Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

12

Fischer-Spassky Redux

BOBBY’S CHESS DRAGON was not only stirring in the cave, it was lashing its tail. Perhaps because he could no longer tolerate his downtrodden life, living off his mother’s checks and receiving just an occasional trickle of cash from here or there, Bobby wanted to get back to the game … desperately. But his urge to rejoin the fray wasn’t all about remuneration—it was the call to battle, the game itself, that he missed: the prestige; the silence (hopefully) of the tournament room; the sibilant buzz of the kibitzers (damn them); the life of chess. Jonathan Swift defined war as “that mad game the world loves to play.” Fischer felt exactly the same way about chess. But could he find his way, existentially, back to the board? Hermann Hesse, in his masterful novel Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), told of someone whose knowledge of “the game” was Fischer-like: “One who had experienced the ultimate meaning of the game within himself would no longer be a player; he would no longer dwell in the world of multiplicity and would no longer delight in invention, construction, and combination, since he would know altogether different joys and raptures.” The difference is that the joys and raptures away from the board weren’t really there for Bobby.

Spassky provided a way back to the board. He contacted Bobby in 1990 and informed him that Bessel Kok, the man who was running for the presidency of FIDE that year (1990), was interested in organizing a Fischer-Spassky rematch, and there might be millions—although not the $5 million he’d passed up in 1975 for a match with Karpov—available for the prize fund.

Kok, a Dutch businessman of extreme wealth, was president of a Belgium-based banking company, SWIFT, and was responsible for organizing several international tournaments. Kok had a noble agenda: He wanted Bobby to continue his career, and he wanted to be a privileged witness to his games, as did almost all chess players.

A meeting was planned to discuss the match, with Kok agreeing to pay all the expenses for Bobby to fly, first class, to Belgium and be lodged at the five-star Sheraton Brussels Hotel. To avoid journalists, Bobby checked in under the name of Brown. He mentioned to Kok that he’d need some cash for pocket money upon arrival. Twenty-five hundred dollars in cash was waiting for him at the hotel.

In addition to Bobby, Kok also invited Spassky and his wife Marina to Brussels. For four days, the trio spent mostly all of their time at Kok’s suburban mansion, but it wasn’t all a discussion of the possible match. At one point, Fischer and Kok joined the Spasskys in a doubles tennis match; there were elegant, candlelit dinners and postprandial conversations, and a few outings into Brussels itself. Kok’s wife, Pierette Broodhaers, an attorney, said that she had a “normal and friendly” conversation with Bobby, not at all about chess. Nor, according to her, did he show any signs of the eccentricities the press kept referring to, with the exception of his speaking too loudly. “Maybe he is used to living alone so nobody listens to him,” she said, sensing his loneliness. He forbade her to take a photograph of him.

One evening, the men, who were joined by Jan Timman from Holland, the number three–ranked chess player in the world, went off to what Broodhaers described as a “raunchy” nightclub in downtown Brussels. Timman recalled meeting Fischer for the first time: “The most interesting thing was that I had once dreamed of meeting Fischer in a nightclub. Funny I had never entertained the hope of [actually] meeting him. When I broke through internationally, he had just stopped [playing].” Talking about who might be considered the greatest player of all time, he said, “As far as I am concerned, Fischer is the best ever.”

The amount being mentioned as the purse for the rematch was $2,500,000. Although Bobby was in want financially, this prize fund was not acceptable to him. Spassky wanted to go through with it, but no deal could be arranged. Little did either of them know, but Kok had already decided not to pursue the possible match. He found Fischer’s neo-Nazi remarks about Jews to be “beyond the abhorrent” and concluded that any large-scale match involving him would spell trouble. Spassky flew back to Paris, and Bobby boarded a train for Germany.

Since he was in Europe—his first time there in almost twenty years—Bobby felt he should stay awhile. Gerhardt Fischer, the man listed on Bobby’s birth certificate as his father, was living in Berlin, and at eighty-two he was not in good health. The press had learned that Gerhardt was somewhere in Germany—and that Bobby was in the country—and they were trying to track down the father so they could interview his famous son. Reporters believed that it was possible Bobby visited him, but there’s no proof he did.

In the late 1980s, during the Chess Bundesliga competition in Germany, Boris Spassky had met a young woman named Petra Stadler. He felt paternal toward her and thought Bobby might be interested in meeting her, so he gave her Fischer’s address in Los Angeles and suggested she write to him and send him her photograph. In 1988 she did just that, and to her surprise Fischer phoned her from California. Near the beginning of their conversation, he asked her if she was an Aryan. Recollecting the incident years later, she claims she replied: “I think so.”

Fischer invited her to visit him in Los Angeles, where she stayed in a hotel, and the two spent the next few weeks getting to know each other. Then Petra returned to her home in Seeheim, Germany. At that time, Fischer was impoverished, so it was impossible for him to fly to Germany with her. Now that he was in Europe in 1990, courtesy of Bessel Kok, Bobby visited Petra, and with the “pocket money” Kok had given him, his mother’s Social Security income, and some small royalty checks for his books, he lived for almost a year in Seeheim and in nearby towns, moving from hotel to hotel to avoid reporters, and spending time with Petra for as long as their relationship lasted.

Petra married Russian grandmaster Rustem Dautov in 1992, and in 1995 she wrote a book titled Bobby Fischer—Wie er wirklich ist—Ein Jahr mit dem Schachgenie (Fischer as He Really Is: A Year with a Chess Genius). Boris Spassky saw a copy and wrote Bobby a letter of apology for having introduced him to Petra. It was dated March 23, 1995.

He told Bobby that when he introduced Petra to him he meant well, but shortly after they met “she started to talk too much about you to other people.” Sensing that Petra would reveal secrets, Spassky warned Bobby to “be careful.”

After Petra’s revealing book was published, Spassky was very upset, primarily because he didn’t want the woman or her book to come between him and Bobby and ruin their good relationship. As a result of Spassky’s letter, Bobby never spoke to Petra again, but he accepted his friend’s apology and maintained cordial relations with Spassky.

While he was in Germany, Bobby went to Bamberg to visit Lothar Schmid, who’d served as arbiter in the 1972 match with Spassky. Schmid’s castle housed the largest known privately owned chess library in the world. Bobby wanted to scrutinize the library and view Schmid’s chess art masterpieces. While there, they also analyzed a number of games together, an experience that indicated to Schmid that Bobby’s command of the game hadn’t waned in his years away from public competition; Schmid claimed that Bobby’s analysis was still remarkably brilliant.

