Endgame

3

Out of the Head of Zeus

DURING THE SUMMER of 1955 Bobby serendipitously happened upon a gathering place for chess aficionados and, in so doing, raised his game to a whole new level. Nigro would often take him to Manhattan’s Central Park, where they’d rent a boat for an hour or two and then paddle up, down, and around the placid lake, through the lily pads, looking like fin de siècle oarsmen in an Impressionist painting. Bobby did most of the rowing, which broadened his shoulders.

One Saturday afternoon, as they walked out of the park on their way home, Bobby noticed a brass plaque affixed to the front of an elegant stone building on Central Park South, a posh street bordering the park. The engraving read simply, MANHATTAN CHESS CLUB. The sign startled the boy, and as he stared at it, his attention was drawn to an open window on the ground level. Bobby stood there for a moment, agape: He was just inches away from two players sitting at a table inside, intently moving pieces across a board. The men were attempting to get a breath of fresh air during one of the dog days of summer. The club looked inviting. Bobby turned sheepishly to Nigro. “Can we go in?” His teacher said simply, “Let’s try.”

“We were looking for [a way] to get out of the heat,” Bobby remembered. “As soon as I saw the sign I wanted to go in, and the minute I went in, I liked it.” The club was decorated with trophies; oil paintings of legendary players such as Lasker, Morphy, and Capablanca; photographs of contemporary masters; and bookcases filled with works on chess strategy. There were about a dozen games taking place when they entered. Bobby saw no children.

Walter Shipman, one of the club’s directors, walked over to the newcomers as they hesitated in the doorway. A twenty-six-year-old novice attorney who later became an international master, he greeted the Brooklyn pair and immediately matched Bobby with a player. Bobby quickly downed his opponent, who called to another player to try his hand with the boy; and he, too, was defeated. Soon, not yet aware that they were in the presence of a prodigy but realizing that Bobby was someone exceptional, the club’s players started gathering around his board and asking him questions. “Where did you learn how to play chess?” “How old are you?” “Where do you live?” “Where’d you learn that opening?”

Bobby was making his debut among the elite chess fraternity of New York. They observed that unlike most beginning players (although he wasn’t really a beginner; he’d been playing at the Brooklyn Chess Club for four years, since he was eight) Bobby could see the totality of the board. It wasn’t that he made the best choice each and every move, but he was almost never forced into playing or being on the receiving end of a one- or two-move unsound combination: a “cheapo,” the term for a “cheap move.”

Shipman, who was rated among the top twenty players in the United States, grasped the boy’s potential. Eagerly, he played him a series of blitz games at one second a move, and Bobby won about a third of them. Shipman remembered: “I was so impressed by his play that I introduced the 12-year old to Maurice Kasper, the president of the club and a millionaire garment maker, whose beneficent offer of a free junior membership was immediately accepted by Bobby.” Bobby became the youngest member in the club’s history. Kasper told him that he could come every day if he wished. Bobby beamed. He was like a little kid being set free in a candy store.

The Manhattan Chess Club was the strongest chess club in the country and the second oldest. It was founded in 1877, three years after the Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club of San Francisco, and for many years it included almost every great player that the United States produced. Chess enthusiasts from out of town and even from other countries, hearing of the club’s almost mythic history, moved to New York just to become members of the Manhattan, to improve their skills and have a chance to play against the greats. Its popularity was analogous to the way artists flocked to Paris in the 1920s to hone their craft under the tutelage of the masters there. The club had been the site of two World Championship matches (Steinitz-Zukertort in 1886 and Steinitz-Gunsberg 1890–91) and had hosted the annual United States Championship tournament since the 1930s. A preponderance of the members were Jewish, a group that had pursued the game for centuries and was highly proficient at it. More than one million Jews, most of them immigrants, lived in New York City at that time, and many had brought with them their love for chess. In 1974, Anthony Saidy wrote in The World of Chess that “perhaps half of all of the greatest players of the past hundred years have been Jews.” When asked whether he was Jewish, Bobby replied, “Part. My mother is Jewish.”

On the rare occasions when no worthy opponents were available at the Manhattan during the daytime, Bobby would wander into Central Park and play under the open sky at the stone chess tables near the Wollman skating rink. During one long, exasperating endgame, it began to rain, and neither he nor his opponent would let the storm stay their appointed task of finishing the game. Bobby thought and played, pondered and moved, all the while becoming drenched. When he finally arrived home, his clothes soaked, his sneakers squeaking and swishing water, and his hair looking as if he’d just stepped from a shower, Regina was furious. But her anger never lasted long.

The Manhattan Chess Club was organized into four groups, based on playing strength. The strongest was the rarefied “A” group where the masters and experts resided; then there was the “A-Reserve,” consisting of potentially strong players, followed by the “B” group and finally the “C” category, which incorporated the lowest-rated or weakest players, many of whom were hoping to work their way up the ladder. In the first few weeks of his membership, Bobby enrolled in a tournament for C players and won it easily. He advanced to the B group and played tournaments within that section until he eventually won and was promoted to the A-Reserves. Ultimately, in not quite a year, he finished first in that group as well.

Soon he was going to the club every day, staying there from early afternoon until late at night. Regina wanted him to go to summer camp as he had before, but Bobby wouldn’t hear of it. For him, the Manhattan Chess Club was nirvana, and although he hadn’t yet developed a grand plan about dedicating his life to chess, he loved the feeling of winning and wanted to be near the game all the time. The Brooklyn Chess Club only afforded him the chance to play on Friday nights and an occasional Tuesday—the two nights of the week they met—for a total of about four hours on any given evening. At the Manhattan, though, he could play twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

The game not only engaged Bobby’s mind, it tempered his loneliness, and while playing, he felt more alive. Since it was the summer and there was no school, he’d rise late, after his mother and sister had left the apartment, eat breakfast alone at a diner, and take the subway into Manhattan to go to the club. Regina would constantly monitor him, bringing him liverwurst sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and a container of milk for dinner, lest Bobby, engrossed in his games, skip his evening meal. At about midnight every night, she’d appear at the club and almost have to drag him back to Brooklyn, the pair taking the one-hour subway ride home together.

