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

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Childhood Obsession

WHEN SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOBBY, accompanied by his mother, walked into the Brooklyn Chess Club for the first time on a Friday night in January 1951, he was an anomaly. He was, in fact, the first child permitted to enter. Even the appearance of Regina Fischer was unusual: There were no other women present, and at that time there were no female members on the club’s roster, as was the case at many other clubs in the United States.

As the new president of the club, Carmine Nigro announced that Bobby was his guest and would be accepted as a member. No one had the temerity to disagree. It was a tradition in many chess clubs, not only in the United States but throughout the world, that children were not to be heard, and certainly not seen. Even Emanuel Lasker, who ultimately became World Chess Champion, was as a child denied membership in his local club in Germany, despite his evident talent.

The Brooklyn Chess Club, established just after the Civil War, was one of the most prestigious in the nation. It was housed in the impressive and stately Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar had sung. The club had distinguished itself by competing every year in the Metropolitan Chess League, often defeating dozens of clubs throughout the New York area. Nevertheless, Bobby seemed unafraid of the cigar-smoking adepts hunched over their boards.

The room was quiet except for the occasional rap of a chess piece slammed to the board in anger. At the conclusion of a game, a player might ask, “If I’d played the rook instead of the bishop, what would you have done?” or mutter indignantly, “I overlooked a mating net: You’re lucky to get a draw.” Invariably, the tones were hushed, even when the speaker was annoyed. Bobby looked on in wonderment, understanding some of the jargon and trying to comprehend the rest.

The problem that developed for Bobby almost instantly that night was more in the minds of his potential opponents. None of the club’s veterans wanted to play a boy, especially since Bobby looked to be about five. A chorus of nervous, fretful snickers ran through the high-ceilinged room when it was suggested they “give Bobby a chance.” The predominant feeling was: It’s bad enough to lose to a peer, but what if I lose to a seven-year-old? The embarrassment! The loss of reputation! After coaxing from Nigro, a few of the older players relented and gave Bobby a game or two.

Most were experienced tournament competitors, some even approaching the strength of Max Pavey. As it developed, they had nothing to fear though: Bobby lost every game that night.

Despite his defeats, Bobby kept coming back for more. He became a dedicated member, and a bit of a novelty. The tableau of a little boy engaged in mental combat with a judge, doctor, or college professor some eight or ten times his age was often greeted with mirth and wonder. “At first I used to lose all the time, and I felt bad about it,” Bobby said later. He was teased unmercifully by the conquering players. “Fish!” they’d bleat, using the chess player’s derisive term for a really weak player, whenever Bobby made an obvious blunder. The epithet hurt even more because of its similarity to his own name. Bobby himself despised the term. Later he’d refer to a poor player as a “weakie”—or, less commonly, a “duffer” or “rabbit.”

Nigro, an expert player of near master strength, sensed potential in the boy, and aware that Bobby was without a father, he assumed a mentoring position. He became the boy’s teacher and invited him on Saturdays to his home, where he’d match him up with his son Tommy, just a shade younger than Bobby though a slightly better player. Tommy didn’t mind playing chess with Bobby, but he didn’t want to take lessons from his father. On those teaching days, Nigro would greatly increase his son’s allowance if he’d sit still long enough to learn chess tactics.

As soon as Bobby began to understand the basics of chess, Nigro went over specific ways to conduct the part of the game known as the opening, where the first few moves can decide or at least influence the outcome of the contest. These initial moves and “lines” follow well-charted paths that have been chronicled for centuries, and players who want to improve their game attempt to understand and memorize them. Because there are a myriad of such variations, it’s difficult for most players to internalize even a small portion. For example, there are 400 different possible positions after two players make one move each, and there are 72,084 positions after two moves each—not all good, it must be added. But Bobby approached with dedication the daunting task of learning many of the substantive ones. Referring to the difficult regimen, he later said, “Mr. Nigro was possibly not the best player in the world but he was a very good teacher. Meeting him was probably a decisive factor in my going ahead in chess.”

Nigro had no problem teaching Bobby. The boy could hardly wait for his weekly lesson, and eventually he began to defeat Tommy. “I started going to Mr. Nigro’s house on Saturdays,” Bobby later wrote, “as well as meeting him on Fridays at the Club. My mother was often on duty on weekends at her job as a nurse, and was glad to have me go [to Mr. Nigro’s house].”