After having been Schmid’s houseguest, Bobby moved to an inn in Pulvermühle, close to Bamberg, located in a valley between Nuremberg and Bayreuth. The inn was known to be friendly to those who played the game and was family-run by Kaspar Bezold, an amateur chess player. Petrosian was a guest there when he played in the international tournament in Bamberg in 1968, and players from throughout Europe often stayed there on holiday.

Schmid made the arrangements for Bobby to stay in Pulvermühle and, to keep journalists at bay, had him register under an assumed name. Staying at a friendly Bavarian inn in the countryside is usually a pleasant affair and can be a chance for renewal, offering long walks in the pastoral countryside, succulent German cooking, decadent desserts, and steins of Rauchbier, the smoked malt and hops from Bamberg that is famous throughout the Free State of Bavaria. But what Bobby liked most was that nobody at the inn, other than Bezold and his son Michael, an up-and-coming chess player, knew who he was. Bobby gave Michael lessons, and the young man went on to become an international grandmaster some eight years later, perhaps inspired by his meeting with the world’s greatest player.

Bobby studied and practiced his German and was becoming semi-fluent after three months. He might have stayed in Pulvermühle much longer, or at least as long as his money held out, but he was spotted by a journalist from the German magazine Stern, who’d tracked him down. Bobby checked out immediately and was never seen in Pulvermühle again.

When Bobby returned from Europe and collected his months of accumulated mail from Claudia Mokarow, there was an unusual letter waiting for him. It would change his life.

I WOULD LIKE TO SELL YOU THE WORLD’S BEST VACUUM CLEANER!

That was how the letter started off. Beneath that headline was a hand-drawn picture of a vacuum cleaner, rendered in color. Why had this been mailed to Fischer and how had the sender found his address? The odd document continued:

NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR INTEREST, TURN THE PAGE.

It was, in fact, a letter from a seventeen-year-old girl, Zita Rajcsanyi, one of Hungary’s most promising women chess players. She had sent the letter to the U.S. Chess Federation, and asked them to forward it to Bobby. “Now that I have your interest,” the letter stated, “I want to tell you the real reason why I wrote to you.” Why did you stop playing? Why did you disappear? she went on to ask. She wrote that she’d been intrigued by Bobby ever since she’d read about him in a book on the history of World Chess Champions. Bobby noticed that the postmark on the letter’s envelope was many months past, and there was actually another letter from Zita in his pile of unopened mail. She was persistent and wanted an answer.

Thus it was that one morning, at about six a.m. Hungarian time, Zita’s phone rang. Zita’s father, an official of FIDE, answered and immediately woke her. “Hi, this is Bobby.” He told her that the reason he was responding was that her letters were so “weird” and quite different from the average fan letters he received, but he thanked her for them. He told her that the reason he wasn’t playing was because the Russians cheat, and over the course of future letters and phone calls he elaborated on his theory regarding how the games played by Kasparov and Karpov had all been prearranged and that he believed that Kasparov and Karpov were actually agents of the Russian regime. He asked if she was Jewish. “Everyone who is a Soviet, and everyone who is Jewish, cannot be trusted,” he affirmed. When she objected to his ranting, he broke off the conversation and didn’t call back for months. More phone calls eventually followed, however, often in the middle of the night, and they also started a pen pal correspondence.

Eventually, he asked Zita whether she’d like to visit him. He told her he’d send her an airline ticket and that she could stay with a friend of his, since his room was too small and it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to stay with him in any event. He was right: After Regina had visited him once, she wrote to him about his cramped quarters: “You can hardly turn around.”

Zita applied for a visa immediately in the summer of 1992 and after many weeks of bureaucratic processing, she arrived in Los Angeles. Bobby met her at the airport. She did not recognize him because of his beard. Although he’d paid for the round-trip ticket, when Zita met him she discovered that he was practically penniless. She lent him a few hundred dollars, virtually all of her spending money. Some of it was paid back immediately because he agreed to be interviewed by a foreign journalist for a fee of $300. Bobby’s having consented to be interviewed for such a relatively small amount of money showed his financial desperation. It’s not known where, or if, the intended story ever appeared.

Zita remained in Los Angeles for six weeks and stayed at the home of Robert Ellsworth, an attorney who helped Bobby with various legal matters. She was with Bobby every day. They enjoyed each other’s company and, despite the May-December age gap (she was 17, he was 47), found common ground in their respective backgrounds. Both had started playing chess seriously at the age of eight and had dropped out of high school to be able to play chess full-time. Both loved the game and were highly intelligent and argumentative by nature. Bobby loved languages and, in addition to being fluent in Spanish, was becoming adept at Russian and German. Zita spoke German and English with hardly a trace of an accent. Bobby was World Champion—or so he still claimed—and she aspired to be. In an interview later on, Zita claimed that the real reason Bobby was interested in her was “because I didn’t want anything from him.”

When Bobby embarrassedly showed her his room, she couldn’t believe the way he lived. Barely thirty-five square feet, the living space included a small bathroom and a single bed. “He was ashamed of his poverty,” she later recalled. Books, boxes, and tapes were piled high. The content of the tapes? According to to Zita, they contained Bobby’s conspiracy theories. He told her he was planning to write a book that would prove how the Soviet players cheated in chess, and the tapes contained his thoughts on the matter.

Bobby and Zita played one game of chess: his new variation, called Fischer Random. She claims that she won and then became frightened. Perhaps he’d become violent toward her, she thought, because she was a woman and, also, not yet even a master. They never played again, but they did analyze together.

One evening when he picked her up to go out to dinner, he spotted some repairmen on the roof of a low-rise building across the street. They were probably Mossad (Israeli intelligence agents) spying on him, he said, part of his continued litany of “constant obsessions” as Zita observed.

Bobby explained that the reason he hadn’t competed in almost twenty years was that he was still waiting for the right offer, though he didn’t define what “right” meant. The right prize fund? Venue? Opponent? Number of games? It was probably all of those things and many more. He was also furious that although President Nixon had said he’d be invited to the White House in 1972, the invitation never arrived; Bobby had been fuming about it for two decades. In the interview Zita later gave to Tivadar Farkasházy, she claimed that Bobby was still waiting for the American government to apologize for the White House snub.

