Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

12. RAGE RULES

When the curtain goes up again, Fischer is in the playing hall. But a new character is on stage and in frustrated turmoil: Chester Fox, an ambitious, young, would-be filmmaker with bushy sideburns, tightly curled red hair, and dressed to impress in a wide-lapeled trench coat. He speaks some Russian. When he smokes in times of trouble (from this point, almost continuously), he forgets to puff and the cigarette burns until it melts the filter between his fingers. Fox is agitated. “Tell me, do I look like a rapist?” he asks a journalist. “Am I in here to rape somebody? All I want to do is make a deal.” Fox’s lawyer, Richard Stein, does his best to curb his client’s outbursts.

Although of limited experience, Fox had been granted exclusive rights to film and to photography inside the sports hall by the Icelandic Chess Federation. The deal was for Fischer and Spassky to receive 30 percent each of the revenue, with the other 40 percent being split evenly between the ICF and Fox. Fox was recommended by Paul Marshall, who claims that he could not find another filmmaker interested in the job. Aspects of the deal bewildered Thorarinsson. The Icelander was surprised that a one-man business was apparently the sole contender for the contract.

For Fox it was potentially a big break. With the unprecedented international interest, with TV stations hungry for pictures, having the monopoly must have seemed like having the key to the bank.

When the drawing of lots had taken place, Fischer had raised no complaints about the arrangements in the hall. The British chess master Harry Golombek, a vice president of FIDE who stood in for Euwe, complimented the Icelanders on “the best playing conditions in the history of chess” closed-circuit television throughout, 15,000 square feet of red carpet, 1,000 green chairs at ground level, 6,000 feet of curtaining to keep out the daylight.

Nervous officials waited in the hall night after night for a Fischer visit, but he kept deferring an inspection. When he eventually showed up, some forty hours before the first game, only the thirty-two pieces and a familiar swivel chair, especially flown in from New York, met his approval. The hand-carved lead-weighted chess set was made by an English company, John Jacques & Son. As for the leather-bound chair, it was designed by Charles Eames, originally for use in the lobby of the Time-Life Building in New York, and had been found at a shop on 600 Madison Avenue. The Michigan manufacturer of the chair Herman Miller had given the Icelandic organizers a $50 discount as “a token of our friendship and respect” for the Icelandic people. The official price was $524.

No matter what they had heard about the challenger, the naturally courteous Icelandic officials must have been disconcerted by what followed. The table, the chessboard, the lighting, the proximity of the seating to the stage, and the cloth-swathed towers in which the cameras were hidden—all were declared unsatisfactory. The $1,200 custom-built mahogany table should have its legs shortened, the sumptuous chessboard changed, the front rows of seats removed, the camera towers pushed right back to a point where filming would be nigh impracticable, the lighting brighter—no, less bright; no, brighter than that. Above the board was a four-meter-by-four-meter fluorescent fixture containing many bulbs. The Swedish-trained lighting engineer Dadi Agustsson was patient and sympathetic.

It was nearly three A.M. before Fischer got around to looking at the chessboard. “There are just too many spots in the stone. It needs to be clear.” At the request of Thorarinsson, Gunnar Magnusson had designed the table and board. The table was a rich mahogany with a matte varnish. There were two lower ledges for water. The chessboard itself was green-and-white marble. One of the nation’s best masons, Thorsteinn Bjornsson, had worked the stone. The factory had never made a chess set before—they specialized, among other things, in tombstones. Icelandic officials now yanked Bjornsson out of bed at six and told him he had thirty-six hours to make another board. “What do you mean, another board,” he shouted. “We made three already. What’s wrong? Is he crazy?” Later, Bjornsson had his men cut the two-and-a-quarter-inch squares, binding them together with crushed marble and transparent glue.