Throughout that summer and during the next few years, Bobby began making chess friends at the club. At first his friendships were mostly with older players—but perhaps as a result of Bobby’s now being a member, or because of a shift in the club’s policy, promising players Bobby’s own age or just a few years older were permitted to join, and these, finally, were children he could relate to. Many would remain lifelong friends or competitors-in-arms. William Lombardy, who’d go on to win the World Junior Championship and enter the pantheon as a grandmaster, was six years older than Bobby and at first beat him most of the time. He was an intense and brilliant young man who possessed a great positional sense. Bernard Zuckerman, who was almost as studious as Bobby in analyzing games, especially the strategy of opening moves, was born just days apart from Bobby and ultimately would become an international master. Asa Hoffmann—like Bobby, born in 1943 and the son of two Park Avenue lawyers—became a master and was also adept at other board games, such as Scrabble and backgammon, in addition to chess, and acquired a reputation as a “money” player: that is, his ability often increased in proportion to the wager or prize. Jackie Beers, a short young man with a charming smile and a ferocious temper, earned Bobby’s respect because Beers could sometimes hold his own with him in speed games; and James Gore, a tall redheaded boy who dressed conservatively even as a teen and who adopted a condescending attitude toward anyone he defeated, had a great influence on Bobby. All of these young players would eventually be surpassed by Fischer, but they tested him with daring alternative variations, and his play sharpened as a result.

Bobby would play as many as a hundred speed games against his friendly foes on any given day. Eventually, as the boys blossomed into their teens and then became young men, Bobby emerged as a leader of sorts: Whatever he wanted they gave him; wherever he went they followed. “One more,” he’d say voraciously, setting up the pieces, and no one refused him. Dr. Stuart Margulies, a master, who was several years older than Bobby, said in retrospect, “I adored playing with Bobby, just adored it!” Playing with Bobby was like reading the poetry of Robert Frost or taking a long hot bath. You came away feeling better for it. Perhaps you learned something, or perhaps the concentration required calmed you, even if you did lose a preponderance of games. Players would often smile when they resigned a game to Bobby, showing admiration for his brilliance.

One of the first grandmasters whom Bobby met at the club was Nicholas Rossolimo, the U.S. Open Champion and former champion of France. The day they met, Rossolimo was sitting on a sofa, eating a bagel with lox and cream cheese, and he spoke to Bobby with his mouth full. Because of that—and Rossolimo’s pronounced accent—Bobby couldn’t understand a word. Nevertheless, the boy was impressed at being in the presence of a champion, and awed that Rossolimo would deign to talk to him, mumbler though he was.

Within a few months after joining the club, Bobby, together with Lombardy and Gore, dominated the weekly speed tournaments, which limited players to ten seconds a move. Eighty-year-old Harold M. Phillips, a master and member of the board, wistfully likened Bobby’s style of play to that of Capablanca, whom he remembered well from when the young Cuban joined the club at seventeen in 1905.

Although Bobby’s life now revolved around the Manhattan, there were other pawns to capture. Nigro brought his student to the 1955 United States Amateur Championship, held at the end of May, during the Memorial Day weekend. Because players of master strength weren’t eligible to enter, the tournament encouraged the participation of weaker and less experienced players. It was a Swiss System tournament (in which players with like scores keep getting paired until a winner emerges after a specific number of rounds are played), with each contestant playing six games. The tournament was held at a resort at Lake Mohegan, north of New York City, in Westchester County.

As Nigro drove out of the city, he and Bobby held their usual conversation, the boy questioning theories he’d read and asking about the strength or weakness of moves that he or an opponent had made during games at the Manhattan Chess Club. After a while, Bobby switched to questions about the weekend’s tournament. Who did Nigro think would enter? How strong would the other players be? How did he think Bobby would do?

Sensing that Bobby felt insecure, Nigro tried to reassure the boy and explained how important it was for him to gain competitive experience. Bobby became quieter, finally biting his nails and staring out the window at the scenery as their car turned off the highway onto the road that cut through the fields alongside the lake to the resort.

When they arrived at the tournament site, and Nigro was about to pay the $5 entry fee and enroll Bobby as a member of the U.S. Chess Federation, as was required of all participants, Bobby lost either his nerve or his will and said he didn’t want to play. He said he’d seen people swimming in the lake and rowing boats. He’d rather do that, he felt. There was also a tennis court! Nigro tried to bring his attention back to the reason they were there. Bobby argued that since the hotel room was already paid for (only $3 a night for each person, a special rate given to tournament participants) and they were going to stay the weekend anyway, he wanted to take advantage of the sports possibilities.

Nigro realized that Bobby was trying to stave off what he feared would be an inevitable loss. He persuaded the boy to change his mind and urged him to the board. Bobby played, but because of either his wavering confidence or interest, his efforts resulted in a minus score. Years after, Bobby recalled that he was unhappy with the outcome and took to heart Nigro’s advice: “You can’t win every game. Just do your best every time.”

A few months later, determined to make up for his poor showing, Bobby mailed in his registration to play in the U.S. Junior Championship in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nigro couldn’t take time off from his teaching schedule to accompany him, nor could Regina leave her job and studies, especially since she’d been home ill with a chronic lung problem for three weeks. So Bobby elected to go alone.