Zita couldn’t figure out who was paying his rent, minimal though it was. Somehow she knew that it wasn’t Claudia Mokarow. Zita thought it could be Bessel Kok; she was unaware that Kok no longer had any interest in backing Fischer for anything. In fact, Bobby’s rent and other basic needs were being paid for by his mother’s Social Security checks.

Regina had moved back to California from Nicaragua after having dizzy spells, a result of heart problems. She was seventy-seven and thinking of having an operation, and she wanted it performed in the United States. When Bobby heard about his mother’s impending surgery, he and Zita, both out of money, used the cheapest transportation they could find—an uncomfortable Greyhound bus—to travel north along the Pacific coast for three hundred miles, to Palo Alto. Besides offering Regina support, Bobby wanted to introduce her to Zita.

Regina was about to have a pacemaker implanted. Bobby, distrustful of doctors, tried to talk her out of the procedure, and they argued about it for hours. As a medical doctor, Regina knew more about the risks than he did, but Bobby was afraid of a foreign object being implanted in his mother’s body and what it might do to her. Regina remained adamant and had the operation anyway. She lived until the age of eighty-four.

In going to the United States and meeting Bobby, Zita had accomplished at least part of what she’d set out to do. She’d found out why Bobby Fischer wouldn’t play: It had to be the right offer, and it had to be (echoes of the Philippines and the Karpov match) $5 million.

Although Zita denied that there was any sexual intimacy with Bobby in the six weeks she stayed in Los Angeles—“I wasn’t thinking of that,” she said—he was falling in love. He referred to Zita as his girlfriend, and at another point he called her his fiancée. He knew that to proceed further—for example, to get married once she was no longer a minor—he’d have to have some money, which gave him further impetus to seek a chess match that would make him financially secure.

Zita’s father was a diplomat and an official of FIDE, and Zita had other contacts in the chess world who might help her find a sponsor for a Fischer-Spassky rematch. If Bobby would give her a letter saying that he was interested in playing a match, she told him she’d see whether she could secure backing. Bobby wrote out such a letter by hand. Remarkably, the man who rarely signed a letter of financial importance gave this seventeen-year-old the right, in this case, to speak for him. In mid-May Zita flew home.

It took almost a year, but she finally located someone—Janos Kubat, an internationally known chess organizer—who knew people who could raise the money for a $5 million match. When she first visited Kubat at his office, she couldn’t get past his secretary to see him. Then, at an airport, she heard his name being announced over the loudspeaker, and she tracked him down. He was at first skeptical of the teenager’s assertions, but when she showed him Bobby’s letter and gave him Bobby’s top secret telephone number, Kubat recognized that she was an authentic representative. He agreed to help.

About a month later, in July 1992, Kubat, Zita, and two officials of Jugoskandic Bank were in Los Angeles to talk to Bobby about a possible “revenge” match between Fischer and Spassky. The president of the bank, Jezdimir Vasiljevic, had given his executives the authority to offer a purse of $5 million with one stipulation: The match had to commence in three weeks in Yugoslavia. Bobby had no idea, really, who Vasiljevic was. He’d later learn that the banker was one of the most powerful men in Serbia, was involved in currency speculation, was suspected of illegally trafficking arms, and was also supposedly promoting a Ponzi scheme. He was six years younger than Bobby but acted in a fatherly way toward him.

The negotiations went back and forth, but Fischer’s current demands were minor compared to the 132 conditions he’d stipulated in 1975 in order for him to play Karpov. In this proposed Fischer-Spassky match, he asked for the winner to receive $3.35 million, the loser $1.65 million. The match would continue, indefinitely, until one player achieved ten wins, draws not counting. If each player acquired nine wins, the match would be considered a draw, and the prize money would be shared equally, but Fischer would retain his title as undisputed Chess Champion of the World. He insisted that in all publicity and advertising the match be called The World Chess Championship. And last of all, he wanted the new clock that he’d invented to be used in all games.

Bobby also wanted $500,000 to be brought to him in advance—before he ventured from California to Yugoslavia. It was a delicate time. Kubat was afraid that Vasiljevic wouldn’t release the advance payment unless Bobby first signed the contract, which had been translated into English by Zita. In the past, Bobby had often backed out of projects before they began. For the match to become a reality, he had to overcome the impulses of his nature. Just before Kubat was to leave for Belgrade to try to collect the down payment, Bobby amazed everyone: He signed the contract without complaint. In a matter of days, Kubat was back in California with the money, and Bobby made arrangements to abandon his tiny room. Because he would be entering a controversial war zone, there was a possibility he might not soon be coming back to California.

Most of his belongings—some fifty-two stuffed cartons gathered from several venues—were put into storage, and Fischer flew off to Belgrade and, ultimately, Montenegro so that he could inspect the playing site and get himself into shape before the match began. Spassky agreed to everything in the contract, and said from his home outside of Paris: “Fischer pulls me out of oblivion. It is a miracle and I am grateful.”

Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia, September 1992

Depending on the wind, a faint echo of massive artillery could be heard occasionally across the mountains near Sarajevo seventy miles to the north. The Balkan war was then at its height, during what was called the Yugoslav Era of Disintegration. Eight thousand people had been killed in just two weeks in August in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the fighting was raging, and millions had fled their homes in the months before. Heavy fighting between forces loyal to the Bosnian government and Serbian irregulars was taking place in Eastern Herzogovina, about fifty miles from the playing site.

However, in Montenegro, on the Adriatic, one of the most beautiful spots in Europe, all was peace, joy, and entertainment on the night of September 1. Torchbearers, dressed in traditional Montenegrin costume—loose-fitting white pants and shirt and a colorful green vest—lined the isthmus leading out to a well-appointed hotel called the Maestral, which had once been a thirteenth-century medieval fort. In the past it had been one of Marshal Tito’s retreats.

The forty-nine-year-old Bobby Fischer was described by a reporter who was covering the match for The New York Times as “an overweight, balding, bearded figure, unmistakably middle-aged, whose expression sometimes seems strikingly vacant.” But Bobby’s untenanted look owed itself not to vapidity but to a certain lack of interest in the world around him. Few things fired his passion. There were his political and religious theories, his vigilant search for dark conspiracies, his joy in languages, his affection for Zita, and of course, his abiding commitment to chess.