As for the camera positions, once Fischer had gone, the Icelandic officials and Cramer thought that they could find a compromise behind his back—a little shift away of the towers and one row of seats removed. Cramer checked his notes to see if there was anything else his boy might object to. “I’ve been through it all,” he said. “As far as I can see, the only thing left is the air.”

Six minutes after the scheduled start of the first game, Fischer appeared to the applause of the audience. At last, the championship was under way, and with a game that left grandmasters openmouthed.

Spassky played the opening and middle game with great caution and the first two hours were devoid of thrills. The queens came off at move eleven, a pair of knights at move sixteen, a pair of bishops at move eighteen, a pair of rooks at move nineteen, the two other rooks at move twenty-three, and the two other knights at move twenty-eight. That left six pawns and a bishop each. Most players would agree to a draw immediately upon reaching such a lifeless, evenly balanced position. There was no scent of victory for either side. There seemed to be no possibility of stirring up the position. Fischer had plenty of time to make his moves and was ahead of Spassky on the clock.

Then, on move twenty-nine, Fischer did the unthinkable. Picking up the remaining black bishop in the long fingers of his right hand, balancing it with his thumb, index, and middle fingers, he stretched out his arm and in one movement plucked off the rook pawn with his two smaller fingers while installing the bishop in its place.

This was inexplicable. In playing Bxh2—bishop takes the king rook pawn—Fischer had fallen into a standard trap. At first glance, the undefended white rook pawn looks as though it can be safely pinched by the black bishop. At second glance, one sees that if the pawn is taken, white’s knight’s pawn will be advanced one square, leaving the black bishop helplessly stranded. White can capture it with nonchalant ease. Even for the average club player, the recognition of such a danger is instinctive.

Fischer was the chess machine who did not commit errors. That was part of his aura, part of the “Bobby Fischer” legend, a key to his success. Newspapers reported a gasp of surprise spreading through the auditorium. Spassky, who had trained himself not to betray emotion, looked momentarily startled. Those who later analyzed the match were equally dumbfounded. “When I saw Bobby play this move,” wrote Golombek, “I could hardly believe my eyes. He had played so sensibly and competently up to now that I first of all thought there was something deep I had overlooked; but no matter how I stared at the board I could find no way out.” Nor could Robert Byrne and Ivo Nei, who analyze the game in their book on the match: “This move must be stamped as an outright blunder.” The British chess player and writer C. H. O’D. Alexander’s verdict is similar: “Unbelievable. By accurate play Fischer had established an obviously drawn position… now he makes a beginner’s blunder.” A television pundit on the U.S. Channel 13 reckoned it would go down as one of the great gaffes of all time. The Los Angeles Times thought it could be explained only as a “rare miscalculation by the American genius.” In Moscow, the correspondent for the Soviet state newspaper Izvestia, Yuri Ponomarenko, located the move’s source in sheer greed. Bondarevskii commented that the move was “a vivid example to smash the myth of [Fischer] as a computer.” Anatoli Karpov, the twenty-one-year-old Soviet star in the making, had a psychological theory involving both players: Spassky was afraid of the American and had sought to prove to himself that he could always draw with the white pieces. Fischer, annoyed, at tempted to disprove this. “So he sacrificed a piece without rhyme or reason.”

Years later, in twenty pages of exhaustive analysis, British grandmaster Jonathan Speelman concluded that even after Fischer captured the h pawn, totally accurate play could have earned him a draw. And to be charitable to Fischer, perhaps he recognized this intuitively. But that is hardly an explanation. For such a gambit had only a downside, offering no chance of victory. At best, with extreme care, it gave him the same result—a draw—that he could have achieved without any effort at all—indeed, probably by simply asking for one.

The game was adjourned after five hours, with Fischer’s position in a hopeless mess. Only The New York Times could conjure up a spirit of generosity: “Even if Fischer does lose the first game, he has achieved the respect of every player here by rising to Spassky’s dare and throwing away a sure draw for a speculative attack.” In 1992, when Fischer and Spassky played a rematch, a journalist, still intrigued by the move two decades earlier, asked Fischer whether he had been trying to create winning chances by complicating a drawn position. “Basically that’s right. Yes,” he replied.

