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

22. UNEASY LIES THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN

With the match over and Fischer wrapped in triumphalism, the organizers were still unable to relax. His absence at the opening ceremony had been a catastrophe; now they worried that the new world champion would ignore the final dinner. Worn down by two months of Fischerism, Gudmundur Thorarinsson was almost reconciled to this. Fred Cramer fed the doubts. He thought his man should be crowned in his hotel room: “I cannot see Bobby sitting quietly through a load of speeches.”

Euwe, Schmid, and Thorarinsson met for a drink at the hotel Esja before the ceremony. A journalist asked Schmid whether he would arbitrate another match. “I would have to have a long think about that,” was the cautious response. Euwe thought the best thing about the match was that it was over. Corriere della Sera completed its coverage of Fischer-Spassky as though it had been a fairy tale: “Good night, Fischer; good night, Spassky; good night to the enchanted island of Iceland.”

China’s newly appointed ambassador to Iceland, Chen Tung, was one of many delighted that the match was finally over. Chen Tung had a long-standing booking of the presidential suite in the Loftleidir, expecting the match to have concluded. So as not to cause a diplomatic row, the hotel had approached Cramer, wondering whether, in view of Chen Tung’s prior reservation, Fischer might be willing to move to another suite. “We are not prepared to discuss anything but chess at the moment,” the panjandrum shot back. “Bobby cannot be bothered with the problems of the Chinese ambassador.” For Chen Tung, there was always the option of the other main luxury hotel in town, the Saga. But that was where the representatives of China’s ideological foe—the Soviets—were quartered.

For the closing dinner at the Laugardalsholl on Sunday, 3 September (price $22 a head), a Viking theme had been chosen. The waiters wore plastic Viking hats. Guests could feast on barbecued suckling pig and spitted mountain lamb, washed down with Viking’s Blood, a potent concoction unknown to Vikings and containing wine, cognac, orange juice, and lemonade. The meal began on time at seven P.M. Spassky was there, as were Schmid, Thorarinsson, Euwe, the minister of finance Halldor Sigurdsson, and over 1,200 other people. In a reprise of the opening ceremony, Fischer’s place was vacant.

Virtually an hour late, at 7:55 P.M., as the band on stage was striking up the chess federation’s anthem, the guest of honor finally appeared, garbed in a violet velvet suit. Harry Golombek wrote that it “must have been made of samite, mystic, wonderful….” A standing ovation greeted the new champion. He took his place to the right of Max Euwe; Spassky was on Euwe’s other side. The FIDE president rose to deliver one of several speeches that night. Fischer promptly shuffled into the vacated seat, reached into his jacket, took out a pocket chess set, and showed Spassky the adjourned position from their final game. It must have been the last thing the weary ex-champion wanted to see, though he maintains today that he was unperturbed by Fischer’s behavior. In any case, he dutifully followed the analysis, from time to time adding comments of his own.

At issue was whether Spassky could have survived with a draw by sealing an alternative move before the adjournment. Fischer thought not.

A crowd gathered around their table. Fischer finally noticed them and turned to his friend and bodyguard. “Hey, Sammy, get these guys outta here.”

It was Thorarinsson’s task to hand over the checks. For the victor, this was a sum of $76,123—two-thirds of $125,000. An equal amount awaited transfer from the United Kingdom—Jim Slater’s money, the donation that had saved the match.

Fischer made no speech of thanks, no graceful comment on the hard work that had gone into the long contest, no tribute to his defeated opponent. Taking his prize, he immediately tore open the envelope and closely scrutinized the contents for several minutes, checking the figure. Satisfied, he then returned to his seat.

Chester Fox came into his own at last, filming everything in sight, probably motivated as much by one-upmanship as profit. There was dancing until one A.M. Fischer boogied awkwardly with two young Icelandic women, Anna Thorsteinsdottir, eighteen, and her friend Inga, seventeen—the papers the next day called them “beautiful Icelandic blondes.” Palsson had arranged their tickets. (He and Fischer had been eating in a restaurant when he had seen them gawking at Fischer and invited them to the banquet. The two women had even been back to the American’s room late at night to listen to rock music.) They denied rumors that there was any romance. “He has been very nice to us, but there is nothing in it. You couldn’t interest him in girls because he’s married to chess.”

To end the formalities, there was still one final reception, given by the government at the president’s official residence. Palsson drove Fischer there: this time, amazingly, they were early. “When Bobby saw that the ministers were arriving after him, he took me to one side and said, ‘Saemi, how did you manage to get me here on time?’” Iceland’s rock ‘n’ roll policeman had cracked it. While Fischer was in the shower, he had put the wall clock, the clock on the table, and the champion’s wristwatch all forward by an hour. “‘Oh,’ Bobby said, ‘that was a great move!’ Sometimes you could say or do anything. But if he’d been in a bad mood, he could have erupted, maybe left, maybe gone straight back to America.”

At that reception, Fischer chatted amiably with officials from the Soviet embassy, and he and Spassky tentatively agreed to go swimming the following day. Spassky later rang to cancel: He was leaving for home early the next morning and he had to pack and so forth. Fischer was annoyed and told Palsson he would not bid good-bye to his opponent. Palsson recounts how he became angry in turn and told Fischer that he should at least write a farewell letter. The Life photographer Harry Benson had given Fischer a cheap camera. As Fischer did not want it, the Icelander suggested he present it to Spassky. Fischer replied that it was too cheap. “‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not the point, it’s a token.’ So I took it to the Saga to hand it over, and Spassky was so emotional. I’ve never seen a man so pleased. It was one of the best things I did during the match.”

In 2000, looking back at his time as world champion, Spassky remarked to the Irish Times, “I was a king in Russia.” Yet his period of office had been so uneasy that we can imagine his mixed feelings on watching Fischer, whom he had so admired, take his place. David Spanier of The Times sensed “that in some deep and hidden part of himself, he wanted Fischer to win.”

After the debacle of the third game, Spassky had fought hard. When it was all over, he commented that Fischer had started the match as a sprint but instead it had become a marathon; he had expected the American to crack at any time. He met Fischer only once after the closing ceremony, at the presidential reception, and asked the new champion whether they could have a rematch.