He stood impatiently at a ticket window in Pennsylvania Station where Regina was attempting to buy him a ticket to Nebraska via Philadelphia. She’d saved the money for him to go and was determined to get him there. The plan was for Bobby to take the train to Philadelphia and meet another player, Charles Kalme, who was also going to attend the U.S. Junior. The two could then travel the almost 1,400 miles together. “How old is your son, ma’am?” the ticket agent asked. Told that the boy was twelve, the agent refused to sell her a ticket. “He’s too young to travel all that distance alone.” “But you don’t understand,” she argued. “He must go! It’s for his chess!” The agent peered over his glasses and looked at Bobby. “Why didn’t you tell me the boy was going for medical care?” Years later, Bobby laughed in reminiscing about the incident: “And he sold us the ticket without further talk. He thought there was something wrong with my chest!” With some trepidation Regina sent her little chess duckling on his way, but not before draping a large U.S. Army surplus dog tag around his neck, engraved with his name, address, and telephone number. “In case …,” she said. “Don’t take it off!” And he didn’t.

Charles Kalme, a Latvian-born sixteen-year-old, was a handsome and polite boy who’d spent years in a displaced persons’ camp and was the reigning U.S. Junior champion. He and Bobby played dozens of fast games during the two-day trip and analyzed openings and endgame positions. Kalme, considerably stronger, was respectful of Bobby’s passion.

Unfortunately for the participants in the U.S. Junior, the city of Lincoln was embroiled in a heat wave of more than one hundred degrees during the run of the tournament, and Civic Hall, the ballroom where play took place, seemed to have little if any air-conditioning. Going into the ten-round tournament, twelve-year-old Bobby was the youngest of twenty-five players. One contestant was thirteen, and there were several twenty-year-olds, all rated quite highly. Ron Gross, slightly older and more experienced than Bobby, later reflected back on Bobby’s performance there: “Fischer was skinny and fidgety but pleasant in a distracted way. He wasn’t a bad loser. He would just get real quiet, twist that dog tag even more and immediately set up the pieces to play again.” Regina called Bobby every day at an arranged time to see if he was all right, and when she received the telephone bill at the end of the month, it came to $50, more than she was paying for rent.

Bobby, dog tag entwined, managed to compile an even score, with two wins, two losses, and six draws, fretting afterward that “I didn’t do too well.” But he was awarded a handsome trophy for achieving the best score of a player under the age of thirteen. “I was the only player under 13!” Bobby was quick to point out. The trophy was quite large and heavy, yet he insisted on carrying it back to Brooklyn rather than have it shipped. “It gave me a big thrill,” he remembered, despite not having won it for exceptional play. His traveling companion, Charles Kalme, repeated his win of the previous year and was crowned the champion once again. He didn’t return to the East Coast right after the tournament, so Bobby journeyed alone, this time by bus, looking out the window sometimes, but mostly analyzing games on his pocket set.

As Bobby was becoming more involved in the world of chess, he attracted the attention of a wealthy and unusual man named E. Forry Laucks. A chess player himself, Laucks liked to surround himself with other players, many of them offbeat and highly talented. He was always generous to Regina in assisting Bobby with small amounts of money—$25 to $100—for tournament entry fees and other expenses. During the spring of 1956, Laucks gathered a group of chess players for a thirty-five-hundred-mile motor trip throughout the southern United States and ultimately to Cuba, stopping off at towns and cities for a series of matches with local clubs.

So that twelve-year-old Bobby could participate in the barnstorming jaunt to Cuba, Regina allowed him to withdraw from school temporarily. Her thinking was that the trip would be educational, exposing her son to new places and different people. However, she agreed to Bobby’s participation only if she could serve as his chaperone. Laucks didn’t know or care that Regina, and therefore Bobby, was Jewish, nor did Regina seem too concerned about Laucks’s neo-Nazi (someone called him “an old Nazi”) allegiance. The idea of travel, especially to the politically explosive country of Cuba, stimulated Regina’s wanderlust. Permission from the Community Woodward School was forthcoming for Bobby’s three-week absence, and the boy was delighted to be on the road playing chess instead of being in the classroom.

Laucks frequently wore a small, black-enameled lapel pin bearing a gold Nazi swastika. Amazingly, it never seemed to attract much attention. He didn’t wear it all the time, but often enough, and it didn’t seem to inhibit him when he went to a Jewish delicatessen to get his favorite sandwich of pastrami on rye, or when he was talking to Jewish chess players. One player, William Schneider, said he was embarrassed when he and Laucks—sporting his swastika—were driving back from a tournament and they stopped at a Jewish restaurant. No one said anything about the swastika, or even seemed to notice it. In addition to the pin, Laucks often wore—weather permitting—a small-brimmed Alpine fedora with a feather in the band, adorned with emblems from the countries to which he’d traveled. He ostentatiously dressed in lederhosen at times, and for a few years even sported a Hitlerian mustache. When he entered a tournament, dressed in a khaki shirt and pants and dark tie and displaying that mustache, it was as if a doppelgänger of Der Fuehrer had been incarnated. In his home he hung Nazi flags in prominent locations and displayed airplane models of Messerschmitts and Junkers as well as an oil painting of Adolf Hitler and other memorabilia from the Third Reich.

Laucks was inarguably one of the most eccentric people in the New York chess community, with conflicting values and erratic behavior. But despite his Nazi trappings, he rarely talked about his political beliefs. His financial patronage of teams and players could always be relied upon, and he was the sponsor of many chess events, some major. He’d also formed a fully functioning chess group—the Log Cabin Chess Club—that met in the finished basement (decorated to look like a log cabin) of his spacious house in West Orange, New Jersey. A number of players, some outcasts or close to homeless but with master-level playing ability, actually lived—on and off—in the house with him. Laucks’s wife and two children lived in another house, in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Laucks rarely visited them, preferring to stay in New Jersey with his chess cronies.