In 1952, still not yet turned nine, Bobby made his first entrance into competitive chess. A group of Nigro’s protégés won the first match with a score of 5–3; the score of the second match has been lost or forgotten. Auspiciously, Bobby won his first game and drew his second against ten-year-old Raymond Sussman, the son of a dentist, Dr. Harold Sussman, a nationally rated master from Brooklyn. Dr. Sussman was also an amateur photographer, and he captured some portraits of Bobby that worked their way into the Fischer oeuvre years later. Fittingly, Sussman also became Bobby’s dentist. “He had a great set of teeth,” Sussman remembered.

That summer and fall, Bobby also spent time playing against his grandfather’s septuagenarian cousin Jacob Schonberg, who also lived in Brooklyn. Regina would take the boy with her when she nursed Schonberg and Bobby would play his great-cousin as the old man sat in bed. Years later Bobby could not remember how strong Schonberg was or how many games the two played, but one could tell by the inflection in his voice that he was affected by the experience, not so much by the playing of the games, but by the encounter with a family member, however distant. It was a ritual that was all too rare for him.

Carmine Nigro was a professional musician, and taught music in a number of styles. Since Bobby was such a sponge in absorbing the intricacies of chess, Nigro tried to foster in him an interest in music. Since the Fischers didn’t own a piano, Nigro began giving Bobby accordion lessons, lending him a somewhat battered “twelve-bass” instrument so he could practice at home. Soon Bobby was playing “Beer Barrel Polka” and other tunes and felt competent enough to give performances at more than one school assembly. After about a year, though, he concluded that the amount of time he was spending practicing the accordion was impinging on his chess studies. “I did fairly well on it for a while,” Bobby said, looking back, “but chess had more attraction and the accordion was pushed aside.”

Until he was ten, Bobby’s regimen was fairly routine: He played at the Brooklyn Chess Club every Friday night, with Regina sitting on the sidelines, reading a book or doing her nursing homework. Late Saturday morning Nigro would pick him up in his car, and if Tommy Nigro was uninterested in playing, which was more often than not, Nigro would drive Bobby to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to get the boy some competition at the open-air chess tables. Nigro also had another agenda: At first, Bobby was somewhat of a slow player, and the chess players in the park were just the opposite. Nigro felt they wouldn’t tolerate Bobby’s sometimes languorous tempo, so he’d be forced to quicken his play and therefore his thinking.

To boost his competitiveness Bobby spent hours after school at the Grand Army Plaza library reading almost every chess book on the shelves. He became such a fixture there, and displayed such seriousness, that a photograph showing him studying appeared in the library’s newsletter in 1952 with a caption identifying him. It was the first time that his photograph appeared in print. Within a few months, he found that he could follow the games and the diagrams in the books without the use of a board. If the variations were too complex or lengthy, he’d check the book out, and at home, sitting in front of his chess set, he’d replay the games of past masters, attempting to understand and to memorize how they’d won—or lost.

Bobby read chess literature while he was eating and when he was in bed. He’d set up his board on a chair next to his bed, and the last thing he did before going to sleep and the first thing he did upon awakening was to look at positions or openings. So many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, bowls of cereal, and plates of spaghetti were consumed while Bobby was replaying and analyzing games that the crumbs and leavings of his food became encrusted in the crenellated battlements of his rooks, the crosses of his kings, the crowns of his queens, and the creases in the miters of his bishops. And the residue of food was never washed off. Years later, when a chess collector finally took possession of the littered set and cleaned it up, Bobby’s reaction was typically indignant: “You’ve ruined it!”

He even maintained his involvement with the game while bathing. The Fischers didn’t have a working shower, just a bathtub, and Bobby, like many young children, needed to be urged to take at least a weekly bath. Regina established a Sunday night ritual of running a bath for him, practically carrying him to the tub. And once he was settled in the water, she’d lay a door from a discarded cabinet across the tub as a sort of tray and then bring in Bobby’s chess set, a container of milk, and whatever book he was studying at the time, helping him position them on the board. Bobby soaked sometimes for hours as he became engrossed in the games of the greats, only emerging from the water, prune-like, when Regina insisted.

The neurons of Bobby’s brain seemed to absorb the limitations and possibilities of each piece in any given position, storing them for future reference. They remained there, tucked into his memory, deep within a cave of abstract thoughts: information and ideas about pawns and squares to be used, discarded, or ignored—all in perfect cadence and synchronicity. Studying the games of masters from the past and present, Bobby seemed to appropriate and learn from many: the intuitive combinational ability of Rudolf Spielmann, the accumulation of small advantages as demonstrated by Wilhelm Steinitz, the almost mystical technique José Capablanca had of avoiding complications, the deep but beautiful murkiness of Alexander Alekhine. As one chess master said of him: “Bobby virtually inhaled chess literature. He remembered everything and it became part of him.” The boy—and then the man—had one salient cognitive goal, although he didn’t express it openly: He wanted to understand.