“Maybe,” replied Fischer.

“When?”

“Maybe in a year—if the money side is okay.”

The former champion reflected on the fate that awaited his successor: “It will be a hard time for him. Now he feels like a god. He thinks all problems are over—he will have many friends, people will love him, history will obey him. But it is not so. In these high places it is very cold, very lonely. Soon depression will set in. I like him, and I am afraid what will happen to him now.” These somber words were also about himself.

By the end, Spassky was far from the figure of radiant well-being who had arrived in Iceland so full of confident anticipation. Larisa Spasskaia remembers also being affected: the healthy woman who went to Reykjavik returned with stomach pains and was not herself for six months. Boris, she recounts, was in a bad way, drinking more than usual and needing psychotherapy to deal with the trauma of the contest.

Trauma was to be expected. “I do not know which is worse, before the match or after,” Spassky said. “In a long match, a player goes very deep into himself, like a diver. Then he comes up very fast. Every time, whether I win or if I lose, I am so depressed I want to die. I cannot get back in touch with other people. I want the other chess player. I miss him. Only after a year will the pain go away. A year.”

There were material compensations. Spassky had his share of the prize money, $93,750. The USSR chess authorities had made no provision for dealing with such staggering winnings, and Spassky simply kept the money for himself; the authorities never asked for it. In the Soviet Union, it made him at least the equivalent of a millionaire in the West. Tigran Petrosian remarked, “Normally you could buy a car with your winnings, but when you could purchase the whole car park, that was something else.” (In future, Soviet participants in world championship matches would be obliged to hand over half their bounty.) He could also parade around in a new Range Rover four-wheel-drive car, sold to him at cost by his dealer friend, Sigfus Sigfusson, who had arranged for the latest model, in white, well equipped with spares, to be sent to Reykjavik and shipped on to Leningrad. Larisa’s prize possession was a new Icelandic winter coat. (The car was sold after two years of hard labor on Soviet roads; the winter coat lasted much longer.)

After leaving Reykjavik on 7 September, Spassky and his wife stayed in Copenhagen for a few days before returning to Moscow to face the music. Was he not the Soviet who had surrendered the crown to an American, and with it Soviet hegemony? Would he not be seen as having failed to live up to the spirit of the great motherland? Perhaps visions of Taimanov’s reception after his defeat by Fischer haunted his dreams.

In fact, the message had already gone out from Central Committee secretary Piotr Demichev that Spassky was to be received in a civilized manner. At Sheremet’evo Airport, the welcome party included a representative of the Sports Committee, a journalist, and some close friends. Nikolai Krogius remembers that “on the whole, Spassky’s defeat was received calmly in Moscow. It was a pleasant surprise that the sporting leadership and the press did not seek to punish him and his team.”

Nevertheless, it was hardly the hero’s reception he would have expected had he been victorious. The Associated Press described it as “anti-VIP” treatment. He had to stand in the long line for passport control, queue up for his bags, fill out the customs forms. A battered gray-and-blue bus awaited them rather than an official Chaika limousine. Larisa was observed chewing gum: a “dirty habit” she had learned “over there,” someone remarked. “Over there” meant outside the USSR. His bus stopped at all the traffic lights: triumphant, he might have sailed through as if he were Brezhnev.

And knives were out over his defeat. Mikhail Botvinnik commented later that Spassky lost because he overrated himself. The former world champion Vasili Smyslov chastised Spassky. In a creative sense, he said, Spassky went to the match completely empty. And he added that Fischer and Spassky both took home what they thought about: Fischer the crown and money and Spassky only money. Geller gave his views privately to Ivonin: that Spassky loved himself, that this defeat had taught him a big lesson, that he had underestimated the need for preparation and had not played enough, that he was still an idealist who “melted again” when he last talked to Fischer. Spassky was “very soft with his enemies and very ferocious with those trying to help him.”

These were just the precursors to the official postmortem held on 27 December 1972 at the Sports Committee and chaired by Viktor Ivonin. Apart from Spassky, Geller, and Krogius, the top brass of Soviet chess was represented in the fifteen men gathered around the table. They included five grandmasters, two of them former world champions, as well as the senior officers of the USSR Chess Federation. Their deliberations are recorded in near verbatim minutes.

The purpose of the meeting was to look ahead, Ivonin declared from the chair: “We must draw up plans for returning the championship to our Soviet family.” But in opening the discussion as the official team leader in Reykjavik, Geller wasted no time in going for Spassky, laying on him all the blame for the lost title. He cited Spassky’s decision “taken on his own” to play in the closed room, constant and incomprehensible departures from agreed tactics, and unbelievable blunders. The most damning accusation related to a psychological failure:

Geller had set the tone, although Krogius, in a much briefer intervention, couched his opinion more positively: Spassky’s defeat was due to his treating people better than they deserved. He related to Fischer as to a comrade and an unhappy genius, but not a cunning enemy.

Then it was Spassky’s turn—the speech for the defense. Like many such speeches, its strategy was to direct material guilt elsewhere while confessing to a human, eminently forgivable weakness. Thus he complained that because they had not been given an organizer, the team’s energies had been diverted into everyday affairs. Pre-Reykjavik, “special work on technical matters” had not been satisfactory—a dig at Geller and Krogius. But the main problem was his being a very weak psychologist, “giving rise to a series of mistakes”—in other words, he admitted to being too trusting.

He also owned up to a failure to foresee that someone was required in Reykjavik specifically to handle “the prematch fever” and what he described as “a real war.” He also offered his version of “the culminating moment,” game three, after which, he said, everything turned against him. Through faintheartedness, he had met Fischer halfway, rather than forcing him to play in the hall or withdraw. Thus he had opened the way to Fischer’s “colossal domination” up to game nine. Only from game ten did he begin to control his emotions.

There was no recognition of his own role in setting up the training routine and the other arrangements for Reykjavik. And the rifts with Baturinskii and Bondarevskii were scarcely as he described them.