At the time, however, he offered a different explanation, claiming to Lombardy that he had reacted too fast because the cameras distracted him. Soon after his first move, he protested ferociously to Schmid about the noise coming from the camera towers and repeated his complaint several times as the game wore on. No one particularly approved of the towers Chester Fox had constructed, ugly contraptions designed to conceal the film cameras and cameramen. They had been wrapped in black hessian, under which the cameramen sweated in saunalike conditions. But overnight the problem appeared to have been resolved when the two camera towers were removed from the hall. A third camera remained, looking down on the game from the back of the set.

Viktor Ivonin had arrived during the first day of the game and had gone straight to the hall, attempting with relish to predict the moves. (In his notebook, he jotted down that at the thirty-fifth move, when Spassky captured Fischer’s bishop, the American left the stage with “his trousers hung under his stomach.”) Despite the intellectual stimulation, he had a number of anxieties. There were some irregularities, some abnormalities, he noticed. There was Fischer’s luxury black leather American chair. The Soviet embassy had told him they were uneasy about it, without explaining why. Ivonin thought that the way the challenger constantly swiveled and threw himself around in it must surely distract the world champion. Spassky’s chair, by contrast, was a regular office model, firmly upright, with arms. Another worry was that when Spassky wrote his sealed adjournment move, his action was picked up by the closed-circuit camera and displayed on the big screen at the back of the stage. (At the end of a session, if a game was ongoing, one player was required secretly to seal the next move.) Ivonin later told Spassky that he had seen him write “pxp,” pawn takes pawn, and warned him in the future to make sure he concealed his move from the camera before committing anything to paper.

However, at dinner the mood was positive. Victory the following day looked assured. Ivonin quoted the Soviets’ first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, to Spassky: “Poekhali!”—“Let’s go!” meaning “We have lift off!” At some point, Spassky took a call from Lothar Schmid. Was he happy with everything? “Yes,” replied Spassky, “everything is fine.” Schmid said that there was something Fischer did not like, but he was not at liberty to say what.

As the experts had foretold, the next afternoon Fischer quickly capitulated; he struggled on for only sixteen more moves. A player other than Fischer might not have bothered to see it through that far. Geller remarked that if Fischer was doing so petty a thing as continuing with the game—not resigning when he was definitely going to lose—he was not that strong. It showed how the Soviet team had failed to understand the American’s character: that he would never give up, so long as there remained even a glimmer of a chance.

Spassky was not fooled by his victory, describing Fischer’s blunder as “a present to the Sports Committee.” When he and Fischer parted at the adjournment, Fischer had spoken to him in Russian, saying, “Do zavtra” (“Till tomorrow”). The Russian interpreted this as a mark of Fischer’s resilience, understanding immediately that he had a fight on his hands and that this was merely an opening skirmish for the battle ahead.

On stage for the adjourned first game, Fischer had appeared satisfied. But after thirty-five minutes and three moves, he leaned far back in his swivel chair and caught sight of the camera. Incandescent, he hurled himself off the platform, pursued by the chief arbiter. Schmid, he spat out to the arbiter’s face, was a liar for telling him the cameras had been removed. Unless the backstage camera was ejected at once, he would leave the match. Crushed by the force of the challenger’s vehemence, Schmid complied, ordering the camera to go. The cameras, the cameramen, and their producer, Chester Fox—all had become the object of Fischer’s rage.