He’d just had a haircut and a beard trim, and he was neatly dressed, wearing a tan suit that he’d had custom-made in Belgrade. Surrounded by four sun-glassed bodyguards—two in front and two in the rear—he slowly paraded down the rocky path with Zita, as if he were Caesar and she Cleopatra making an entrance into Rome, smiling and nodding benevolently at their subjects. They were en route to the opening party for the celebrated rematch, and also Zita’s nineteenth birthday—and since they were in medieval surroundings, the entertainment took on a fourteenth-century ambience, with musicians, folk dancers, and acrobats, and fireworks ignited from a boat offshore.

All the while Zita wore a smile on her open face, which was framed by straight light brown hair and dominated by thick, pink-rimmed glasses. Small in stature, she appeared childlike beside Bobby, who, at six feet, two inches, was more than a foot taller.

During the festivities, Bobby sat on a literal throne, next to the sponsor of the match, the shadowy Jezdimir Vasiljevic, who was perched on a duplicate throne: They were two co-kings, one of chess and the other of finance. Vasiljevic had bought the hotel for $500 million, so the $5 million that he fronted for the prize fund was not a particular burden for him. After Bobby signed the contract to play, and it was returned to Vasiljevic, the Serbian screamed: “I just made $5 million!” since he’d been ready to negotiate with Fischer and raise the purse to $10 million if necessary. But he was careful to make sure that Bobby never knew how much more he might have won.

Before play began, there were mixed emotions, conflicting speculations, and assorted reactions throughout the chess world concerning the match. In an editorial in The New York Times, grandmaster Robert Byrne summarized the theories and conjectures: “At one pole, there is elation over Mr. Fischer’s return from two decades of obscurity. He is, after all, the giant of American chess, and few grandmasters can say they haven’t been influenced by his ideas, or awed by the brilliance of his games. If he can still play at top form, if he goes on to play further matches, if he challenges for the championship—if, if, if—then some of them [the chess public] look for a new chess craze to sweep the country, perhaps the world, as it did when Mr. Fischer defeated Mr. Spassky for the championship two decades ago.” But more important than the question of whether Bobby would inspire another “Fischer boom” was the question of whether his immense and innate talent could find its release on the chessboard. There was no telling what his strength would be after such a long hiatus; even Bobby couldn’t be sure that he’d held on to his former insight and brilliance. Playing—and winning—a rematch with Spassky would, to some extent, prove that Bobby’s prowess was intact. However, Spassky, at age fifty-five, had sunk to about one hundredth on the FIDE rating list, so many chess players doubted that the match would be a true gauge of whether Bobby deserved to still be called the strongest player in the world. Bobby asked Gligoric (“Gliga”) to play a secret ten-game training match to get into shape. Bobby won the match, but only three games have been made public: Bobby won one, and there were two draws.

Garry Kasparov, the reigning champion, was one who discounted the match’s significance. When asked at the time whether he’d like to engage Fischer in a match for the official championship, Kasparov snapped, “Absolutely not. I don’t believe Fischer is strong enough now. Boris and Bobby are retirees, not threats to me.” The Daily Telegraph of London offered an atypical reaction to the impending match: “Imagine that you can hear the end of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’ or Beethoven’s 10th, or see the missing arm of Michelangelo’s Venus. These are the feelings that Fischer’s return brings to the world’s chessplayers.”

Before the clock was set in motion for the first game, Bobby was receiving criticism for even considering playing in a war-ravaged country. The United States and some other countries, as well as the United Nations, were attempting to isolate Serbia because of its sponsorship of violence against Muslims and other minorities. On August 7, Kubat gave an interview to the Deutsche-Presse Agentur in which he claimed that the U.S. government had given Fischer permission to play in Serbia. Either Kubat was engaging in wishful thinking or the statement was just a public relations smoke screen to give the match more credibility.

Ten days before the match began, Bobby received the following letter from the Department of the Treasury:

ORDER TO PROVIDE INFORMATION AND CEASE AND DESIST ACTIVITIES FAC NO. 129405

Dear Mr. Fischer:

It has come to our attention that you are planning to play a chess match for a cash prize in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) (hereinafter “Yugoslavia”) against Boris Spassky on or about September 1, 1992. As a U.S. citizen, you are subject to the prohibitions under Executive Order 12810, dated June 5, 1992, imposing sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. The United States Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (“FAC”), is charged with enforcement of the Executive Order.

The Executive Order prohibits U.S. persons from performing any contract in support of a commercial project in Yugoslavia, as well as from exporting services to Yugoslavia. The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the performance of your agreement with a corporate sponsor in Yugoslavia to play chess is deemed to be in support of that sponsor’s commercial activity. Any transactions engaged in for this purpose are outside the scope of General License no. 6 which authorizes only transactions to travel, not to business or commercial activities. In addition, we consider your presence in Yugoslavia for this purpose to be an exportation of services to Yugoslavia in the sense that the Yugoslav sponsor is benefiting from the use of your name and reputation.

Violations of the Executive Order are punishable by civil penalties not to exceed $10,000 per violation, and by criminal penalties not to exceed $250,000 per individual, 10 years in prison, or both. You are hereby directed to refrain from engaging in any of the activities described above. You are further requested to file a report with this office with[in] 10 days of your receipt of this letter, outlining the facts and circumstances surrounding any and all transactions relating to your scheduled chess match in Yugoslavia against Boris Spassky. The report should be addressed to:

The U. S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Enforcement Division, 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Annex—2nd floor, Washington D.C. 20220. If you have any questions regarding this matter, please contact Merete M. Evans at (202) 622–2430.

Sincerely, (signed)

R. Richard Newcomb

Director

Office of Foreign Assets Control

Mr. Bobby Fischer

c/o Hotels Stefi Stefan (Room. 118)

85 315 Stefi Stefan

Montenegro, Yugoslavia

cc:

Charles P. Pashayan, Jr., Esq.

1418 33rd St., N.W.