Little wonder, then, that there is a note of suppressed wrath in Baturinskii’s point-by-point reply. It covered Spassky’s rejection of the grandmasters’ counsel (Yuri Averbakh noted dryly that “when a person does not wish to listen, it is difficult to give him advice”), his passive attitude to the maneuverings of Fischer and Euwe in the run-up to the match, his failure to prepare effectively, and his refusal to accept the full team on offer. It did not escape Baturinskii that although Spassky complained about the absence of a delegation leader in Reykjavik, he had not consulted Ivonin over the move to the closed room. Finally, he protested that he had done everything asked of him to ensure victory for Spassky, and would always do all he could for the common cause of chess and chess players.

As the discussion went on, the question marks over Spassky’s preparation and his inability to take advice were raised again and again—“superficial,” “unsatisfactory.” Mikhail Tal was particularly cutting: “It is not an embarrassment to have lost to a chess player like Fischer, but Spassky’s game was simply shocking.”

Spassky’s politics and personality were also attacked. The president of the Leningrad Chess Federation, A. P. Tupikin, told the meeting that the Leningraders’ love affair with Spassky was at an end, blaming what he called Spassky’s arrogance, his alien views, and his failure to understand the political significance of the match.

A deputy president of the USSR Chess Federation and FIDE vice president, B. I. Rodionov was even more brutally direct. In effect, the world champion had ignored the fact that he was wearing a red shirt and was guilty of damaging the prestige of the state. It was incomprehensible how Spassky had given in to his opponent—to what Rodionov called “the completely groundless demands made by that scum.”

At the end, Ivonin delivered judgment. He was unsparing about Spassky, castigating his attitude both to work and to ideology:

A sense of disillusionment pervaded the meeting. The defeat had been a warning. Like so much else in the USSR, the Soviet chess machine appeared to be rusting away. The first problem was the new champion. Baturinskii thought that “the struggle which we must wage for the world championship will be very difficult. If Fischer made so many demands when he was a challenger, then how will he behave now that he has won the world championship?” So the comrades must work harder and more systematically, and trainers must realize that they were in the service of the state, not independent actors.

Petrosian weighed in on the slothfulness of the elite players: “Our grandmasters have begun to work less.” Ivonin had tough words for the disunity among chess players, putting it down to the long monopoly of the world title. “It seems to me that in the past few years, several people have been attacked by the worm of parasitism in chess and a refusal to undertake a lot of research work.” There were problems of excessive secrecy and internal struggles that weakened the Soviet Union’s external performance.

The Sports Committee itself did not escape censure. In words of foreboding, another deputy president of the USSR Chess Federation, V. I. Boikov, pointed to a decline in the game’s predominance:

The issues so agonizingly raked over at this meeting were followed by action. Ivonin produced a fourteen-point plan, affirmed in a committee decree. The plan included more chess education, a chess library that would include foreign publications, reform of the USSR championship, and proposals to improve the professional players’ physical training and nutrition.

Nikolai Krogius, who became head of the USSR Chess Organization, says that in the long run the impact of Spassky’s defeat was beneficial: “The authorities sought to assist young chess players and to develop chess in the country as a whole. Many children’s chess schools were opened, the publication of chess literature was increased, the system for staging USSR championships was reorganized, greater attention was paid to the leading young chess players headed by Karpov. It sounds paradoxical, but Fischer’s victory in reality had a markedly positive influence in raising the status of chess in the USSR.”

As for Spassky, he was not allowed to play abroad, he says, for nine months—a bad thing, “as after a defeat you need to play, since you have a lot of energy that needs releasing.” The extra 200 roubles a month he had been granted when preparing his title defense was cut, but he was still comparatively well off on his grandmaster’s stipend.

It could so easily have been worse for him. Early in the cold war, when the Soviet Union was newly taking part in international competitions, the Politburo’s impatience with poor performances led to their moving a General Appolonov from the Interior Ministry to the Sports Committee. Failure abroad brought a telegram from the general to the offender ordering an immediate improvement. Somehow, the athletes then found extra strength. And in 1974, the then interior minister Nikolai Shchelokov, promoted to the rank of general by Brezhnev, visited the Karpov-Korchnoi match (the winner to meet Fischer in the world championship). According to Baturinskii, he asked, “Who went with Spassky to Reykjavik?” On being told, he commented, “If it were up to me, I would put them all in jail.”

No matter how wounding the postmortem, Spassky’s career at the top was far from over. He had returned from his defeat with his basic will to compete undiminished, though he told Ivonin that he wanted to consider his position now that he was an ordinary grandmaster. He had decided not to enter the USSR championship, but he intended to play in a big tournament the next year. And indeed, the next year he recaptured the Soviet title. In 1974, in the Candidates round, he beat American grandmaster Robert Byrne without losing a single game, though he failed to reach the Candidates final for the chance to settle scores with Fischer.

He was still motivated in part by a desire to surprise and tease. On one occasion, this threatened to cost him his passport when an application to go abroad took him in front of the Foreign Travel Commission of Party worthies. Assessing his political reliability, they asked about the situation in Angola. At the time, Portuguese forces were battling with Marxist rebels. Soviet newspapers gave the war many column inches, celebrating the victory of the people over the “colonizers.” Perhaps to shock, Spassky replied that he did not have the time to follow developments in Angola. The commission was duly shocked and refused him a passport. The Sports Committee had to step in to reverse the decision.

After his loss of the world title, professional crisis and divorce had coincided again, and in September 1975, Spassky married for the third time. He met Marina Shcherbacheva—a French citizen—at the apartment of a French diplomat; she worked in the commercial section of the French embassy in Moscow. Her grandfather was General Shcherbachev, who had commanded the Tsar’s armies on the Romanian front in 1916–1917. Later, the general emigrated to France.

Spassky might have been a king in Russia (or an ex-king), but like every other Soviet citizen who wanted to marry a Westerner and live abroad, he faced obstruction from the authorities. Marina came under pressure to leave the country but refused. After Spassky moved into her Moscow apartment, the two of them were put under surveillance, and in August 1975, Spassky’s own apartment was mysteriously robbed and all his personal possessions disappeared (including the camera Fischer had given him). From around this time, his Western visitors were liable to be searched on leaving the country.