Aside from her self-serving desire to travel, Regina insisted on being part of the tour because she didn’t trust one of its participants: the shifty-eyed Norman T. Whitaker. He was a disbarred lawyer who’d served years in Alcatraz and Leavenworth for a variety of crimes and confidence schemes, including the extortion of more than $100,000 by claiming (falsely) that he knew the whereabouts of the missing Lindbergh baby. Whitaker, known as “The Fox,” the name he was referred to in the Lindbergh duping, had also been imprisoned for car theft and for raping a twelve-year-old girl. When he was in his sixties, he proposed marriage to a fourteen-year-old. Regina worried that his pedophiliac tendencies might apply to boys as well as girls, and she didn’t want him to be alone with Bobby on the trip. Why Whitaker was accepted as a part of the Log Cabin team or in the chess community at all is a difficult question to answer, beyond noting that at the time of Laucks’s journey Whitaker was still a powerful player at age sixty-six, and in his prime he had been one of the strongest players in the nation. He also had a charming way about him, as do most confidence men. His chess prowess and velvet tongue may have blinded some people to his despicable past, proving the adage that sometimes chess players make strange team fellows.

In contrast to Whitaker, one of the chess caravan’s more delightful players was Glenn T. Hartleb, an expert-level Floridian. A tall, gentle man with steel-rimmed glasses and a perpetual smile, Hartleb greeted everyone he met—champion or patzer, beginner or veteran, child or octogenarian—by bowing low and saying with deep reverence, “Master!” When asked why he used this salutation, he said, “In life we are all masters,” countering a past champion’s chestnut, “In life we are all duffers.”

The disparate team crammed into Laucks’s unreliable 1950 Chrysler station wagon, which contained everyone’s luggage, chess sets and boards, food, and sleeping bags—some of it precariously strapped on top—and like the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, gunwales straining, shock absorbers depressed to their limits, they were ready. “Let’s schuss!” said millionaire Laucks jovially, using his favorite expression, and off they sped at seventy miles an hour down the turnpike for a hair-raising trip (Laucks was a dangerously careless driver). Bobby sat up front between the fascist and the con man.

As the Cabineers roamed through the South, stopping at towns for either prearranged or hastily organized matches, Whitaker as best player would invariably play board one, and Bobby board two. Bobby, feeling as though he were playing hooky from school, had a good time competing in the matches, usually at the relatively leisurely time limit of sixty moves in two hours. Most of his competition was stiff but nothing he couldn’t handle. While in the car, he also played hundreds of games with his fellow team members, and with the exception of his games against Whitaker, he usually won.

“I want to see the alligators,” Bobby piped up as they drove through the Everglades. “Let’s stop—I want a soda,” he could also be heard to say frequently. His little-kid complaints, including the traditional “Are we there yet?” annoyed some team members, and behind his back they began referring to him as “The Monster.”

The trip was not entirely expense-free for the Fischers. Although Laucks, with his great wealth, could have covered everyone’s expenses, he’d frugally pick and choose where, when, and how he wanted to spend his money. On some occasions, the team would stop at a fairly expensive restaurant and he’d announce to everyone, “Order anything on the menu you want, but no alcohol.” At other times Bobby and Regina had to pay for themselves.

While in the South, Bobby was getting his first exposure to racial prejudice. Blacks were still not allowed to sit at the counters. Bobby had to ask his mother what it meant when he saw a drinking fountain that was labeled COLORED ONLY. Regina was furious at the prejudice she was witnessing, but no one else seemed to care.

One of the men on the trip began to hint to the others that he was ready to seduce Regina and that he thought she was a willing seductee; he became a laughingstock one night when she adamantly refused him entrance to her room.

Crammed in the car, the group sometimes tired of chess talk and reminisced about other adventures, real or imagined. Whitaker cracked at least one joke a day, usually tasteless: “I know a woman who will pay me one thousand dollars to see me in the nude: She’s blind.” Bobby often asked for explanations. “See me later, kid; I’ll tell you,” someone would pipe up.

During the six-hour trip on the ferry from the Duval Street dock in Key West to Havana, Bobby and an older player, Robert Houghton, played blindfold chess, visualizing the evolving game and calling out their imaginary moves; but when they reached nine or ten moves and the game became more complicated, the positions began to dissolve in Houghton’s mind and he couldn’t continue. To Bobby, the positions were as clear as if he had the game set up on a board in front of him. After a few additional attempts sans board and pieces, the invisible match was abandoned and they played on the portable set. Bobby won dozens of quick games during that session, not losing one.

Havana in 1956 was a feisty, corrupt city. Tourist agents called it “The Pearl of the Antilles,” but it was more provocatively referred to by others as “the sexiest city in the world.” Filled with gambling casinos, brothels, and streetwalkers, and with rum costing only $1.20 per bottle, the city had a reputation for debauchery. More than 250,000 American tourists went to Havana that year, most to have a wanton weekend or two. The Cabineers, however, were in Havana to play chess, and although it’s possible that some of the men went to the infamous Shanghai Theater or to other shadowy places at night, the team members played a match almost every day.

The major team match against the Capablanca Chess Club was disappointing for the Americans: though Bobby and Whitaker won their games, the five other Americans lost. Bobby gave a twelve-board simultaneous exhibition against members of the club and won ten and drew two—“just for fun, not for money,” he was quick to explain. He later summed up his experience: “The Cubans seem to take chess more seriously.… They feel more the way I do about chess. Chess is like fighting, and I like to win. So do they.”

The New York Times took notice of the Log Cabin tour with a headline: CHESS TEAM ENDS TOUR. The story pointed out that the Cabineers ended the tour with a minus score; they won 23½ games and lost 26½, but Whitaker and Bobby were the leading scorers in the club matches at 5½–1½ each, excluding Bobby’s ten wins in his simultaneous exhibition.