He enjoyed playing over what are called miniature games, short encounters of usually twenty moves or less, as if they were musical exercises, works of art unto themselves, usually with only one pervasive idea.

Beginner’s books such as An Invitation to Chess and other primers were quickly discarded as Bobby then became engrossed in advanced works such as Practical Chess Openings and Basic Chess Endings; the two volumes of My Best Games of Chess by Alexander Alekhine; and a then newly published book, 500 Master Games of Chess. He was also particularly interested in the collection titled Morphy’s Games of Chess, which displayed the great player’s tactical ingenuity and his adherence to three general principles: rapid development of one’s pieces, the importance of occupying or capturing the center squares of the board, and mobility—the necessity of keeping lines, ranks, files, and diagonals open. Bobby absorbed these lessons and would act on them for the rest of his life. He once told master Shelby Lyman that he’d read thousands of chess books and retained the best from each.

It should be stressed that these works wouldn’t have been easy to read even for an experienced adult player: They aren’t accessible unless a person has the drive to excel in the abstraction of chess. That an eight- or nine-year-old boy had the power of concentration to get through them was highly unusual. That the same boy was able to understand and absorb what he read was nothing short of remarkable. Later, Bobby would increase the degree of difficulty by reading chess books in multiple languages.

In the realm of academics Bobby’s level of achievement was more erratic. Aside from summer camps, the first classes Bobby ever attended were at the Brooklyn Jewish Children’s School, a kindergarten, where he was taught songs by rote for Hanukkah and Purim, in both English and Yiddish, a language he didn’t know. He couldn’t relate to the other children. At first, he couldn’t figure out the purpose of a dreidel—a four-sided spinning top that’s played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. He didn’t like the idea that he had to wear a uniform—a white shirt and pressed pants. And in the restroom he may have seen that his penis was different from the rest: He wasn’t circumcised. After a few weeks Regina withdrew him from the school. Although she was Jewish, she wasn’t religiously observant; Bobby never had a bris (the circumcision ceremony usually performed on the eighth day after birth for Jewish boys), and he later claimed that he’d received no training in Judaic customs or theology and was never taken to a synagogue for religious purposes. He may have simply failed to recall it.

Attempts by Regina and Joan to engage Bobby in schoolwork were usually fruitless. Bobby could concentrate on puzzles or chess for hours, but he fidgeted and grew restless when confronted with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Attending the Brooklyn public schools was also problematic. He was a loner and invariably separated himself from the other children, possibly because of acute shyness or fear of competition. By the time he reached the fourth grade, he’d been in and out of six schools—almost two a year—leaving each time because he wasn’t doing well in his studies or couldn’t abide his teachers, classmates, or even the school’s location. In frustration, Regina registered Bobby in a school for gifted children. He lasted one day and refused to go back.

Eventually, she found a school that was an appropriate match for her problematic son. In the fall of 1952, when Bobby was nine, Regina secured scholarship enrollment for him in Brooklyn Community Woodward, a progressive grade school of approximately 150 children. Housed in a stately brownstone that had originally been a private home, it was one of the loveliest school buildings in Brooklyn. The school’s philosophy of education was based on the principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, an eighteenth-century Swiss educator who opposed memorization exercises and strict discipline, and concentrated on the individual’s development though a series of experimental techniques. The school promoted the concept of Anschaung, a personal way of looking at things that was inherent and individual to every child. The seats and desks weren’t permanently fixed in place as they were in most schools, and the children were encouraged to forget the distinction between study and play. To learn early American history, for example, students dressed in costumes of the era and were taught how to spin yarn, hook rugs, and use quill pens.

Bobby’s way was chess, and what it meant to him. He was already showing talent for the game, and he was accepted by Community Woodward with the understanding that he’d teach the other students to play, and also as a result of his astronomically high IQ test score of 180.

A bright spot in his social and physical development at Community Woodward occurred when he was chosen to be on the baseball team, and he began to emerge from his shell. He fell in love with the game, could hear the roar of the crowds from nearby Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, while at school or at home, and on class trips attended games at the stadium. He had a knack for fielding and batting, but although he was fast, he wasn’t a particularly coordinated runner on the bases. “He incited a great deal of interest in chess here,” one of his teachers said later. “He easily beat everybody, including the chess-playing members of the faculty. No matter what he played, whether it was baseball in the yard, or tennis, he had to come out ahead of everybody. If he’d been born next to a swimming pool he would have been a swimming champion. It just turned out to be chess.”