The story has a happy ending. A Franco-Soviet summit was scheduled, and the Soviets wanted to avoid bad publicity. Spassky also profited from Brezhnev’s signing of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement: its sections on human rights encouraged the free movement of peoples and contained provisions on facilitating binational marriages. The chess establishment saw that the exchampion was determined to go, but they wanted to keep their ties to him; he certainly did not want a clean break from them. So with some help from Ivonin, says the former deputy minister, and some publicity in the Western press, Spassky and the authorities came to an arrangement. He left the Soviet Union with Marina in September 1976, moving to Paris on a visitor’s visa, regularly renewed, while he kept his Soviet passport. Among his peers in Moscow, Spassky’s departure reinforced the view that he saw himself as set apart from Soviet society. His son, Vasili, felt it prudent to change his surname to his mother’s maiden name, Soloviev, to safeguard his application to become a student of journalism.

The year 1977 saw Spassky again in the Candidates round. Back in Reykjavik, to the delight of the Icelanders, he beat the Czechoslovak grandmaster Vlastimil Hort, and he followed this up with a win over the Hungarian grandmaster Lajos Portisch in Switzerland. In a profound irony, he then represented the Soviet Union against the despised Viktor Korchnoi, who had defected from the USSR in 1976 by walking into a police station in Amsterdam to claim political asylum. From his self-exile, Spassky accepted the Sports Committee’s offer of full support. At his request, the committee sent Bondarevskii to join him in Belgrade, and Ivonin even went to give moral support. Spassky lost, 10.5 to 7.5. But in spite of the result, his waging a form of psychological war showed that he might have learned something from Fischer.

Korchnoi was already under strain: he was subjected to a sustained campaign of vitriol in the Soviet press, while Soviet players boycotted tournaments in which he appeared. His family was still in the Soviet Union. After game nine, and 6.5 to 2.5 down, Spassky appeared on the stage only to make his move, darting back behind the scenes. Korchnoi complained that it was like playing a ghost.

Spassky also put on a silver sun visor, swinging it as he came and went. In this poisonous atmosphere, with notes of protest and recrimination going back and forth, Spassky addressed an open letter to “chess players,” defending his actions and claiming anarchy had broken out. The match had passed into a phase in which, “expressed by the words of Fedor Dostoyevsky, ‘Everything is allowed.’” Spassky had refused to put his name to a letter condemning Korchnoi’s defection, but after the match he felt it right to attack him in terms of which Pavlov would have approved. Korchnoi “had lost his moral principles, and thus his future both morally and in chess is insignificant.”

Spassky’s defeat did not signal the end of his involvement in world-class chess. He again played in the Candidates round in 1980; this time Portisch had his revenge, beating Spassky on a tie break. Spassky’s last appearance in the world championship cycle was in 1985, and he continued to participate in the Olympiads and the World Cup until 1989.

Settled in France, Spassky seems to have had the best of all his worlds, a happy marriage, as much competitive chess as he desires, and freedom in his daily life from the Soviet system.

Today, he lives among other Russian émigrés in the tranquil eighteenth-century town of Meudon, on the edge of the French capital and famous as the home of the sculptor Rodin. Often asked to serve as an “ambassador” for chess, he travels extensively in Russia as well as other parts of the world. In his apartment, the chessboard is set up, but the tennis racket too is close to hand.

He bears no malice toward Fischer, telling the Irish Times in 2000, “Ever since my youth at about twenty-two, twenty-three years of age, I had a good impression of Bobby. He was always very honest and said exactly what he thought.”

After becoming champion, Fischer stayed put in Iceland for another two weeks, whiling away the days with Palsson, swimming, bowling, and, of course, absorbed in his chessboard. On 15 September, he exchanged the calm of Iceland for the commotion of New York. The following week, there was a lavish reception at City Hall hosted by Republican mayor John Lindsay, who saluted Fischer as “the Grandest Master of them all,” while Sebastian Leone, the president of the borough of Brooklyn, hailed his fellow resident as the world champion of “a truly Brooklyn sport—the sport of intellectuals.” A large poster read WELCOME, BOBBY FISCHER, WORLD CHESS CHAMPION. Displayed among the official plaudits was evidence of local government frugality—the sign’s reverse side greeted earlier conquering heroes, the crew of Apollo 16, who had returned to earth on 27 April, six days after landing on the moon.

The officials had shared a question with chess organizers worldwide: Would Fischer show up at the proceedings at all? According to an anonymous aide quoted in the press, when Fischer had been offered the key to the city he responded, “I live here, what do I need a key for?” In the event, the celebrations found him in an unusually relaxed state of mind. So eager was he to sign autographs that he mistook several hovering journalists for groupies, grabbing their pens. And when he gave his speech, he even made a joke: “I want to deny a vicious rumor that’s been going around—I think it was started by Moscow. It’s not true that Henry Kissinger phoned me during the night to tell me the moves.” Comfortingly for those who relied on Fischer for dinner party horror stories, some things remained constant. He banned cameras from the reception, and only after some discussion was the press allowed in.

His future and the future of world championship chess alike seemed assured. An editorial in The New York Times commented, “The Fischer era of chess has begun, and it promises a brilliance and excitement the ancient game has never known before.” Fischer stated that he would not shrink from defending his title; on the contrary, he would regularly take on challengers. Few expected him to be knocked off his throne for a decade or more. One exception was his former second, Larry Evans: “I just had the feeling he would never play competitive chess again.”

There was a widespread consensus that Fischer would soon enter the multimillionaires’ club. Almost immediately after the match, entrepreneur and bridge fanatic Ira G. Corn, with whose financial backing the U.S. bridge team had won the world championship in 1970 and 1971, proposed a Fischer-Spassky rematch. Talks were held over a possible simultaneous display in London’s Albert Hall. Lucrative tournament offers arrived daily, from Qatar to South Africa, from the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos to the Shah of Iran.

Promoters and producers, financiers and backers, were soon reminded of Fischer’s allergic reaction to contracts. A frustrated Paul Marshall remembers that megacontracts were drawn up, but “although he wanted the money, he wouldn’t make written commitments, and you can’t get the money without such commitments.”