After Bobby’s three-week adventure, returning to Brooklyn and to school was anticlimactic. Nevertheless, the boy enjoyed getting back to the familiarity of the unregimented school and to the opportunity to play with his friends at the Manhattan Chess Club. In retrospect, he said he enjoyed his four years at Community Woodward, mainly because the unstructured routine enabled him to “get up and walk around the room if you wanted” and to dress any way he liked (“ordinary polo shirts, dungarees or corduroy pants”). He also enjoyed his status as the school’s resident chess player. Instead of Bobby’s adapting to the teachers or the administration, the staff ended up adapting to him. When graduation from eighth grade occurred, however, in June 1956, Bobby elected not to attend the ceremony, because he didn’t want to give up an afternoon of chess and because he disliked “any kind of formality and ceremony.” He was thirteen and intended to spend the summer studying and playing chess. Although he’d be entering high school the following September, that transition, exciting to many youngsters, was of little interest to him.

Jack Collins, one of the great teachers of chess, lived with his sister Ethel in Brooklyn and was host to a chess salon in his apartment called the Hawthorne Chess Club, which met there regularly. It was open and free to just about anybody who wanted to play—or study—the game with him, although he did charge a token fee to some for individual lessons. He was kindhearted, highly self-educated, and had an uproarious sense of humor. Some of the greatest players in the United States were Collins’s pupils, such as the Byrne brothers and William Lombardy. Collins’s apartment was stocked with hundreds of chess books, chess paintings and statues, and furniture and draperies decorated with chess figures; it was a virtual chess museum. Jack had exchanged a few words with Bobby when they met in Asbury Park, New Jersey, at the U.S. Amateur Championship during Memorial Day weekend in 1956. At that meeting Collins had invited Bobby to come to the apartment, and two weeks after, the boy appeared. Collins wrote about Bobby’s first visit to his home:

Bobby Fischer rang my doorbell one afternoon in June 1956. I opened the door and a slender, blond, typical thirteen-year-old American boy dressed in a plaid woolen shirt, corduroy trousers, and black-and-white sneakers, said simply: “I’m Bobby Fischer.”

I had seen him once before, and I replied, “Hi, Bobby, come on in.” We went into the living room and sat down at the chess board. I knew he was rather shy and I am not always easy at first meetings either. So, it seemed the best thing to do was to become immediately involved in the thing we both loved best—chess. I happened to have a position from one of my postal instruction games set up on the board. It was a difficult position, and I had just been analyzing it for about half an hour. I nodded at it and asked, “What do you think about this position, Bobby?”

Bobby plunged right in. Within seconds he was stabbing out moves, trying combinations, seeking won endings, and rattling off variations, his fingers barely able to keep pace with his thoughts. He found several hidden possibilities I had not seen. I was deeply impressed. Of course, I had heard of his remarkable talent. But this was the first time I realized that he was really a prodigy and might become one of the greatest players of all time.

Just as Bobby had fairly leaped into—and established residence at—the Manhattan Chess Club the previous summer, he soon became a regular presence at Collins’s salon. The chess teacher’s place was only a few blocks from Erasmus High School, and Bobby would dash from the school during lunch hour and free periods, play a few games with Collins while eating his sandwich taken from home, then hurry back to school. At three p.m. he’d return and spend the rest of the day over the board, eventually having dinner with Jack and Ethel, more often than not eaten while the two friends were still playing or analyzing. Bobby would continue at the board through the evening, until Regina or Joan would come and escort him home. Bobby and Jack played thousands of games—mostly speed—analyzed hundreds of positions, and solved dozens of chess problems together. Bobby also became a constant borrower of books from the Collins library. The short, stunted man confined to a wheelchair and the growing boy went to movies, dined in restaurants, attended chess events at clubs, and celebrated birthdays and holidays together. The Collins apartment became a home to Bobby in every way, the boy being thought of as part of the family.

Was Jack Collins, in fact, Bobby’s most important teacher, overshadowing Carmine Nigro? The question should be raised, since Bobby later in life said he’d learned nothing from Collins. In truth, Bobby’s quick dismissal of Collins’s contribution may have been delivered out of cold, ungrateful pride. Certainly, Collins replaced Carmine Nigro as Bobby’s mentor after Nigro moved to Florida in 1956, the year that Bobby and Collins met. Bobby would never see Nigro again.

Collins was one of the finest players in the United States, and for a number of years was rated in the top fifty; Nigro never reached anywhere near that achievement. Bobby said that he always felt Nigro was more of a friend than a teacher, but that he was a very good teacher. Nigro was a professional teacher and was quite formal in his instructional technique, while Collins, as talented and caring as he was, employed a Socratic approach. With pupils, he’d often just set up a position and say, “Let’s look at this,” as he did that first day with Bobby, and then ask the player to come up with a plan or series of alternatives, making the student think. He did this with Bobby hundreds of times. Nigro and Collins both acted fatherly toward the boy, but Collins’s relationship lasted more than fifteen years. Nigro’s, though admittedly occurring at a formative time in Bobby’s life, lasted just five.

When Bobby returned from a tournament, he’d often rush to see Collins and go over his games with him. Collins, a shrewd analyst, would comment on the moves that Bobby did and didn’t play. Learning was taking place, but not in the traditional way. Collins’s approach wasn’t “You must remember this variation of the King’s-Indian Defense, which is much stronger than what you played”—rather, he relied on a kind of osmosis. International master James T. Sherwin, a New Yorker who knew both Fischer and Collins well, had this to say when he heard of Bobby’s later dismissal of Collins’s influence on him: “Well, I think that’s a little hubristic; it must have been said in a moment of pridefulness. Bobby must have learned from Collins. For example, Jack always played the Sicilian Defense, and then Bobby started playing it. I think the remark was a young man’s way of saying, ‘I’m the greatest. No one ever taught me anything and I received my gifts from God.’ I think Jack helped Bobby psychologically, with chess fightingness, just being tough and wanting always to win.”