One day Bobby bounded up the three flights of stairs to the safety of his home, only to find it empty. Joan was still in school, staying late for the Biology Club; Regina was in a nursing class, to be followed by library work and then a night shift after that. He found a note, penned in a small, blue spiral-bound pad, propped up on a chair in the kitchen:

Dear Bobby—Finish off the soup and rice. Milk in refrig. I may get back after 3 to drop off groceries, and will then go back to study. Love, M.

Being alone in the apartment was the default position of Bobby’s life from the time that Regina felt her son could be left by himself without supervision, and this persistent solitude might well have been a catalyst for his deeper involvement in chess. As he sat in front of the chessboard, often at the kitchen table, with a chess book spread open, the pieces became his companions, the book his mentor. Neither the loneliness nor the learning was easy for him, however. He would have liked to have had a friend, some other boy that he could play and share adventures with, but since chess was already occupying most of his time, interest, and thoughts, that potential friend would have had to not only know how to play chess but play it well enough to engage Bobby’s attention and loyalty.

A certain compulsion forced him to continue to search for the secrets of the chessboard, and this preoccupation commanded his attention for hours on end. He was happy when the glare of the winter light ceased to pierce the broken shade of the kitchen window; it interfered with his thinking. When his sister Joanie or mother Geenie—as they were known by their friends—would come home in the late afternoon or early evening, they’d sometimes find Bobby in the dusk of the apartment, unaware or not caring that the lamps were unlit, staring at the board and lost in a reverie of tactics or strategies.

Even though Regina felt Bobby was fairly independent, she was worried that he was home alone too much, and she had been seeking someone to childsit for him, to be sort of a companion. Money was a problem: Even a token payment to a caretaker was difficult to raise. So she had placed the following advertisement in the campus newspaper of Brooklyn College, not far from the Fischer home:

Baby sitter wanted for schoolboy, 8½. Evenings, some weekends, in exchange for room, kitchen privileges. Sterling 3-4110 7 to 9 PM.

A young math student replied—he even knew how to play chess—but for unknown reasons he didn’t take the job. Bobby remained alone.

Unlike Joan, Bobby seemed to have little interest in school, and whenever Regina helped him with his homework he typically gave it short shrift, impatient to go back to chess. She had great difficulty coping with his imperiousness: “I want to play chess!” he’d demand, with all the pomposity of a crown prince talking to a servant. And off he’d go to his chessboard, without his mother’s permission, leaving his school assignments in abeyance.

It’s not that Bobby rejected the studiousness displayed by his sister and mother. Rather, he was bent on the acquisition of another skill: chess. The difference was that it was more important to him to study how to win with rook and pawn than to learn the three branches of government or where to move the decimal point in long division. The three Fischers, prototypes of Talmudic scholars, were always studying: Joan her textbooks; Regina her medical tomes; and Bobby the latest chess periodical. The apartment was often as silent as a library.

One of Bobby’s few non-chess interests emerged unexpectedly during his eighth year in the summer of 1951, when Regina sent him to the Venderveer Nursery School, a day camp in Brooklyn. Despite its name, the school accepted older children for its summer camp, and the program provided a place for Bobby to go once the school year ended. Either Regina or Joan would drop him off in the morning and fetch him in the late afternoon. Bobby fully expected to hate the camp—or at least dislike it—but he found that he enjoyed many of the physical activities it offered. Most important to him was Venderveer’s large outdoor pool, where he learned to swim.

Thereafter every summer, when he was in one of the camps he attended and when he wasn’t studying chess, Bobby would train to take various Red Cross swimming tests, easily qualifying as an “Intermediate” and then “Advanced” swimmer. A true Piscean, he loved the water, especially if swimming meant competing with the other children in races. He was fast, determined, and alert, and the instant the swimming coach blew the whistle Bobby would kick off, often landing in the water when the other swimmers were still in mid-dive. Swimming gave him the chance to move and exercise his body, to uncramp it from the stiffening stillness of sitting with a chessboard or a book. He discovered that he loved moving through the water, and he found that he loved competition itself, whether swimming or playing chess. There seemed to be virtually nothing else he enjoyed doing.

