in which he’d found himself in the tournament’s first half, but devastated that he hadn’t won first prize.

...he summarily dropped out of the 1967 Interzonal in Tunisia—even though he was leading and was almost assured of first place—because of the refusal of the organizers to agree to his scheduling demands.

There was the brooding Mikhail Tal, he of the disconcerting stare; Bent Larsen, his blond hair brushed straight back; Mikhail Botvinnik, who looked like a conservative businessman; the Czechoslovakian Vlastimil Hort, just a few months younger than Fischer; Bobby’s friend Svetozar Gligoric, the handsome, mustached Serbian whose personality made him one of the most popular players; and the swarthy Tigran Petrosian, whom Bobby was about to play.

A bystander reported that Fischer had said, “Too early,” but Geller’s face turned red, suggesting that Fischer’s reply had been more caustic.

Despite besting twenty-three of the world’s most eminent chess players, though, he remained relatively unimpressed with his performance: “I am satisfied with the result, but not with my play.”

For his labors, Bobby was awarded a $7,500 prize plus an honorarium of $3,000 from the U.S. Chess Federation.