Collins also noticed what Nigro had observed the year before: Bobby’s habit of procrastinating during a game, loitering over the board, taking just a little too long to make an obvious move. To help the boy overcome these self-defeating tendencies, Collins ordered a clock from Germany with a special ten-second timer, and he insisted that Bobby play with it to practice thinking and moving more rapidly.

Collins, for his part, said that he never “taught” Bobby in the strictest sense. Rather, he pointed out that “geniuses like Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare and Fischer come out of the head of Zeus, seem to be generally programmed, know before instructed.” Essentially, Collins was saying that Bobby Fischer’s talent was God-given, innate, and all Collins could do was serve as a guide or bystander, offering encouragement and nurturing the boy’s prodigious gifts. He was also a loyal friend.

Fischer, who much later in life would gain notoriety for his anti-Jewish rhetoric, always said that although his mother was Jewish, he had no religious training. It is not known whether Bobby, on or near his thirteenth birthday of March 9, 1956, participated in the formal Jewish ritual of Bar Mitzvah, reading Hebrew from the Torah at a synagogue. However, his chess friend Karl Burger said that when he played twelve-year-old Bobby in the park on Rochester Avenue in Brooklyn, the boy “was studying for his Bar Mitzvah.” Also supporting the belief that Bobby had experienced the ritual was the fact that, many years later, he gave an old chess clock and chess set to his Hungarian friend Pal Benko, a grandmaster. Bobby had been keeping them among his belongings and told Benko that they were gifts he’d “received for his Bar Mitzvah.”

It’s possible that Bobby was simply given the gifts on his thirteenth birthday, even though there was no actual coming-of-age Bar Mitzvah ceremony. (Regina’s strained circumstances may even have played a role: There are usually year-long fees for catenation, the instruction given to a twelve-year-old to ready him for the ritual.)

When he reached the age of thirteen, Bobby may have truly felt that he was an adult who had to take charge of himself, and that his destiny was no longer in anyone’s hands but his own. Certainly, he did seem to exhibit a newfound maturity, and when it came to playing chess, his skills seasoned to some extent as he began playing more resolutely.

A significant improvement occurred in his learning curve in 1956, when he was thirteen. Bobby’s intense study of the game and incessant playing came to remarkable fruition. During the annual amateur Memorial Day tournament that May, he placed twenty-first. Only five weeks later, during the July 4 weekend, he captured the United States Junior Championship at a tournament held at the Franklin Mercantile Chess Club in Philadelphia. Only four months had passed since his thirteenth birthday and Bobby had become the youngest chess master in history and one of the strongest young players in the country.

Many factors could have contributed to his meteoric rise at the time: meeting Jack Collins and playing countless games with him and with Jack’s acolytes, almost all masters who came to the Collins salon throughout the summer; his year of facing competition at the Manhattan Chess Club; the knowledge he’d accumulated from steadily studying chess books and periodicals for almost five years; and a gestalt of understanding regarding the game that, through a combination of study, experience, and intrinsic gifts, coalesced in his mind.

But there were personal elements as well. Losses that he’d experienced in tournaments created a fierce determination to win. (“I just can’t bear thinking of defeat.”) And somewhere along the way, he became more reconciled to the need to take chances. In the end it may have boiled down to what the poet Robert Frost once said about a successful education: “Just hanging around until you have caught on.”

Just two weeks after that July 4 weekend tournament, the 1956 United States Open Championship was going to be held in Oklahoma City. It would have many more contestants, including some of the best players in the United States and Canada.

While Bobby had no hope of placing among the top contenders, he was eager to continue his winning streak, aware that the opportunity to compete against stronger players would sharpen his game. Regina balked. She was concerned that he’d exhaust himself playing in a third tournament within two months. It was also impossible for her to take time off to accompany her son on the long trip to Oklahoma, and she worried about his going alone.

Bobby was adamant. If he could go to Nebraska by himself, he argued, why couldn’t he go to Oklahoma City? Regina reluctantly agreed, but raising enough money for his expenses was, as always, a problem. She persuaded Maurice Kasper of the Manhattan Chess Club to give her $125 toward Bobby’s expenses (the travel fare was $93.50), and she contacted the tournament organizing committee to arrange to have Bobby stay at someone’s home to save on the cost of a hotel. A player’s wife agreed to keep an eye on the boy and provide most of his meals. Before leaving, to help raise money for his trip, Bobby played a twenty-one-game simultaneous exhibition in the lobby of the Jersey City YMCA, winning nineteen, drawing one, and losing one, with some one hundred spectators following his games. Each player paid a dollar, with two free entries allowed. Bobby’s profit: $19. Scrimping to make up the balance, Regina sent him off to Oklahoma.

By far the strongest tournament Bobby had ever played in, the U.S. Open was held in the Oklahoma Biltmore Hotel, a somewhat palatial facility that seemed out of context in a Great Plains town, although the décor of American Indian and buffalo paintings reminded the competitors that they were in cowboy country.

Bobby, still small for his age (he appeared to be only nine or ten), became a novelty at the Open. He was interviewed twice on local television, profiled by newspapers, and by the Oklahoman magazine, and continued to draw crowds to his table. A flash of photographers seemed always on hand to snap his picture.