Regina began to fear for Bobby’s future if he didn’t take his schoolwork seriously. More than that, she was worried that his interest in chess was becoming obsessive. She believed he was so engrossed in the game that he was never quite in touch with the reality around him, so addicted to chess that he would not—could not—control it, and that eventually, because of the exclusion of everything else, this accidental interest might ruin his life.

For Regina, discussing Bobby’s overcommitment to chess with Nigro was a hopeless endeavor. If anything, Nigro was constantly encouraging him to play more, to study, to enter tournaments. Bobby became Nigro’s protégé and chess companion. A caring man who was aware of Regina’s strained financial state, he never charged her for the lessons he gave Bobby, whether chess or music. Nigro and Bobby began to play clocked games together, at two hours each—the official speed of tournament chess—and with each encounter Bobby seemed to become stronger, which made him study even more, until he was beating Nigro in the majority of games.

Much to Bobby’s consternation, Regina insisted that he have a psychological evaluation to determine whether something could or should be done to temper his relentless preoccupation with the game. When she brought the boy to Dr. Harold Kline at the Children’s Psychiatric Division of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, Bobby was less than cooperative. Sensing this, Dr. Kline didn’t give him any of the battery of personality, intelligence, or interest tests usually used to assess a child. He simply talked to the boy. “I don’t know,” said Bobby sullenly, when asked why he spent so much time playing chess and not on his schoolwork. “I just go for it.” With just a word of advice to Bobby about not neglecting his schoolwork, he asked the boy to step outside. Dr. Kline told Regina that she shouldn’t worry about Bobby, that children often became intrigued, virtually obsessed, with games, toys, sports, and other things, and that after a while they either lose interest or step away from such heavy involvement. No, he didn’t think that Bobby was neurotic, and he didn’t recommend therapy. “Neurotic” was a word that really explained nothing, he added, pointing out that Bobby was not hurting himself or others, chess was probably stretching his mind, and she should allow him to play as often as he liked. Her son’s resistance to schoolwork was a mild disorder that many children go through, but his study of chess, an intellectual activity, was supplanting it. Perhaps, he added, she could fashion some of his schoolwork as a sort of game, which might pique his interest.

Not fully comforted, Regina sought a second opinion. She learned of a psychiatrist who was a chess master, Dr. Ariel Mengarini, a nonanalytic neuropsychiatrist who worked for the government. Mengarini was so in love with chess that he identified with Bobby’s passion. He confessed to Regina his own fanaticism for the game and also something else she didn’t want to hear about Bobby: “I told her that I could think of a lot worse things than chess that a person could devote himself to and that she should let him find his way.”

Gradually, Bobby’s performance at the Brooklyn Chess Club began to improve. It took him a few difficult and sometimes discouraging years, but eventually he was winning the majority of his games. For their part, his opponents were impressed with his tenacity and clear signs of progress. “I’d already gone through most of the books in the public library near us and was beginning to want chess books of my own,” Bobby said later, reflecting back on the period. Nigro gave or loaned him books, and Regina permitted him to purchase a book now and then, whenever she had some spare cash. Bobby’s allowance of 32 cents a day didn’t afford him much of an opportunity to buy books—and even as he grew older and his per diem was raised to 40 and then 60 cents, the money was spent on chocolate milk for lunch and a candy bar after school.

Whenever Nigro was finished reading his copies of Chess Review and Chess Life, he gave them to Bobby, who became fascinated with both periodicals, not only for their multitude of engaging and instructive games and descriptions, but because they gave him the chance to read about the great champions in chess. Sitting with those magazines, it was as if he were studying the chess equivalent of Plutarch’s lives of the Roman generals or Vasari’s lives of the artists. Quite simply, they inspired.

Then, in the summer of 1954, Bobby had an opportunity to see in action some of the greats he’d been reading about. It turned out that the Soviet team would be playing for the first time on United States soil.

In that era of anti-Communist hysteria, when anyone in America who read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or wore a red tie was thought to be a Communist, the president of the U.S. Chess Federation, Harold M. Phillips, a lawyer who’d defended Morton Sobell in the Rosenberg espionage case, confided almost with relish that he expected to be called in front of Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and accused of being a Communist simply because he’d tendered the chess invitation to the Russians. It never happened.

It’s important to stress the difference between Soviet and American chess teams at that time. The Soviets were all not just professional players, but grandmasters, the designation given to the highest-rated chess masters who have distinguished themselves in international tournaments. Tsar Nicholas II originally bestowed the title in 1914; it was being used in 1954 and is still awarded today.