Chester Fox was already an isolated and unpopular figure. The Icelandic camera team thought him unprofessional and his planned approach ludicrous, using miles and miles of film on a visually static scene when the action, and the profits, were outside the playing hall. (Of course, it is the traditional role of film cameramen to dismiss the director as being risibly ignorant and incompetent and for wasting their talent and time.) There were also cultural barriers. Fox was the New Yorker’s New Yorker. Thirty-one-year-old Icelandic cameraman Gissli Gestsson, who supplied the crew and equipment, took against him:

Nor did the Icelander have much sympathy for Fox’s problems inside the hall:

In fact, Fox could have been right. With the longueurs edited out, a move-by-move film of the match would still be selling today. Gestsson was under tremendous stress, and perhaps this partially accounts for his impatience with Fox. The Icelandic film and television industry was negligible, and the cameraman made his living by representing two of the biggest British worldwide film agencies. They had pressed him to cover the match for them; he had to bar his regular customers from the hall.

The Icelandic Chess Federation also faced a dilemma. They were contractually bound to Fox, and he was now in conflict with Fischer’s representatives, the very people who had suggested him. Gudmundur Thorarinsson remembers that although the Americans had been so keen on granting Fox exclusive rights, “once the problems started, they came to me and said, ‘You have to tear up the agreements with Chester Fox.’ I said, ‘We don’t do that in Iceland. Here we make an agreement and it’s an agreement.’”

Like Gissli Gestsson, Thorarinsson was struck by the “Jewishness” of the New Yorkers. (The number of Jews in Iceland was negligible: historically, they came and went as traders or merchants, and the Icelandic word for Jew, Gyoingur, was used to mean cunning or sharp.) “Fox was one of the Jews—they were all Jews around him,” notes Thorarinsson. “I think he was rather a simple guy, and he had nobody to support him; he seemed quite alone.” In a fight between Fischer and Fox, saving the match was always going to come first.

In any case, the legal position was not clear-cut. From Fox’s viewpoint, the Icelandic Chess Federation had sold him all picture rights. Film and video exploitation was permitted under the match rules and was a significant part of the budget. But the rules also stated that the players had the right to demand the end to any disturbance. And Fischer complained that the cameras disturbed him.

The Amsterdam agreement, in which all the rules were laid out, was not drafted to be watertight. Edmondson had done his best to cover Fischer in all eventualities. Approached by Schmid after the adjournment of the first game and handed a copy of the Amsterdam agreement, Paul Marshall demonstrated the approach that had brought him success and riches in New York legal combat: “I dropped them on the floor, saying, ‘They’re written in English: Do not quote rules that you can’t read.’ Almost as an afterthought, Marshall adds, ‘Because the rules were clearly in Bobby’s favor, and his complaint was absolutely right.’”

Through Marshall, Fischer demands that the ICF underwrite a document giving him complete control over filming. Believing it could not favor one player over another, the federation says no. With only one game over, the match reaches another impasse. Fox has his rights. Schmid and Thorarinsson have the match to safeguard. Fischer has his rage. Behind the walls a space is discovered in which the cameras are hidden yet can still see the board. Has the problem been finessed? On learning that the cameras are still there, Fischer refuses to come to the hall for the second game.

The game is scheduled to begin at five P.M. on Thursday, 13 July. Schmid presses the clock on the dot. Rule five states, “If a player does not appear within one hour of the start of the game, he loses that game by forfeit.” The road is cleared between the hall and Fischer’s hotel. Engine running, a police car stands ready to bring him. All the traffic lights are held at green. From New York, Andrew Davis intervenes, calling Richard Stein, one of the lawyers for Chester Fox Inc., and proposes that the cameras be removed for this game only, pending further discussion. Stein takes the call at 5:30 P.M. while Fischer’s clock is ticking and immediately agrees. He calls Lombardy on a hot line that has been set up from Fischer’s room to the playing hall. Thorarinsson orders the cameras to be removed completely. Fischer adds one more condition: His clock must be restarted. Already bruised by Fischer, and now distraught, Schmid refuses. The rules are the rules. He has Spassky to consider; the world champion has been waiting for forty minutes.