One hundred and two players competed in the twelve-round tournament, spread over two weeks. Bobby’s opponents were not necessarily the strongest in the tournament, nor were they the weakest. He drew with several masters, defeated some experts (players a rank below master), kept his resolve, and ended up not losing a game—which was a record for a thirteen-year-old at a U.S. Open. When the pieces were cleared, he was tied with four other players for fourth place, just one point away from the winner, Arthur Bisguier, a fellow member of the Manhattan Chess Club. His official U.S. Chess Federation rating calculated after the event was astronomically high—2375—confirming his status as a master and ranking him number twenty-five in the nation. No one in the United States, or in the world, had ever ascended so quickly.

It was late in August 1956, and Bobby had followed his Oklahoma success with a trip to Montreal. Once again, Regina had arranged for him to stay in someone’s home; this time it was with the family of William Hornung, one of the tournament’s supporters. The eighty-eight players in the First Canadian Open may have composed a stronger roster than had been fielded at the United States Open a few weeks earlier. Canada’s best players came out in force.

Some of America’s youngest but strongest stars had ventured north of the border to play. As usual, Bobby was the youngest of the New York City contingent, which included Larry Evans, William Lombardy, and James T. Sherwin (who played ten straight speed games with Bobby in between rounds, and lost every one: “It was then that I decided that he was really too strong for me,” Sherwin remembered).

In the fourth round, Bobby became involved in a 108-move extravaganza, a chess ultra-marathon that stretched to more than seven hours. In the contest he was pitted against Hans Matthai, a German immigrant to Canada. The game, which turned out to be the longest of Bobby’s career, ended as an interesting draw.

After the game was drawn, he wondered if there’d been anything he’d overlooked. There was just something about the position, an echo of an idea distantly heard. Could he have established a won game, even at the point just before it was drawn?

That night, in a deep but restless sleep, a dream came to him and the position appeared over and over again—seemingly hundreds of times. Just before waking, the solution came to Bobby as a kind of apparition. There was a win there.

Bobby woke and sat bolt upright. “I’ve got it!” he said aloud, not knowing that anyone else was in the room. Mrs. Hornung had just tiptoed into the bedroom to wake Bobby and tell him breakfast was ready. She witnessed his epiphany. Still wearing his pajamas, he bounced barefooted into the living room to where he knew there was a chess set ready for action and began working on the endgame that he’d struggled with the previous day. “I knew I should have won!” he fairly screamed.

Freud held that dream content usually consists of material garnered from incidents, thoughts, images, and emotions experienced during or preceding the day of the dream. Some players in the midst of a tournament do dream about their games that night, and in these nocturnal reveries some actually solve an opening trap, an endgame finesse, or some other aspect that’s been troubling them, waking with a fresh and practical idea. Former World Champion Boris Spassky once said that he dreamt about chess, and David Bronstein, a World Championship candidate, talked about playing whole games in his sleep—ones he could reproduce the next morning. Mikhail Botvinnik claimed that during his World Championship match with Vasily Smyslov, he awoke one night, walked naked to his board, and played the move that he was dreaming about in his adjourned game.

Dreaming about chess didn’t happen often with Bobby. But when it did, the result was always something he could use in a future game, or the explanation of what he could have done in a lost or drawn game. In one interview he said that he most often dreamt about detective stories, which could be intricate games in themselves. Since chess had become such a motivating force in his life, he might have been incapable of dreaming about the game, or any game, except in symbolic form—that is, his psyche might have automatically defaulted to characters instead of pieces, plots and counterplots instead of variations on the board, murders in place of checkmates.

Bobby’s last-round draw against Frank Anderson, the Canadian champion, was a nail-biter … literally. When he wasn’t gnawing on the fingers of his left hand, he began biting his shirt, actually chomping pieces out of it and leaving holes.

He finished with a score of 7–3, tied for second place, a point behind first prize, and he won $59, which he pocketed without revealing his windfall to his mother.

Larry Evans won the prize as First Canadian Open Champion. Knowing that Evans had a car and was driving back to New York, Bobby asked for a ride. Evans was kind enough to agree. Bobby paid no attention to the stunning scenery or to Evans’s equally stunning wife, who sat in the backseat to allow the boy to sit up front. Instead, during the entire eight-hour trip, Bobby plied the champion with questions: “Why do you play the Pirc, and against Anderson?” “Did Sherwin have winning or drawing chances against you? How?” “Didn’t Mednis have a win against you? Why did he accept the draw? He could have made the time limit.” Evans recounted, “I had no idea that I was talking to a future world’s champion, just a very young master with great intensity. It was the beginning of a long and sometimes turbulent friendship.”

A week after he returned from Canada in August, Bobby bought a ticket to a night baseball game at Ebbets Field to see his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers play the Milwaukee Braves. He wasn’t disappointed: not only did the Dodgers win, but he was treated to a spectacle courtesy of Jackie Robinson. One of the great base stealers, Robinson danced around second base to worry and nettle the pitcher; when the pitcher tried to throw him out, the ball went over the head of the second baseman and Robinson sped home to score a run.

Bobby was feeling grown-up, mainly as a result of his summer travels to New Jersey, Philadelphia, Oklahoma, and Montreal, but also because of the accolades he was receiving and his growing status in the chess world. He was thirteen. If he could defeat adults at chess, why shouldn’t he be treated as an adult? He asked his mother if she’d stop coming to the chess club to take him home at night. It embarrassed him. “OK,” she said, “I’ll stop coming, and you can come home by yourself, but only on two conditions: You must be home by no later than ten p.m. on a school night and no later than midnight on a weekend night, and you must learn jujitsu to defend yourself.” Regina didn’t want Bobby to be mugged or hurt in a half-deserted subway station as he worked his way alone at night from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Bobby reluctantly agreed to the terms of the deal. As it developed, he never took a jujitsu lesson, though. Regina discovered that lessons would cost a minimum of $8 an hour—money she just didn’t have. Their agreement had been made, however, and from that time on Bobby went home by himself. The only untoward incident he had was that someone once stepped on his newly polished shoes—on purpose, he said.