The Soviet players were subsidized by their government and in many cases given dachas as retreats where they could study and train for matches. Back then, these grandmasters commanded as much prestige in Soviet society as a movie star or an Olympic athlete does in contemporary America. When Mikhail Botvinnik, who became World Chess Champion, arrived at the Bolshoi Opera House, he was given a standing ovation. In the mid-fifties, the Soviet Chess Federation had four million members, and playing chess wasn’t just required in elementary schools but compulsory in after-school activities; youngsters who possessed talent were given special training, often working one-on-one with grandmasters who were tapped to groom the next generation of world beaters. One Soviet tournament registered more than seven hundred thousand players. In the USSR, the playing of chess was considered more than just a national policy. It was deeply ingrained in the culture, and it seemed that everyone—man, woman, and child; farmer, civil servant, or doctor—played chess. The impending clash between the Soviets and the Americans thus had Cold War implications.

Three days before the match an editorial in The New York Times observed: “It has become painfully obvious to their opponents that the Russians bring to the chessboard all the fervor, skill and manifest devotion to their cause that Foreign Minister Molotov brings to the diplomatic conference. They are out to win for the greater glory of the Soviet Union. To do so means public acclaim at home, propaganda victories abroad.” Chess was not merely a game to the Soviets; it was war, and not as cold as might have been thought.

The U.S. Chess Federation then had only three thousand members, no national program to promote chess or train children, and only boasted one grandmaster, Samuel Reshevsky. His status netted him a grand total of $200 a month, a stipend meted out by a few admiring patrons. In addition, he made approximately $7,500 a year giving exhibitions and lectures. It was falsely rumored that he didn’t even own a chess set.

In many ways the looming match was analogous to a team of National Basketball Association all-stars playing a college team. There was always the possibility that the collegians would win, but statistically their chances would be much lower than a thousand to one.

On Wednesday, June 16, Bobby, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt, arrived at the Roosevelt Hotel escorted by Nigro, to witness the first round of the historic match. It was the first time the boy had ever been in a hotel, and he looked up at the large clock at the head of the stairs, then noticed some familiar faces entering the Grand Ballroom. He recognized various members of the Brooklyn Chess Club and also a few regulars from Washington Square Park. He dutifully took his seat in the auditorium, as though he were at the Academy Awards of chess, scanning the stage “wide-eyed with amazement,” as Nigro noted.

On the stage, in front of a velvet curtain, were two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the unmistakable and portentous crimson Soviet banner with its hammer and sickle. Beneath them, spanning the breadth of the stage, were eight demonstration boards, where the moves of the games were to be displayed. The eight tables, with chess sets and boards, were at the ready for the players. There were eleven hundred spectators, more than for any previous chess event in U.S. history.

And then there were the players, gathering onstage, waiting for the signal from the referee to take their places and commence their games. Soviet player David Bronstein asked for a glass of lemon juice—no, not lemonade, but real lemon juice, he insisted—which he downed in what looked like one gulp. Someone remarked that the Americans looked nervous, as indeed they should have: Aside from their previous two defeats to remind them of the odds against victory, there was the Soviets’ recent routing of the Argentine team in Buenos Aires and the French team in Paris. Donald Byrne, the United States Open champion, said he was so on edge that he spent the entire day before the match trying not to think of chess, reading the romantic prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Eventually, after some speech making about the contribution of chess toward a possible détente between the Soviet Union and the United States, play got under way. Nigro noted with proud amusement that his protégé was watching carefully and absorbing everything he could.

Did Bobby fully comprehend the political implications of the match? Did feelings of patriotism surge within him and was he rooting hard for his country to win? Did he wish—dream—that one day he’d be up on a similar stage playing against the world’s finest players? He never made a statement about the match, but it’s likely that the answer to at least the latter question was yes.

Aside from the games themselves, which he followed assiduously, Bobby noticed other things: chess players congregating in all the corridors and public rooms of the hotel discussing and analyzing the games, chess books and portable sets at the ready, and many people leaving observation posts only briefly to buy tuna fish and ham-and-cheese sandwiches at a small newsstand in the lobby. When Bobby spotted Reuben Fine—perhaps America’s second strongest player—in the audience, he became especially excited, since Fine’s books had become almost chess bibles for Bobby. Dr. Fine wasn’t playing for the United States because he had retired from play in 1948. But there was Dr. Max Pavey up on the stage—the man Bobby had played in a simultaneous exhibition three years previously—ready to play for his country.