Washington, DC 20007

Choate & Choate

Attorneys at Law

The Pacific Mutual Building

523 West Sixth Street

Suite 541

Los Angeles, CA 90014

U.S. Embassy

Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Bobby, who had an almost anarchistic disdain for the U.S. government and had refused to pay taxes since 1977, was totally blasé about the receipt of the letter and the threat of a $250,000 fine and ten-year imprisonment for violating the sanctions. As for the public, the sentiment among most people was: “What are they going to do, throw him in jail for ten years for moving wooden pieces across a chessboard?” Well, according to Charles “Chip” Pashayan, Bobby’s pro bono lawyer, the Treasury Department could and would fine and imprison him. He sent Bobby a letter on August 28, 1992, practically begging him to postpone the match, and pointing out that Vasiljevic, to show his good intentions to the world, had promised to donate $500,000 to the International Red Cross for those suffering in the Balkans. Pashayan believed that the Treasury Department might appreciate the humanitarian gesture and eventually might allow the match to go forward by giving Bobby a special license to play. If Bobby returned home immediately, the match could still take place at a later date once the sanctions were lifted. “It is absolutely imperative that you comply with the attached order,” he warned. Bobby was supremely obstinate, and although he could not really justify his decision to play, under the circumstances his tenacity, heart, and pocketbook prevailed. His response was to kill the messenger: He ultimately fired Pashayan.

The Yugoslav prime minister, Milan Panic, whose reasons for wanting the embargo lifted went way beyond chess, backed Bobby and said of the impending match: “Just think how it would be if the sanctions forbade a potential Mozart to write music. What if these games were to be the greatest in chess?” When the match’s venue was moved to Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, met Bobby and Spassky and asked to be photographed with the two. He used the occasion to trumpet his propaganda to the international press: “The match is important because it is played while Yugoslavia is under unjustified blockade. That, in its best way, proves that chess and sports cannot be limited by politics.” Milosevic was later charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, and died in prison.

Despite the missing years, Bobby was being Bobby again. His list of demands continued to grow. Vasiljevic’s strategy of appeasement was to give him whatever he wanted, even though the item might not have been mentioned in the contract. Bobby rejected six tables as inadequate, before asking for one from the 1950 Chess Olympics in Dubrovnik. Even that one had to be slightly altered by a carpenter to satisfy his demand. The pieces had to have the right heft and color, and he chose the same set that had been used at the Dubrovnik Olympics; he particularly liked the small color-contrasted dome on the bishops’ heads, which prevented their being confused with pawns. It’s difficult to believe, but Bobby rejected one set because the length of the knight’s nose was too long; the anti-Semitic symbolism was hardly lost on those who heard the complaint. As a test of the size of the pieces and pawns in relation to the area of the squares, he placed four pawns inside a square to see if they overlapped the edges of the square. They didn’t, so he accepted the size of the pieces as well. He asked for the lighting to be adjusted so that it wouldn’t cast a shadow on the board. And oh yes, spectators were to be kept back sixty-five feet from the stage.

Bobby’s invention of a new chess clock that operated differently from those traditionally used in tournaments had to be specially manufactured for the match, and Vasiljevic had it made. Bobby insisted that it be used in the match. The game would start with each player having ninety minutes, and upon his making a move, two minutes would be added to each player’s time. Bobby’s theory was that in this new system, players would never be left to scramble to make their moves at the end of the time allotment with only seconds to spare, thereby reducing the number of blunders under time pressure. The pride of the game was the depth of its conceptions, Fischer contended, not triumph by mechanical means.

Not all of Fischer’s demands concerned the playing conditions. He also wanted the lavatory seat in his villa to be raised one inch.

According to the tale told by Washington Irving, when Rip Van Winkle awoke and returned to his village, twenty years had passed, and many things had changed. When Bobby Fischer, chess’s version of Van Winkle, emerged after twenty years, the thing that had changed the most was him. The smiling, handsome Bobby Fischer who immediately after the 1972 championship charmed audiences on television shows and crowds on the steps of New York’s City Hall, had been replaced with a swaggering Bobby Fischer filled with angst, irritation, and pique.

The very idea of Bobby Fischer wanting to talk to the press was astonishing, but this new Fischer called for a press conference the night before the match was to begin. He’d been interviewed throughout his chess career, sometimes by assembled groups of journalists, but this was his first formal press conference in more than twenty years, and he was coiled, ready to pounce on any question. Most of the members of the press were ready to see a ghostlike Bobby Fischer appear, someone totally apart from the hero of Reykjavik; many of the journalists who were assembled had never seen him in the flesh before—nor had the public had a glimpse of him during the two decades of his Wilderness Years. Bobby strode in, looking larger and healthier than imagined, and swiftly took his seat on the dais. He appeared not quite as physically impressive as a football linebacker, but certainly looked like a broad-shouldered athlete, perhaps a retired Olympic swimmer.

He’d insisted that all questions be submitted to him in advance, and he sifted through the cards searching for those he chose to answer. Spassky, looking uncomfortable, sat on Bobby’s right, and Vasiljevic, smoking a meerschaum pipe and appearing relaxed, was on his left. After a few minutes of awkward suspense, Bobby looked up and read aloud a reporter’s name, his affiliation, and the first question. “Let’s start with some impudent questions from The New York Times,” Bobby said impudently:

Roger Cohen: Why, after turning down so many offers to make a comeback, did you accept this one?

Bobby Fischer: That’s not quite true. As I recall, for example, Karpov in 1975 was the one who refused to play me under my conditions, which were basically the same conditions that we are going to play now.

Roger Cohen: If you beat Spassky, will you go on to challenge Kasparov for the World Championship?

Bobby Fischer: This is a typical question from Mr. Roger Cohen from The New York Times. Can he read what it says here?

(Fischer then turned and pointed to the banner behind the dais that said “World Championship Match.” The audience applauded.)

Traditionally, with rare exceptions, members of the media don’t applaud at press conferences, since it would be considered an endorsement of what the speaker is saying, rather than just reporting the information being given. Although a large number of reporters had been interested in attending Bobby Fischer’s controversial press conference, journalists were forced to pay $1,000 for accreditation at Sveti Stefan. As a result, many chose not to cover the match—at least, not from the “inside.” There were only about thirty journalists present in the room that day, although there were more than a hundred people in attendance. The applause very likely came from the non-journalists in the crowd, who may have been handpicked claques for their anti-American and pro-Bobby leanings.