Warner Brothers had the idea of making a Christmas LP in which Fischer would record some basic chess lessons. Two producers had been dispatched to Iceland during the match to try to agree on terms. Fischer was too busy to grant them an audience. Nevertheless, money was considered no object in the LP’s preparation—the potential spoils were forecast to be massive. Larry Evans was contracted to assist with the script for a handsome fee. He asked the president of Warner Brothers whether Fischer had actually signed a contract and was told no, but this was a mere formality. All the particulars had been agreed to in principle. Said Evans, “In that case, I’d rather be paid in advance.” He was.

A manufacturer offered Fischer over a million dollars to endorse a chess set. Palsson was promised a percentage if he could get his buddy to agree. “I said to Bobby, What’s wrong with the idea? You wanted chess in every home.’ I’m positive I could have persuaded him, but I had to have more time. They needed an answer immediately because it was September and the sets had to be in the shops by Christmas.” In the end, this and every other proposal ran aground.

Fischer, meanwhile, made a few TV appearances, including a show with Bob Hope in which the champion delivered responses to well-meaning questions, sometimes sullenly, sometimes with a shy grin, head rolling to one side, eyes fixed to the ground, words drawling from the side of his mouth. At Fischer’s invitation, Palsson had accompanied him to the States—taking unpaid leave from the Icelandic police force—with the idea of becoming his minder and fixer, and perhaps finding a shop window to display his own dancing talents. His wife and children stayed behind in Iceland. “Maybe my wife was a little jealous of Bobby because he always wanted to speak to me and took up so much of my time.”

Palsson and Fischer stayed with the Marshalls in New York and then moved west to Pasadena. None who knew Fischer would be surprised to hear that Palsson never received a cent in payment. But today, the Icelander has no regrets about going. He was quoted in the press and treated like a star; during the day, while Fischer slept, he was driven around in a limousine lent to them by Bob Hope. At one glamorous reception, the chairman saluted him as Fischer’s bodyguard, “without whom, in Fischer’s own words, he would never have become world champion.” “They all stood up and clapped,” says Palsson. “That was America. It was a great feeling. It was the highlight of my life.”

Fischer had sworn to Palsson that he would even meet the president—that an invitation had arrived from the White House and that both of them would go. In fact, White House files reveal that the question of a presidential invitation threw the administration into a state of tortuous indecision, producing a stream of conflicting recommendations. A year earlier, after Fischer’s victory over Petrosian, a ten-minute photo opportunity had been canvassed. The president should make time, said this first recommendation, as it would “show [his] interest in an intellectual sport for which there are estimated to be, world-wide, 60 million fans.” The idea had originated with Leonard Garment, President Nixon’s acting special counsel and close confidant. Dr. Kissinger and the National Security Council added their stamp of approval to the proposed appointment. But a note from Garment on 18 January 1972 killed it off:

Following Fischer’s triumph, the issue returned to the White House agenda. Interestingly, there was even talk of flying in Spassky, too. General Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, saw “no problems with the president agreeing to meet with Bobby Fischer. There has been widespread international interest in the match, and the meeting would be pleasing, for example, to the Icelanders considering that their president has just met with Fischer. On the other hand, we do not think it would be appropriate for the president to meet with Boris Spassky.”

What happened to the invitation is unclear. Palsson says it was ther, but Fischer could not make up his mind about dates. “Bobby knew I wanted to go to the White House. He had to send a guest list, and he said, ‘You’re top of the list.’ I asked when we were going. He was always postponing it.” The publicity value to the president diminished with every passing day. Almost thirty years later, an irate Fischer snarled, “I was never invited to the White House. They invited that Olympic Russian gymnast—that little communist Olga Korbut.”

Three months in the States were enough for Palsson. His family did not want to relocate to the United States, and he missed them. He told Fischer he was leaving; Icelandic Air paid for his ticket home. Fischer rushed up to his friend at the airport and said, “Are you really leaving me?” In a fit of guilt, the U.S. Chess Federation found $500 to compensate Palsson for his labors; as he had been with Fischer for five months, that worked out at $3 a day.

Within a few months, Fischer had virtually vanished from public view, pausing only to put in a cameo performance toward the end of 1972 at the Fried Chicken tournament. This took place in San Antonio, Texas, and was funded by George Church, who had made a fortune from his fried chicken franchise empire. Some of the best players in the world were there, though Fischer was not invited. One of the organizers said this was because “there was a danger that for his appearance fee Bobby would demand Mr. Church’s entire business.” However, he was welcomed as an honored guest and flown in on a private jet. Naturally, he was late, holding up a round of games for fifteen minutes.

The tournament culminated in a three-way tie, between the Armenian veteran Tigran Petrosian, the Hungarian veteran Lajos Portisch, and an anemic-looking twenty-one-year-old Russian. Anatoli Karpov was the Soviet authorities’ hope for the next generation, though they were worried about his stamina. He weighed only about 106 pounds and looked as if he barely had the strength to lift any piece weightier than a pawn. But he was hugely gifted, mentally tough, and a member of the Botvinnik school of wholeheartedly Soviet chess players. He once said that his three hobbies were chess, stamp collecting, and Marxism. His chess, like his personality, was sober, practical, and phlegmatic.

In 1974, Karpov took on the Soviet elite one by one in the Candidates round. Having already beaten Lev Polugaievskii and then Boris Spassky (in a closely fought contest), he emerged victorious against Viktor Korchnoi, too. Korchnoi had accused the Soviet authorities of favoring the younger man in their head-to-head.

So Karpov was set to challenge Fischer in a match for the world title. The general assembly of the International Chess Federation met during the chess Olympiad of 1974 to agree to the terms of the match. Fischer had fired off a fusillade of 179 demands, all but two of which FIDE immediately conceded. Petrosian grumbled, “These men do everything that Bobby wishes, and he will sit down at the chessboard on the conditions that he dictates to them.” Although Ed Edmondson was back on Fischer’s team, once again Fred Cramer was the main conduit for Fischer’s conditions, one of which was that the arbiter should be banned from engaging in any journalism about the match, even after it was over. A FIDE member was overheard to comment, “Mr. Cramer will not stay quiet even for three minutes, and he wants the match controller to stay silent for his whole life.”