Unwillingly, finding the whole affair “vulgar,” grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson steps in at the request of the Icelandic Chess Federation. Within a few minutes, he has arrived at the Loftleidir hotel on a mission to mediate. His reward is a second dose of rudeness. Having ignored the Icelandic grandmaster at Keflavik, Fischer now submits him to a verbal tirade. Again and again he tells him that the ICF is a communist front. Olafsson phones Schmid. The only hope is to ask Spassky to agree to a restart. Schmid cannot. “There has to be a limit.” In one of the worst moments of his life, he goes onto the stage at six o’clock and announces that Spassky has been awarded the game. That night, Schmid wakes up with tears in his eyes “because I thought I had destroyed a genius by my decision.” Spassky now leads by two games to zero; it seems extraordinarily difficult for Fischer to surmount that—the champion needs only twelve points out of twenty-four to retain the title. The Washington Post reports that Americans are voluble in references to Fischer’s “disgraceful behavior.” Some are observed apologizing to Icelanders in the name of the United States.

A new round of crisis meetings begins. Andrew Davis jets in from New York, dropping everything to mastermind the predictable protest against Schmid’s decision. It will be based on what he claims has been a guarantee by Iceland that all television equipment would be “invisible and noiseless.” Seeking a way out for his client Chester Fox, Richard Stein tries schmoozing Fischer. He writes: “I can only express my admiration and appreciation for the elevation of chess in the eyes of the people of the States, through your Herculean efforts. As a folk hero of the Americans, you must permit millions of Americans to share this experience with you in their homes, through television.” Stein points out Fox’s investment and notes that the Icelandic Chess Federation’s entire financial structure depends on video and film proceeds. For all the impact this letter was going to have, he might as well have put it in a bottle and thrown it into Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon.

Meanwhile, conscience-stricken, Schmid tries to reach Fischer to discuss matters. He makes it plain to the match committee, which will hear the inevitable American protest, how ready he is to have his decision overruled. After receiving a note from Cramer, he tells Darrach to write an official letter of appeal to reach him before the deadline under the rules, midnight (six hours after the forfeit). According to Darrach, Schmid comes to Fischer’s suite just before time runs out, hoping to obtain the appeal. He is shown some scrawled pages and feels that they might count as delivered on time if he but touches them—which he does, then leaves them to be typed.

Why did the chief arbiter show such solicitude for the challenger? “I tried to give Bobby a chance. I had to be fair to both players. Bobby was unusual. He wasn’t protesting just to protest. He thought he was right even when he was not. I knew Bobby was not easy, but I knew also that he was not a bad boy. We had to save the match.”

Schmid is still in his pajamas, though with his hair neatly combed, when Fischer personally delivers the letter. Jumping up, the arbiter accidentally bangs his head on a lamp hanging low over a coffee table. According to Darrach, “Bobby grinned” at the sight of Schmid’s discomfort. In the letter, Fischer writes that he had been told the cameras would be silent and invisible and that “nothing could have been further from the facts.” “The bungling unknowns who claimed to be professional cameramen were clumsy, rude and deceitful. The only thing invisible, silent and out of sight was fairness on the part of the organizers. I have never compromised on anything affecting playing conditions of the game itself, which is my art and my profession. It seemed to me that the organizers deliberately tried to upset and provoke me by the way they coddled and kowtowed to that [camera] crew.” Spassky sniffs, “The letter is about everything except chess.”

That same morning, Friday, 14 July, the match committee meets. It consists of one American, Fred Cramer; one Russian, Nikolai Krogius; and two Icelanders, the assistant arbiter, Gudmundur Arnlaugsson, and a member of the ICF and head of the FIDE match committee Baldur Moeller, who is the Icelandic minister of justice.