Bobby kept reading Cohen’s follow-up questions and not directly answering them, just making comments such as “We’ll see” or “Pass on,” until he read Cohen’s final question: “Are you worried by U.S. government threats over your defiance of the sanctions?”

Bobby Fischer: One second here. [He then removed a letter from his briefcase and held it up.] This is the order to provide information of illegal activities, from the Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C., August 21, 1992. So this is my reply to their order not to defend my title here. [He then spat on the letter, and applause broke out.] That is my answer.

Vasiljevic, also applauding, looked at him approvingly and smiled; Bobby leaned back in his chair, swiveled back and forth, and smugly basked, Mussolini-like, in his courtiers’ adulation.

Bobby Fischer’s spit was sprayed around the world. His anti-Americanism was lambasted on the editorial pages of the Daily News (“Fischer Pawns His Honor”) and The New York Times (“Bosnia’s Tragedy and Bobby’s”) and reported in newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts on almost every continent. The consensus reaction was that Bobby’s expectoration reeked of callousness regarding the carnage taking place in Bosnia, and was a clear flouting of, if not international law, then at least moral norms. Bobby’s bizarre act was likened to such other symbols of anti-American defiance as Ezra Pound’s “Heil Hitler” salute, Jane Fonda’s pose on a North Vietnamese tank, and even Tokyo Rose’s propaganda broadcasts during World War II.

One of the most surprising criticisms of Bobby’s statements came from Bobby’s close friend and former teacher Jack Collins, the Yoda of American chess. “I am bored and disgusted with him,” said Collins. And then, mentioning the adulation that Bobby was receiving in Yugoslavia, Collins added, “They make so much out of a goof like him.” Another close friend, William Lombardy, disagreed, however: “Yes, Fischer betrayed chess and everybody. But he’s still magic, and can do a lot for the game. Bobby and Boris are finally cashing in. I don’t begrudge them that.”

Bobby continued making outrageous—or at least controversial—statements as he answered more of the reporters’ questions. When asked about his views on Communism, he said, “Soviet Communism is basically a mask for Bolshevism which is a mask for Judaism.” Denying that he was an anti-Semite, Fischer pointed out with a smirk that Arabs were Semites, too: “And I am definitely not anti-Arab, okay?” Calling Kasparov and Karpov “crooks” for what he considered their unethical collaboration, he also included Korchnoi on his hate list: “They have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical pre-arranged games. These guys are the lowest dogs around.”

Although she sat in the audience at the press conference, Zita didn’t answer any questions, at least publicly. Later, in a semi-off-the-record interview she gave to a Yugoslavian journalist, she claimed that she was not planning to marry Bobby, but that she was attracted to his honesty. She added, “I like geniuses or crazy people,” not saying which category, if either, Bobby fit into.

Bobby walked rapidly to the board, sat in his chair at precisely 3:30 p.m. on September 2, 1992, stretched his right arm across, and shook Spassky’s hand. He was dressed in a blue suit and wore a red-and-white tie, giving him a certain patriotic look. And if there was any doubt about his nationality, a small American flag could be seen on his side of the table, facing the audience; Spassky, who’d become a French citizen, had the tricolors of France next to him. Lothar Schmid, the arbiter who’d directed the 1972 match between the two grandmasters, was once again present, and he started the clock. And as Schmid depressed the button, a wave of nostalgia rolled over everyone watching. Twenty years had passed since the last Fischer-Spassky showdown, but each of the three main players seemed approximately the same—excepting some gray hairs, additional furrows, and extra girth around the middle. Laugardalshöll had morphed into the Hotel Maestral. Iceland had become Yugoslavia. Bobby was still Fischer. Boris was still Spassky. The game was still chess.

Within a few minutes, Bobby donned a wide-brimmed brown leather visor, the rationale for which was so that his opponent couldn’t see what he was looking at. When it was his move, he pulled the visor way down and often rested his chin on his chest, almost as if he were a poker player secreting his cards.

Twenty years of rust aside, Bobby played as masterfully as he had in 1972: aggressive, relentless, brilliant, attacking on one side of the board and then the other. There were sacrifices of pieces on both players’ parts.

Chess players the world over were following the game through faxes and telephone contact, and their collective question was answered at Fischer’s fiftieth move. Spassky resigned. Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan wrote: “Yes, indeed, Bobby is back! A flawlessly handled game. Precise to the last moment.” News outlets that, just the day prior, had criticized Fischer for his political incorrectness now had to admit that he was more than correct on the board: “Playing forcefully, the American chess genius seems to be in top form.” But to paraphrase Aristotle, one chess game does not a champion make.

During the second game, Bobby seemed as if he was feeling his strength … until he again made his fiftieth move and this time made an atrocious error, converting the game, which he might have won, into a drawn position. In some respects he repeated the error of his ways in the third game as well: letting a potential—or at least a possible—win slip through his grasp and drift into a draw. Bobby’s comment at the end of the game was revealing in its honesty. “This was maybe an off-day for me. I hope it was an off-day for me. I was in trouble.” A scintilla of doubt had begun to insinuate itself. If the third game proved not to be just an “off-day” for him, it might be an indication that his long time away from the board was punishing him and hampering his ability to emerge as the old Bobby Fischer. The fourth and fifth games almost proved to him that he was experiencing some decline, or an accumulation of rust: He lost both.

One of the spectators at the match was the venerable Andrei Lilienthal, the eighty-one-year-old Russian grandmaster who’d lived most of his life in Hungary. He and his wife drove from Budapest to Sveti Stefan to follow the games. Lilienthal had never met Fischer, and at the conclusion of the fourth game, they were introduced at the hotel’s restaurant. “Grandmaster Lilienthal, this is Bobby Fischer,” said the person handling the introductions. The two chess giants shook hands, and Bobby boomed out, “Hastings, 1934/35: the queen sacrifice against Capablanca. Brilliant!”

The comment was so like Bobby in that he tended to remember and categorize people through their chess games, not necessarily anything else. Years later, Lilienthal was still shaking his head over Bobby’s recollection of his famous win over Capablanca more than a half century before.

After the match, Spassky wrote:

My general approach was not to think about the result of the match but how to help Bobby to restore his best form. The sixth game was critical. I was playing for a draw with white, but Bobby played so badly that I achieved a winning position. This would, of course, give me a real chance to lead with three wins and two draws!