There remained, however, two sticking points. Firstly, FIDE had proposed that the winner be the first person to win six games. Fischer insisted that the championship be decided by ten victories, draws not to count, and that the number of games be unlimited. Second, Fischer insisted that if the score reached nine wins apiece, the champion (that is, Fischer) should retain the title, meaning the challenger must win by two clear points, an unheard-of advantage for the incumbent. After much haggling behind closed doors, the delegates offered a compromise—victory to be achieved by ten wins, up to a maximum of thirty-six games (at which point the player with the most points would be declared the winner). Otherwise, they pointed out, the match could be prolonged indefinitely. Fischer instantly dispatched a note: “I have been informed that my proposals have been rejected by a majority of votes. By doing so, FIDE has decided against my participation in the 1975 world championship. I therefore resign my FIDE world championship title.”

All was not yet lost. Many people interpreted his resignation as another, familiar display of brinkmanship. The bidding process for the match continued apace, with Manila offering a staggering $5 million, said to be the second largest purse in sporting history (just below the Muhammad Ali—George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire).

The full FIDE body assembled in March 1975. Now they made one more concession, agreeing to an unlimited number of games. But they refused to countenance Fischer’s nine-to-nine rule. Edmondson went to California to plead with the champion. Meanwhile, FIDE announced that if Fischer did not agree by 1 April, he would be deemed to have forfeited the title. The day came and went. On 2 April, a new champion was proclaimed, Anatoli Karpov. In his acceptance speech, he hinted that he was prepared to meet Fischer in an unofficial match, presumably thinking of Manila and the $5 million. He even met Fischer secretly three times, in Japan, Washington, D.C., and Manila, to discuss terms. Eventually, Sergei Pavlov at the Sports Ministry, backed by the Central Committee, turned down the idea. Chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov himself signed its death warrant. He considered it “inexpedient.”

Fischer had been the most dormant of champions, not playing a single competitive game for three years. Eager to prove himself worthy of the crown, Karpov went on to be the most active, growing in strength over the following years, winning a series of elite grandmaster tournaments, and stamping his authority on the chess world. He beat Korchnoi twice more, in the Philippine city of Baguio in 1978 (just) and in Merano in Italy in 1981 (convincingly). Garry Kasparov, Karpov’s successor as world champion, wrote of Baguio, “It finally erased the memory of Reykjavik and restored the prestige of Soviet chess.”

Where was Fischer? For several years, he lived in the bosom of the Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, where he was called “a co-worker.” The church fed him, they gave him comfortable accommodation in Mocking Bird Lane, they even flew him around in a private jet. In return, Fischer handed over around a third ($61,200) of his Icelandic prize money. He was befriended by Harry Sneider, a national weight-lifting champion who trained church students. Almost every evening, he and Fischer would take some form of physical exercise—soccer, basketball, racquet-ball, swimming, table football. Fischer was now also spending a lot of time listening to Christian preachers on the radio.

There were other people willing to look after him. One was Claudia Mokarow, also a member of the Worldwide Church of God. International master David Levy visited Fischer in 1976. At the time, his host was staying in a large house with no furniture. Levy and Fischer slept on mattresses on the floor. Fischer used Mokarow as a taxi service, Levy remembers, calling her up to take them to and from the restaurants of his choice.

In 1977 Fischer broke with the church, accusing it of being “satanic,” and vigorously attacking its methods and leadership. From this point on, the subject of so much chess acclaim became a near total recluse. Those acquaintances with whom he kept in contact were sworn to secrecy. Relations with anyone who spoke about him to the outside world were broken off—for good. So as not to be recognized, he grew a beard and mustache. However, a letter from Fischer to an old chess acquaintance, Bernard Zuckerman, dated 13 May 1978, shows that he was still using Claudia Mokarow as his answering service. He gave her telephone number and told Zuckerman that was where he could leave messages.

Fischer’s life now became a fertile ground for rumor, although few rumors could exaggerate the reality. In early 1981, he spent several months in San Francisco playing a series of seventeen speed games against Peter Biyiasas, a Greek-born Canadian grandmaster. (Fischer won them all.) Biyiasas said that Fischer carried around a locked valise full of Chinese and Mexican pills. “If the Commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them.” There were reports that Fischer had replaced all his fillings after coming to believe that the Soviets were capable of using the metal in his teeth to beam in malignant waves.

On the afternoon of 26 May 1981, Fischer was picked up by the police, apparently mistaken for a bank robber, and was thrown behind bars for two days. He later published a pamphlet, graphically depicting the indignities he suffered: “I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse! by Bobby Fischer, the World Chess Champion.”

It appears that Fischer’s refusal to cooperate with the authorities and his inability to recall the address at which he was staying were at least part of the problem. Fischer wrote that he was “brutally handcuffed” and that the metal tore into his flesh. When he stopped answering their questions, one officer, Fischer wrote, “grabbed my throat with one hand and started choking me by the neck.” Although he never discovered this policeman’s name, he wanted him identified. Fischer described him as “hyper-aggressive, like a little dog who barks and snaps a lot and bares his teeth. He is also quite vicious.” Fischer declared that he was stripped and left naked in a bare, dank, drafty cell. Through the tiny window, he sought help from passersby, screaming that he was being tortured to death. Nobody came to his rescue.

Fischer’s apparent inability to distinguish between the genuinely shocking and the relatively trivial is striking. The hysterical tone remains constant throughout: “Legality is a sham at the jail-house. There are No Smoking signs everywhere, and no smoking is rigidly enforced—for the prisoners. But I noticed a light-skinned colored cop/jailer smoking whenever he pleased.”

The text is signed:

After this, “Robert J. Fischer, the World Chess Champion,” became a wanderer. For a time in the mid-1980s, he lived in Germany. Michael Bezold, then just a schoolboy but later a grandmaster, analyzed with him each day for three months. Fischer was still a nocturnal animal, rising in the afternoon and often eating a huge breakfast of cereal and eggs and bread at five P.M. He was obsessed with “a game in the 1960s, and the question was whether or not to move the pawn to h6. This was the only question. And he said he’d been analyzing this game for more than thirty years, and he couldn’t figure out whether it’s better to play h6 or not. It was fantastic.”