When Nigro introduced Bobby to writer Murray Shumach of The New York Times, the boy shied away and just looked down at his shoes. Allen Kaufman, a master player, also met Bobby for the first time that day and more than a half century later reminisced: “He seemed to be a nice kid, somewhat shy, and I had no idea that I was talking to a future World Champion.” The next day, Shumach wrote humorously of the assembled onlookers at the match: “Chess spectators are like Dodger fans with laryngitis—men with rampant emotions but muted voices.”

Not totally voiceless, as it developed. As the games became more complex, the spectators, many of whom followed each game with their tiny pocket sets or leather chess wallets, discussed the vagaries of the positions in whispers. The cumulative effect of the sound was that of a mild winter wind or the roll of a summer surf. At times, when a dubious or complex combination was played, or when the diminutive American Reshevsky took one hour and ten minutes on one move, twenty-two hundred eyebrows seemed to rise in unison. If the noise in the hall became too intrusive, Hans Kmoch, the ultraformal bow-tied referee, would stare angrily out at the audience and issue a stern, Dutch-accented “Quiet, please!” Stung by the rebuke, the spectators would look momentarily embarrassed and quiet down for a few minutes.

Bobby enjoyed being in the hall, and kept a scorecard as if he were at Ebbets Field. The eleven-year-old carefully penciled in the results for each game: zeroes for losses, ones for wins, and halves for draws. He attended all four rounds, unaware that in just a few short years he’d be facing, in separate tournaments and matches on different continents, fourteen of these same sixteen players from the United States and the USSR, a conglomeration of the finest players in the world.

Aside from following the action in the ballroom, Bobby liked the analysis room. There, out of earshot of the contestants, top players were discussing and analyzing in depth every game, move by move, as it was played. Bobby wasn’t confident enough to offer an opinion as to what move a player should or shouldn’t make, but he was delighted that he could predict some of the moves before they were made and could understand after the fact why others were played.

Finally, after four days of play, the United States team had taken a humiliating beating, falling to the Soviets 20–12. At the final round, the applause from the American audience appeared to be sincere and respectful, but privately, a plaintive cry went up among many of the chess players: “What’s wrong with American chess?” An editorial in Chess Life lamented the loss of the vanquished team and tried to explain it: “Once again in the USA vs. USSR Team Match we behold reiterated proof that the gifted amateur is rarely, if ever, the equal of the professional. No matter how talented by natural heritage, the amateur lacks that sometimes brutal precision that marks the top professional as master of his trade, that almost instinctive pre-vision which comes only from constant practice of the art under all conditions and against all sorts of opposition.” With heavy hearts, Nigro and Bobby rode the subway home to Brooklyn. If Bobby took anything away from that match, it was the knowledge that the Soviet players were the best in the world. It was a realization that made him fairly seethe with purpose.

The following year, in July 1955, a return match in Moscow was even more distorted in favor of the Soviets: The Americans lost again, this time 25–7. Banner headlines in newspapers across the globe ballyhooed the match, however, and the American players had their picture splashed across the front page of The New York Times, as well as other newspapers throughout the world. The amount of ink was attributable to the fact that Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin paid a surprise visit to a garden party held in Moscow for the American chess team. There Khrushchev issued a policy statement to the effect that the Soviet Union was solid as never before, and he was willing to pursue détente between both countries as long as the United States agreed to talk “honestly.”

During that same summer of the Americans’ annihilation by the Soviets, Bobby Fischer, now twelve, was engaged in his own battles on the board, playing in a tournament in Greenwich Village. The scene at the outdoor chess tables in Washington Square Park was a mélange of urban vitality and color. In contrast to the subdued, almost meditative pairings at the Brooklyn Chess Club, the park’s contests were waged by a fast-talking and disparate group of chess hustlers, Village bohemians, and tournament-strength players who enjoyed competing in the open air, sometimes from sunup to sundown. Intriguingly, the chess tables crossed class barriers: One might find Wall Street bankers playing against homeless men from Skid Row, or Ivy Leaguers facing down high school dropouts. As for the park itself, it was an American version of a Middle Eastern bazaar, with folk singers, storytellers, beggars, political dissidents, soapbox orators, and even the occasional snake charmer. The “anything goes” atmosphere encouraged audacity and inventiveness.

Despite the park’s nonconformity, during the 1950s organized tournaments and other games were played there almost every day, even in winter, with players wrapped in mufflers and hats, awkwardly moving their pieces with gloved hands. “At first I couldn’t get a game,” Bobby said, looking back on his days at the park. “The players were all adults, mostly old men in fact, and didn’t care to waste their time on a boy. Mr. Nigro introduced me around and when I got better it was easier to get a game.” Bobby’s recollection of a homogenous cast of “old men” was probably skewed by his child’s perspective at the time. In reality, the tables were populated by players of all ages; there just weren’t many children as young as him.