Could Bobby withstand such a situation? I did not know and this created a difficult psychological situation for me. I wanted to win the match but I was afraid to win: Bobby could simply leave the match and abandon chess forever. This uncertainty prevented me from winning [the sixth game]. Bobby saved the game with his fighting spirit, and his creative capacity was restored. His self confidence returned and [from that point on] he began to play much better.

Over the next two months, the match’s momentum ebbed and flowed, but from the ninth game on, Bobby, scraping his way back, took the lead and held on to it. The stakes were huge: Whoever won ten games first would capture the lion’s share of the prize money and secure the “championship.” There were few Fischer tirades while playing, but Bobby continued to lose friends and make enemies as a result of his press conferences. He gave nine before the match ended, not counting brief comments that were made jointly with Spassky after each game. Some of Bobby’s controversial statements to the press:

“I think I am doing quite well, considering that I’ve been blacklisted for the last twenty years by world Jewry.”

“No, I have no regrets about spitting at that letter.”

“That man [Kasparov] is a pathological liar, so I wouldn’t pay much attention to whatever he says.”

“I sued a company called Time Incorporated.… I sued them for many tens of millions of dollars, or maybe even many hundreds of millions of dollars on many different causes of action—defamation of character, breach of contract, etc. I spent two years in court, a lot of money, a lot of my time. This was in Federal Court, by the way. Then the judge just said: ‘You have no case. I’m throwing it out without going to trial.’ [The case was not only against Time, Inc., but also Brad Darrach, the author of Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World; the contract that Bobby signed was to give Darrach access to write articles, not a book. The U.S. Chess Federation was also sued because they advertised the book.]

“So I consider that the United States government and Time Incorporated went into a criminal conspiracy to cheat me out of hundreds of millions of dollars, which is the reason I have not filed and paid my Federal and California State income tax since about 1976 … since 1977, rather.”

By the time they reached the thirtieth game, Bobby had won nine games and Spassky four. Games 26, 27, 28, and 29 were all draws; it was very hard for either man to defeat the other by that time. Both men were tired. In the final game, Spassky played his twenty-seventh move—it was hopeless at that point—and then resigned. Fischer had played resolutely and won what might be described as a comfortable game.

By his own standards, Bobby was Champion of the World once again, and $3.5 million richer. He’d made what Charles Krauthammer described in Time magazine, somewhat facetiously, as the greatest comeback since Napoleon Bonaparte sailed a single-masted fleet from the island of Elba in 1815. Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan said of Fischer’s performance that it put him “somewhere in the top ten in the world.” And a few months later, on the occasion of Bobby’s fiftieth birthday, grandmaster Arnold Denker said, concerning his old friend and competitor: “True, the match with Spassky was not all that great, but after such a long lay-off, wasn’t that to be expected? Yet, he did win convincingly. A match between him and the present world champion [Kasparov] would outdraw anything yet seen, and create a publicity explosion for world chess.”

Bobby revealed that he’d be willing to play a match for the championship with Kasparov, but that he’d like to play a few training matches with younger players as a warm-up and then face Kasparov in 1994. But before Bobby could consider his next chess opponent, he had to, first, face a formidable non-chess opponent: the U.S. government. At issue were his violation of the sanctions, the fifteen years of back taxes he owed, and the taxes he potentially owed on the millions he’d just won.

At the closing banquet, Bobby was coaxed onto the dance floor for a few spins with some young Serbian women and then said some gracious words of thanks in Serbo-Croatian to his host and to the people of Yugoslavia.

After receiving the entire payment due him (within forty-eight hours of the conclusion of the match, disproving rumors that Vasiljevic would renege on the amount) Bobby by prearrangement met up with his sister, Joan, at the Belgrade Intercontinental Hotel. There was still a question concerning money due Bobby from the company that had purchased the television rights to the match—some $1 million. (Ultimately, Bobby never received any of it.) Joan took most of the match money, however, and traveled via train to Zurich, where she opened an account in Bobby’s name at the Union Bank of Switzerland. This was done because it wasn’t clear whether Bobby would be stopped at the Yugoslav border due to his violation of the sanctions and, if that were to occur, whether U.S. government officials might try to impound some, if not all, of the money.

At this time Vasiljevic was making an arrangement for another match for Bobby, this one to be played both in Belgrade and in Spain with Ljubomir Ljubojevic, the leading Yugoslavian player and one of the world’s strongest tacticians. Bobby had met Ljubojevic. They liked each other, and both were eager to play.

Vasiljevic’s plans concerning Bobby always contained ulterior motives. Certainly, he never made anywhere near a profit from the Fischer-Spassky match, despite the revenue from admissions fees, the sale of souvenirs, posters, television rights, etc. He promoted the match to bring global publicity to the Yugoslavian embargo and to make it appear as though the United States and other nations were attempting to suppress an important artistic endeavor. Within a few months after the match ended, Vasiljevic’s financial house of cards began to collapse. Five hundred thousand depositors had funneled $2 billion into his sixteen banks and had been promised 15 percent interest on their money. Eventually, he found himself unable to meet the interest payments. He fled to Hungary and then to Israel, supposedly with bags of money—to avoid prosecution and with hope of setting up a government-in-exile. Years later he was extradited to Serbia and put into Belgrade Central Prison to face charges of embezzlement. Bobby grew to hate Vasiljevic, claiming that he was a Zionist agent. Further, he felt that the $3.5 million he had won in his match against Spassky was money garnered illegally by Vasiljevic. He made no move to return the money, however.

There were press reports that Bobby might be indicted and extradited back to the United States. Although he wanted to return to California, he didn’t want to take the chance of entering the United States just yet. In mid-December, he received a telephone call from his attorney that a federal grand jury was about to meet and consider his case, and there was an almost certain chance that they’d vote for an indictment. The spitting incident, symbolically equivalent to burning the American flag, had apparently earned the government’s wrath. Bobby immediately left Belgrade—taking with him his second, Eugene Torre, and two bodyguards provided by Vasiljevic—and secretly traveled to the small town of Magyarkanizsa, in the northernmost reaches of Serbia, on the border with Hungary. Vasiljevic had selected this location for Bobby for a few reasons: Its population consisted of about 90 percent Hungarian nationals, so people from Budapest and its environs could cross the border with impunity, meaning that Zita could visit him easily. Also, should Bobby have to quickly cross from Serbia into Hungary, it was probable that he could do so without being stopped, since the checkpoint was undermanned and the guards wouldn’t likely be on the lookout for him. The fact that Magyarkanizsa was known as “The City of Silence” also made it attractive to Bobby … at least at first.