Then suddenly the recluse resurfaced for all the world to see. In 1992, in the midst of the Yugoslav war, exactly two decades after their encounter in Reykjavik, Spassky and Fischer met in a rematch. It was organized by Jezdimir Vasiljevic, a Serbian financier of dubious repute, who proffered $5 million of his bank’s money (two-thirds to go to the winner, one-third to the loser) to entice the ex-champions back to the board. Once again, the world’s press assembled en masse, tantalized not only by the prospect of a battle between the two old foes, but by a sighting of Fischer. What would he look like after all these years?

The answer was, totally transformed from the lithe, boyish figure he had presented in Reykjavik. Now forty-nine, balding, pudgy, and with a beard mottled the same shade of gray as his suit, he had the air of a university lecturer. Fischer considered this a “World Championship” contest—absurdly, given that he had forfeited the title seventeen years earlier and Spassky was now rated only about one hundredth in the world.

The match, split between Belgrade and the picturesque island resort of Sveti Stefan in Montenegro on the Adriatic Sea, was in many ways a triumph for Fischer’s obduracy (as well as his principles), for the rules were those upon which Fischer had insisted in 1974 in the negotiations with FIDE. But his taking part in the match in the middle of the Yugoslav civil war breached UN sanctions: the U.S. Treasury Department bluntly informed him beforehand that he would be in violation of an executive order (number 12810) if the match went ahead—a serious crime carrying a heavy fine and/or a jail sentence.

He ignored the warning. In a press conference, Fischer opened his brown leather suitcase and removed a letter from the Treasury Department. He then spat at it, with precision. Asked about the then top two players in the world, Karpov and Kasparov, he described them as “the lowest dogs around.” A U.S. arrest warrant was later issued—it is still valid.

For admirers of the two champions, the rematch was an unedifying spectacle, rather like the sight of two former heavyweight boxers, well past their prime, climbing back into the ring for a last big payday. After game one, the experts were in a state of high excitement—Fischer had won it brilliantly: he looked like the Fischer of old. But it was a form he was to regain in only a couple of games. Although he won convincingly, ten games to Spassky’s five, with fifteen draws, the quality of the chess was regarded as somewhat pedestrian. An immensely profitable few weeks for the two adversaries, the episode tarnished the Reykjavik legend as a bad sequel to a movie can sully the original.

Then the nomad was off again. Zita Rajcsanyi, a nineteen-year-old Hungarian chess star, had been instrumental in drawing him into the Spassky rematch and had kept him company in Yugoslavia. But although Fischer spent several years in Budapest in the 1990s, Rajcsanyi married and disappeared from the scene. At some stage, Fischer moved to Tokyo. There are reports of his having a child. Sightings of him became as rare and often no more accurate than those of the Loch Ness monster.

Fischer has descended into an abyss of unreality, the world of Holocaust denial, persecution complexes, and conspiracy theories. In the 1980s he became fixated on the study of anti-Semitic tracts, such as the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. In the late 1990s, he broadcast occasional interviews, though he performed only on condition that they went out live. This was a risky proposition for station chiefs: Fischer railed about the Jews, usually referring to them as kikes, Jew-bastards, or Yids. He told those with whom he retained any kind of contact that he had a mission to tell the truth. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Huh!” As for the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, “Well, America got what it deserved.” That very day, on Philippine radio, he shouted, “Death to the U.S.A.!” (The USCF subsequently passed a motion condemning their only world champion.) An anticommunism had somehow transmuted into an anti-Americanism. In an interview with Icelandic radio, he recommended the country break with the United States and shut down the Keflavik air base. His e-mail address in Japan was us_is_shit.

Fischer’s mother and sister have died. His mother took to the grave an astonishing secret: Her son’s biological father was not her ex-husband, Gerhardt, but a Hungarian-born physicist, Paul Nemenyi, which whom she began an affair in 1942. Against Nemenyi’s wishes, Bobby was never told what the U.S. government must have known. For a quarter of a century, as Bobby was growing up, the FBI tracked Regina closely, suspecting her of being a communist agent. They documented every detail of her life: her political affiliations, her contacts, her movements. They investigated her telephone records and bank account details; they interviewed her neighbors and work colleagues. Dozens of special agents were involved, and scores of informers serviced them with information. Many of the FBI memos are from or to the then director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Given Bobby’s anti-Semitic and anticommunist obsessions, there is a poignant irony to the fact that his parents were communist sympathizers and that he is ethnically Jewish on both sides of his true parentage.[1]

Does he still play? With the advent of Internet chess, Fischer gossip began to circulate with ever-increasing velocity within the international chess community. On the Internet, many players—especially grandmasters—adopt a pseudonym as their “handle,” their Internet name. One reason for this practice is to prevent potential opponents from studying their games and detecting within them certain structures and patterns. There have been insistent tales of Fischer himself dabbling in cyberspace. An astoundingly successful “handle” is observed smashing opponents with consummate ease and the cyberwhispering begins: “Fischer is back.” The remarkable readiness with which these stories are embraced is akin to the eager anticipation of religious cult members awaiting a second coming. With his disappearance, the Fischer mystique has become part of chess lore, captured, for example, in the Hollywood film Searching for Bobby Fischer, about a father’s relationship with his talented son and the pressures of being compared to the former champion.

He invented a clock, the Fischer clock, the principal idea of which has rapidly gained currency in the chess community. Like many of Fischer’s proposals, its aim is to strip chess of risk as far as possible so that it is the better player who ultimately wins. With the conventional clock, a situation can occur in which a player has only one minute on the clock to make, say, ten moves—in such circumstances silly slip-ups are quite common. On the Fischer clock, each time a player makes a move, he or she is given more time. For instance, the clock may be set to give the mover an extra two minutes after every move. A mad time scramble is thus avoided.

To reenergize chess and to free it from the oppressive body of theoretical knowledge built up over decades, Fischer now advocates random chess, in which the pieces on the back row are shuffled at the beginning of each game. Random chess would force players to clear their minds of preparatory work and think about each game afresh. Fischer dreams of another Spassky rematch—this time at random chess. Spassky told the authors of this book that he would agree to one, “just for fun.”