Before the substantive issues can be thrashed out, a prior question must be addressed: Did Fischer’s appeal arrive on time? Schmid presents the facts. The previous night at 8:40 P.M., he had received a letter from Cramer, who said that it was not the formal protest: that would come later. At 11:50 P.M., Fischer had invited Schmid to his room and shown him some scribbles. At one A.M., Schmid had gone to the Russians in the Saga to tell them that there was a protest, but he did not yet have the text. They made clear that they did not accept Cramer’s letter as sufficient: Fischer had not signed it, as the rules required. The official protest duly signed had finally been delivered to him at eight A.M.

Davis then intervenes. He attempts to persuade the committee that the written protest was a mere formality; they must get to the essence. Schmid should not have started the clock because Fischer had already protested against the presence of television cameras in the hall. They had not been withdrawn. Thus, the conditions were not in order, in accordance with his demands. Ergo, Fischer was not late.

At this point, Geller interjects a counterargument. The rules said that players must be at the game on time. Now that the match was under way, it was too late to protest against the general conditions—there could be complaints only about specific games, and they must be made at the game itself.

As it is his judgment that is under question, Schmid withdraws. That same day at a news conference, Arnlaugsson announces the committee’s ruling. The protest is accepted as delivered in time, but Schmid’s decision to start the clock is affirmed. The cameras would be discussed later with the participants. Fischer’s loss is approved.

Everything to do with Fischer now goes into reverse: in place of the question “Will he comer?” is “Will he leave?” Lombardy, Cramer, Marshall in New York, all scurry around, organizing telegrams from fans in the States beseeching him to stay put. But in the event, an equal number of people, unprompted, send telegrams of condemnation.

While all this is going on, Henry Kissinger is on duty in California, helping to entertain the Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin at Nixon’s western White House, Casa Pacifica, on the beach at San Clemente. It is a considerable honor for Dobrynin as well as an opportunity for long, informal conversations with Kissinger on U.S.-Soviet relations. They sunbathe on the beach, and Kissinger takes the ambassador and his wife to Hollywood to mingle with the stars. There is no record of them meeting the Marx Brothers, though Hitchcock proposes a suspense film set in the Kremlin. “The time is not yet ripe,” intones Dobrynin. At some stage, Kissinger is said to have found time to put in a call to Reykjavik 22322, the hotel Loftleidir.

Fox’s chief cameraman, Gissli Gestsson, tells the story of how he, Gestsson, was in Fischer’s suite when the telephone rang: “That is the strangest call I ever witnessed in my life. I could hear Henry Kissinger giving him this pep talk like a coach, saying, ‘You’re our man up against the Commies.’ It was unbelievable.” Quite. Bearing in mind that the whole problem was caused by Fischer’s wrath directed at the cameramen, being admitted to Fischer’s side and hearing him take a call from the U.S. president’s right-hand man must have been the scoop of the match.

Fischer’s mind is unchanged, and again the match has descended into Marx Brothers burlesque. There are scenes involving flight reservations, plots to detain Fischer in Reykjavik to prevent his escape, and aborted drives to the airport. Marshall recalls:

Fischer off-stage continues to command almost all the attention. In the press, much of it makes for uncomfortable reading. The Washington Post agonizes that “Fischer has alienated millions of chess enthusiasts around the world.” All the expectations of him have “turned to ashes, with Bobby Fischer himself as arsonist.” The correspondent of Agence France-Presse writes that Fischer has crossed the boundaries of all proper behavior.

In contrast, the front pages of the Icelandic press are adorned with pictures of the well-mannered and apparently carefree world champion walking, fishing for salmon, or playing tennis. No doubt these help reassure the organizers that they can focus their efforts on keeping Fischer in the match and let the world champion await the challenger’s decision. It is difficult to resist the conjecture that their attitude is also influenced by the cold war. The West-East, us-them relationship is instrumental in what follows. The Americans and the Icelanders, partners in NATO, both with free market economies and democratically elected governments, are “us,” the Soviet chess delegation is “them.” Not being a true “them” is to prove Spassky’s undoing.