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

18. CHESS CONTAGION

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 café, 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 presciently enough:

Inevitably, chess metaphors spilled into other items in the news, most particularly into politics. In The New York Times, an opinion piece by Tom Wicker described President Nixon’s decision to choose Spiro Agnew as his vice presidential running mate in the forthcoming election as a sort of “king’s pawn opening.” Why a “king’s pawn opening” as opposed to a “queen’s” or “queen’s bishop’s pawn” was unclear and unexplained.

Predictably, diplomatic correspondents called on chess to describe negotiations between Washington and Moscow. One such article satirized the recent superpower summit, imagining it as a chess contest between Bobby Nixon and Boris Brezhnev. Far from shunning publicity, à la Fischer, Nixon courted it. “Nixon has insisted from the start that the match be held in as large a place as possible, that television cameras be turned on and kept on well before and after each game, that either he or his second be interviewed daily, and that all games be scheduled between 8 P.M. and 11 P.M., Los Angeles time….”

In Britain, a broadsheet daily The Guardian wrote, “Getting President Nixon and Mr Brezhnev together [in May 1972] was child’s play compared with the Fischer-Spassky chess summit.” The editorial assumption was that readers on both sides of the Atlantic had followed the chess drama. “Mugs sell mags” is the rule, and the tall, besuited genius made a compelling picture, while his personality and behavior could be relied on for a peg or angle to hook the reader.

The press attention given to the match was all the more surprising in the light of the competition for space.

Most important, there was Vietnam. As Kissinger shuttled between Washington, Saigon, and Paris in search of a peace agreement, Nixon pledged that there would be no letup in the bombing of North Vietnam without substantial progress in the negotiations, though he continued to withdraw American troops. Meanwhile, jury selection had begun for the trial of Daniel Ellsberg on charges of conspiracy, theft, and espionage of the top-secret Pentagon Papers, the seven-thousand-page study of America’s involvement with Vietnam.

The conflict in Southeast Asia was not the only fissile issue preoccupying the president: the election was looming. At 2:30 A.M. on 17 June of that year (Iceland’s Independence Day), five burglars wearing rubber surgical gloves had been arrested at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex. The police found they were carrying electronic eavesdropping equipment, cameras for photographing documents, walkie-talkies, and large sums in consecutively numbered $100 bills. As the match went on, two young journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were on the trail, their articles slowly forcing their way from the inside to the front pages.

Nixon was already involved in attempts to conceal the White House’s role in the break-in and continued to be at the center of the cover-up as summer turned into autumn and his thoughts were occupied with preparations for the Republican convention in late August (he was renominated by 1,347 votes to 1). The Watergate film All the President’s Men has the radio reporting Fischer’s forfeiture of game two as Woodward finds his first message from the secret source “Deep Throat” hidden in his breakfast New York Times. With the growing involvement of Congress and the courts and daily fresh evidence from the press, as the match ground on, Nixon became engaged in his own desperate game of chess, making move after move to save his presidential skin.

Chile was the scene of increasing anarchy (fueled, as we know now, by the United States) under the divisive and ultimately doomed government of the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende.

In Northern Ireland, it was a summer of dreadful riots, paramilitary killings, and bombings. The psychopathic ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, expelled the country’s fifty thousand Asian citizens on 5 August, accusing them of “sabotaging the country”—in fact, the Asian community was at the heart of Uganda’s business and commerce, as the country discovered to its cost after the expellees had grudgingly been given refuge in Britain by the Conservative government.

Readers seeking relief could turn to the sporting pages. Billie Jean King beat Evonne Goolagong in the Wimbledon women’s final, while Stan Smith defeated Ilie Nastase in the men’s. In golf, Lee Trevino won the British Open, and Belgian cyclist Eddie Merckx took the Tour de France for the fourth time. And as the chess match was drawing to a close, attention was shifting to Munich and the Olympics: Soviet hearts would beat faster when tiny Olga Korbut rippled her way to gymnastic gold. Among other American triumphs, Mark Spitz would capture seven swimming gold medals.

Munich would be remembered for the spilling of blood. A few days after the closing ceremony in Reykjavik, the Black September Palestinian terrorist group took eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage and then murdered them.

If amid all these events, Fischer-Spassky found its way on to the front pages, it was not just because of the challenger’s personality, the chess itself, or the off-board antics. In the United States there was much more to it than that. The country was undergoing a fit of cultural pessimism, mainly because of Vietnam, but also because of social and racial cleavages at home. Now, in the words of George M. Cohan’s bouncy lyrics, here was “a real live nephew of [his] Uncle Sam, the kid with all the candy”—in other words, here was an undisputed, unalloyed world-class player who (once he started to play) appeared to be a kick-ass winner. When Americans bought into chess, they were affirming the American way. Fischer appeared to be a guarantee that can-do America could do it at a time when it was profoundly in need of that reassurance.