Reykjavik changed chess itself. In the immediate aftermath of the 1972 match, a sudden fascination for the game brought salad days for the chess masters. Publishers sought them out to satisfy the appetite for information: A huge array of books appeared, from those targeted at the complete beginner to those aimed at the already accomplished. There were books on openings, books on the middle game, books on endings. There were books on tactics and books on strategy, books on how to beat the patzer and a book on how to beat Fischer. A number of instant books were released on the match. The first, by David Levy and Svetozar Gligoric, was on its way to the printing presses before the result had been officially declared, and went on sale in New York stores within twenty-four hours of the declaration. Gligoric had penned his final sentence immediately after his good friend Lothar Schmid let slip that Spassky had resigned by telephone. The one-hundred-thousand print run sold out rapidly.

The chess phenomenon was such that grandmasters, and even international masters, could now make a decent living. The prize money shot up for competitions; cash was to be earned from giving simultaneous matches, from writing, from coaching. Edmar Mednis turned professional along with several other top players. “During the first year subsequent to the match, it was as though money were falling from heaven.”

Soon after Reykjavik, San Francisco promoter Cyrus Weiss floated the idea of a professional chess major league, in which five teams across the United States would compete against one another in a series of televised matches. At the time, this seemed far from quixotic. Chess was entering the nation’s sporting bloodstream. A decade earlier, the U.S. Chess Federation had fewer than 10,000 members. Now there were over 60,000 and the rate of growth appeared to be carrying the numbers into orbit.

A generation of youngsters was stimulated to take up the game. The rise of Britain as a chess powerhouse can be traced back to Reykjavik. Nigel Short, who one day would challenge Garry Kasparov for the title, decided then, at age seven, that he would become a professional.

The match itself inspired the (then) most expensive musical ever staged, Chess, written by Tim Rice and the ABBA partnership of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. The idea for the musical had occurred to Rice shortly after Fischer’s victory: “The good guy was the Russian, who was meant to be the bad guy, and the bad guy was the American, who was meant to be the good guy. It was all very confusing and a perfect illustration of how politics creeps into everything.” His lyrics reflected this:

Again, this cold war aspect was singled out by a 1980s British pop group, the critically acclaimed Prefab Sprout, in their song “Cue Fanfare”:

However, in America, at least, the explosion of interest did not endure as long as the cold war. Although grandmasters have never quite returned to their earlier levels of impoverishment, within a few years the enthusiasm of promoters had begun to subside, and sponsorship money for tournaments to dry up. And just as Fischer had been primarily responsible for the boom, so, by disappearing from the scene, he was principally responsible for the bust.

Apart from Fischer, none of the Western participants benefited materially. Palsson was left financially worse off than before, though his house is rich in bulging scrapbooks. Paul Marshall never received a dime: “I guess being involved in such an intimate way in what turned out to be a world-shatteringly silly event, and the fact that it was good for dinner party conversations for the rest of my life, was probably enough of a fee.” Gudmundur Thorarinsson went on to serve as a member of Parliament for two terms—but failed to scale the political heights to which he had hoped the match would take him. Nevertheless, more than three decades on, he is still starry-eyed over the event he brought to Reykjavik: “People say this was the chess match of the century. It was not the chess match of the century. It was the chess match of all time.”

Beyond the legend, what we are left with, of course, are the games. As one would expect from a clash between the two preeminent players of the day, several were of extraordinary brilliance, artistic creations that will be with us always. One thinks, for example, of the magnificent game ten, apparently so effortless, so economical, so unshowy—yet so beautiful. There were also some staggering howlers, a function of the inhuman stress affecting both players: Bxh2 in game one (Fischer), Qc2 in game five (Spassky), pawn to b5 in game eight (Spassky), pawn to f6 in game fourteen (Spassky). Works of art are usually the product of a single guiding mind and hand. A chess masterpiece is the product of competing genius: Crass blunders from either side can disqualify a game from true greatness. But Spassky’s errors and defeat must not be allowed to obscure the fact that he was one of the finest players of all time. In his career, he could boast match-play victories against some of the totemic chess names of the second half of the twentieth century—Keres, Geller, Tal, Larsen, Korchnoi, and Petrosian.

Fischer, some will maintain, was the outstanding player in chess history, though there are powerful advocates too for Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, and Kasparov. Many chess players will dismiss such comparisons as meaningless, akin to the futile attempt to grade the supreme musicians of all time. But the manner in which Fischer stormed his way to Reykjavik, his breathtaking dominance at the Palma de Majorca Interzonal, the trouncings of Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian—all this was unprecedented. There never has been an era in modern chess during which one player has so overshadowed all others.

Our story is in essence a tragedy. What could have been the feast of chess anticipated by Spassky is as much remembered for the pathologically manipulative behavior of the challenger, the panic of the officials, and the psychological collapse of the champion, as for the quality of the games.

While we may sympathize with the organizers and the manifest and manifold pressures upon them, the game three capitulation to the challenger can be seen as their moral tragedy. Had they not been impelled to give way to Fischer, Spassky might have left Reykjavik early, and as champion. On the other hand, had Spassky himself not been so fixed on playing Fischer, had he been a little less of a free spirit and a little more willing to work with the authorities, he might have left Reykjavik on his own initiative, and as champion.

Fischer’s life testifies to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s proposition that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Achieving his only goal destroyed his raison d’être. Without that goal, he seemed to lose his already weak hold on reality. With nothing more to prove, fear of defeat prevailed over his desire to play. Fischer turned Reykjavik into a battleground, and the match would be the last real chess war he would ever wage.

Boris Spassky went to Reykjavik to celebrate chess. Bobby Fischer went there to fight. His version of the match triumphed. The relics of the combat can be seen in the Icelandic Chess Federation museum, found down a Reykjavik side street, on the first floor of what looks like the run-down offices of a struggling small business. Some photographs and cartoons capture the atmosphere of the event. And there, recently reclaimed from the cellars of the National Museum to which they had been consigned, are the chessboard, signed by the contenders, the chessmen they pushed across it, and the clock started by Lothar Schmid at five P.M. on 11 July 1972 to begin the match of the century.