On December 15, 1992, a single-count indictment in federal court in Washington, D.C., was handed down by a grand jury against Bobby Fischer for violating economic sanctions, through an executive order issued by President George Bush. A letter to that effect was sent to Bobby in Belgrade, and upon announcement of the indictment, federal officials issued a warrant for his arrest. It wasn’t clear how rapidly—or aggressively—the government would pursue him.

In the middle of winter, there was little to do in Magyarkanizsa. Bobby didn’t want to write letters or receive them, for fear of being tracked by the U.S. government, which was attempting to arrest him. When he communicated by telephone, he did so by having one of his bodyguards call the intended person and then hand over the phone. No call-back number was ever left. Trying to outwit any government pursuers, he at first stayed at a small hotel and then at an inn on the outskirts of town. And when the weather became warm, he moved into a health and rehabilitation center, not because he was ailing but because the facility had a swimming pool and a gym where he could work out. After a while, he moved to another hotel. Occasionally, Svetozar Gligoric, his old friend, would visit him and stay for a week or so.

In late May of 1993, the Polgars, the royal chess family of Hungary, visited Bobby—Laszlo, the father, and his two precocious daughters, Judit, sixteen, and Sofia, nineteen. Both girls were chess prodigies. (The oldest daughter, Zsuzsa, twenty-three—a grandmaster—was in Peru at a tournament.) Bobby welcomed their arrival since he was starved for companionship.

Soon after they left, though, he began to feel very hemmed in by circumstances. His funds were getting a bit crimped since he was fearful of traveling to Switzerland to draw money from his account—and if he tried to have the Swiss bank wire money to a bank in Magyarkanizsa, he’d once again be violating the sanctions. Not having many people to interact with or much to do was making him feel lonely and bored. (“I have no friends here; only Gliga and the bodyguards,” he wrote to Zita.) Somehow, he had to extricate himself from Yugoslavia.

Without naming the country he wanted to go to, he sought legal advice from an attorney in Los Angeles and without mentioning names, should the phones be tapped, he had an English-speaking attorney in Magyarkanizsa take down the information. The country that Bobby had in mind to go to was the Philippines, although other than Torre he told no one of his intended destination. Getting there would be complicated.

If Bobby managed to get to Hungary without being arrested, he could fly directly to the Philippines. If traveling there directly appeared too risky, he could rent a small private plane somewhere in Hungary, or even Yugoslavia, and fly to Greece or Egypt and then to Manila. Another possibility was taking a boat or a tramp steamer, but that might be too prolonged. Bobby worried that his funds in the Union Bank of Switzerland might be sequestered, so he wanted to get the money out of there as soon as possible.

Ultimately, Bobby felt that traveling to the Philippines—as much as he wanted to go—was a risk he wasn’t prepared to take at that particular time, and in any event, he learned that his UBS funds couldn’t be sequestered. While he was still pondering what to do, he received some shocking news.

Zita had taken the bus from Budapest to visit him, and she had an announcement to make: She was pregnant, and not by Bobby. One can only imagine Bobby’s shock, anger, and sadness at hearing this. He couldn’t understand or accept that the passion he felt for Zita wasn’t reciprocal. His proposal of marriage was categorically refused. A bitter argument raged through the night. “He was rough,” Zita said. “His behavior was very, very bad.… he hurt those that I love.” Finally, as dawn approached, Bobby went to sleep and Zita awoke a few hours later. She left a good-bye note indicating that her affair had nothing to do with why she didn’t want to marry him. The fact was, she just didn’t love him.

When Bobby awoke, he wrote a letter of apology to her, but she didn’t answer.

When Zsuzsa Polgar returned to Budapest, her family made a second visit to Magyarkanizsa, specifically so that she could meet Bobby. Accompanying the family in Zsuzsa’s VW Passat was Janos Kubat. Describing her first impressions of Bobby Fischer, Zsuzsa recalled: “I was surprised to see how tall and big he was. He was slightly overweight, though I wouldn’t call him fat, and he seemed to have enormous hands and feet. He was very friendly and open with me right away, and had a lot of questions including about my recent trip to Peru.”

Zsuzsa questioned Bobby about why he was staying in Magyarkanizsa—an ancient town, small and colorless—when he could be living in Budapest, the Paris of Eastern Europe, a city with many restaurants (including ones that featured his favorite Japanese cuisine), movie theaters, bookshops, thermal baths, concerts, and libraries. She added that there he could socialize with some of the great Hungarian players he knew—men such as Benko, Lilienthal, Portisch, and Szabo.

Bobby listened closely to what Zsuzsa was saying. He realized that if he was in Budapest he could continue to pursue Zita much more easily. He saw his quest for her in chess terms: “I have been in lost positions before … worse than this, and I won!” Laszlo Polgar invited Bobby to stay with his family anytime at his country home. That left only one question to ponder: Would he be stopped at the crossing into Hungary and turned over to the U.S. authorities?

The Polgars, thinking of everything, had taken a chance on their way across the border and asked the guards that very question. They were assured that Bobby wouldn’t have any trouble entering Hungary. He was somewhat skeptical, however, and wrote apprehensively to his friend Miyoko Watai in Japan: “I think the Hungarians may arrest me as soon as I cross the border.”

Realizing that his next move might ruin his life, Bobby, whose life on the chessboard had always been about preparation and calculation, decided that people in desperate positions must take desperate chances. Two weeks later, Bobby, Eugene Torre, and the two bodyguards drove in a rented car to the border of Hungary, were asked for their passports, and without further delay were allowed to pass. If the guards recognized Bobby and knew he was a wanted fugitive, they gave no evidence of it.

Entering the sparkling city of Budapest, Fischer checked into one of the most romantic and elegant hotels in the city, the Gellért, right on the Danube, and had lunch on the terrace. Bobby couldn’t wait to slip into the Gellért’s thermal bath; he felt he was in paradise. Even the bell captain made him feel at home. When the man carried Bobby’s luggage to his room, he suddenly recognized the reclusive champion and challenged him to a game.