In the park in those days chess clocks to time the games weren’t often used, but a form of speed chess called “blitz” (the German word for “lightning”) was quite popular. In this variation, players had to move immediately as soon as an opponent made his move. If a player didn’t respond after more than a few seconds, the opponent—or a designated timekeeper—would shout “Move!” and if the demand wasn’t complied with, that player would lose the game. Many shouts of “Move!” could be heard on any given day in the park. Bobby played this form of chess at Nigro’s insistence and wasn’t particularly good at it, but it did quicken his appraisal of the position at hand and forced him to trust his instincts.

As Bobby’s participation in the summer of 1955 Washington Square Park tournament got under way, he took his place on a wooden bench and began moving his pieces on the stone tables embedded with lightly colored red and gray squares. As soon as the action on the board began to grow tense or complicated, the boy would grow more pensive and often have to kneel on the bench to get a better perspective. Pink and white petals from late-blooming cherry trees would occasionally float down onto the board, and some would gently land on his head. Dog owners out for a stroll would continuously pass by, pulling on leashes and calling out commands to keep their animals from scurrying under the tables and sniffing the ankles and shoes of the players. Kibitzers, always free with mostly unwanted advice, would often have to be chased away by the tournament organizer José Calderon.

During the games, Nigro would ritually head off for a few minutes to a nearby restaurant and return with a hamburger, French fries, and a chocolate milk shake for Bobby, who’d consume the lunch absentmindedly, his eyes always on the board. Bystanders commented softly to Nigro on how steadfast and serious the boy appeared. Once, thirty minutes after his lunch, Bobby, unaware that he’d already eaten, whispered, “Mr. Nigro, when is the food coming?”

The 1955 Washington Square tournament included sixty-six players of all different strengths and talents. Since the entry fee was only 10 cents (the $6.60 collected was sent to the American Red Cross as a donation), anyone could enter. So there were rank beginners who barely knew the moves, seasoned club players who’d been playing chess all of their lives, and a sprinkling of masters. So involved was Bobby in his games that he never noticed that some of the top players en route to Moscow for yet another return USA-USSR match had stopped by to watch, and a few were even following one of his games.

Bobby won a series of contests against weaker players, but as he progressed up the tournament ladder, he confronted stiffer opposition and started to lose. Harry Fajans, a tall, pencil-thin master with poor posture, who was a member of the Marshall Chess Club, one of the most renowned chess institutions in the country, related that when he beat Bobby in that Washington Square tournament, the boy began to cry. When questioned about the incident years later, Bobby was highly indignant and vehemently denied it.

The rounds of the tournament stretched into October, and toward the final weeks it was often cold and rainy. Bobby, dressed in a light zip-up jacket that wasn’t warm enough, pressed on despite the discomfort, his pieces occasionally sliding off the cement tables slick with rain. “We were glad when it was over,” Fischer remembered.

He finished fifteenth, and was awarded a ballpoint pen, perhaps because he was the youngest player. He later recounted: “I felt bad when the pen was handed to me, because it looked like the ones that I was always buying for a quarter or a half dollar.” A few weeks later, however, while walking with his mother past a drugstore, she pointed out an identical pen for sale in the window. It had a price tag of $10.00. “I felt better,” quipped Bobby.

As a result of his participation in the tournament, Bobby for the first time saw his name published in a major newspaper, a harbinger of the vast publicity he’d attract for the rest of his life. The New York Times ran a small story about the results, crammed in the back of the paper, on the obituary page. The headline proclaimed, EASTMAN WINS AT WASHINGTON SQUARE—BOY 12, NEAR TOP.

Although Charles Eastman had won the event, it was Bobby who received the most ink. The Times extolled: “Many in the crowd of 400 onlookers seemed to think the best show was given by Bobby Fischer. Despite competition from his more mature and experienced adversaries, he was unbeaten until yesterday, when he came within 15 players of the championship.”

When Bobby’s maternal grandfather, Jacob Wender, died, the yellowed Times article was found among his papers. Bobby commented with both wistfulness and sting: “My grandfather had shown little interest in [me] and knew nothing about chess.” Still, the irony wasn’t lost on him. He sensed that the old man was probably proud of him from the very beginning of his chess career, but never told him.