“Me llamo Robert Fischer.”

During his first weeks in high school, right after he returned from Montreal, Bobby had not studied the introduction to his Spanish text, El Camino Real, had failed to attend two of his classes, and now was faced with his first ten-question quiz. Despite his trip to Cuba and his attempt to speak pidgin Spanish, he couldn’t translate or come up with the answers to such questions as “Where is the train station?” or “How much does the banana cost?” so he only answered six of the questions—all incorrectly—and left the others blank.

In the Fischer household failing a language exam was a major infraction. In and out of college, Regina had formally studied Latin, Hebrew, Russian, German, French, and Spanish. She was fluent in many of these tongues (and got by in Yiddish) and was continually taking language courses in adult education centers to sharpen her skills. Joan took Spanish and German in high school and was adept in both. “Industry!” Regina yelled at Bobby, with the not-so-subtle implication that if he spent just a fraction of the time on his studies that he devoted to chess, he’d be a stellar student. She continually emphasized to him the importance of knowing other languages, especially if he intended to play chess in foreign lands. He understood. But to accelerate his progress, she began to speak to him in Spanish, coaxed him to take up his text, and tutored him, and within a short while he was receiving high grades. Eventually, he became fluent in Spanish.

Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn was one of the largest in New York and one of the oldest in the nation. With more than five thousand students, it was a factory of learning. Entering in the fall of 1956, Bobby felt comfortable there, although much less so than at Community Woodward. He later said that at Erasmus he was adorned with a cloak of anonymity: “As practically nobody in the school played chess, the other students did not know I was a chess player, which suited me fine, and I took care never to say anything about it either.” At least that’s what Bobby thought. The other students did know who he was. Indeed, it was difficult to not take notice of him: The New York newspapers regularly ran stories and photos of the prodigy; he gave several simultaneous exhibitions that drew publicity; he sparkled out from the cover of Chess Review; he even appeared with Arlene Francis on NBC’s Home show. As for his classmates and their lack of acknowledgment, Bobby said, “I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me.” He seemed unaware that fellow student Barbra Streisand, the future singer, had a secret schoolgirl crush on him. She remembered that “Bobby was always alone and very peculiar. But I found him very sexy.” Bobby’s remembrance of Streisand? “There was this mousey little girl …” His teachers, at least some, were annoyed by his aloofness and lack of interest in the lessons at hand.

October 1956

Scattering fallen leaves as he rushed down the tree-lined street, thirteen-year-old Bobby vaulted up the red-carpeted stairs of the Marshall Chess Club two steps at a time and entered the Great Hall. It was not his first visit. Indeed, he’d already begun making frequent visits to the Marshall, New York’s other major chess club, where he enjoyed a heady feeling of being where he belonged, of possibly writing his own page into chess history.

The club—which was located on Tenth Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, one of Manhattan’s most attractive neighborhoods—had been quartered in this venerable brownstone (built in 1832) since 1931, when a group of wealthy patrons, including one of the Roosevelts, bought the building so that their beloved Frank J. Marshall, the reigning U.S. Champion, who would hold the title for twenty-seven years, would always have a place to live with his family and to play, teach, and conduct tournaments. Walking down the street with its rows of stately brownstones festooned with window boxes of flowers, and a private boarding stable on the same block, Bobby could have easily felt he was transported back to the Gas Light or Silk Stocking era of the nineteenth century.

Most of the world’s most renowned masters had visited the club—it was steeped in the echoes of legendary games, epic battles, hard-fought victories, and heartfelt defeats. Indeed, its only peer in the United States was the Manhattan Chess Club, forty-nine blocks to the north. In team matches, the Manhattan usually, but not always, came out on top.

Looking somewhat like a British officers’ club, the Marshall was wood-paneled, with plush burgundy velvet curtains, several fireplaces, and oak tables fitted with brass lamps. It was at this club that Cuba’s brilliant José Raúl Capablanca gave his last exhibition, where World Champion Alexander Alekhine visited and played speed chess, where many of the most gifted international grandmasters gave, and continue to give, theoretical lectures. Artist Marcel Duchamp lived directly across the street and was an active member of the club, and became a great fan of Bobby’s. The Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis took lessons there. If a motion picture location scout were searching for an idealized chess club, the Marshall might be his pick.

Certainly, there was a sense of decorum that permeated the club, even when it came to dress. Bobby’s habitual mufti of T-shirt, wrinkled pants, and sneakers was considered an outrage by Caroline Marshall, Frank Marshall’s widow and the long-standing manager of the club, and on several occasions she informed him of his sartorial indiscretion, once even threatening to bar him from the premises if he didn’t dress more appropriately. Bobby ignored her.

He was at the Marshall that night in October to play in the seventh round of an invitational tournament, the Rosenwald Memorial, named for its sponsor, Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of Sears Roebuck who was an important art collector and chess patron. The invitation came as a result of Bobby’s having won the U.S. Junior Championship three months earlier, and the Rosenwald was the first important invitational and adult all-masters tournament of his career. The other eleven players were considered some of the finest and highest rated in the United States, and the club members were excited by the event. Bobby’s opponent that night was the urbane college professor Donald Byrne, an international master, former U.S. Open Champion, and a fiercely aggressive player. Dark-haired, elegant in speech and dress, the twenty-five-year-old Byrne invariably held a cigarette between two fingers, his hand high in the air, his elbow resting on the table, in a pose that gave him an aristocratic demeanor.

Regina accompanied Bobby to the club, but as soon as he began to play she left to browse at the nearby Strand Bookstore, whose shelves contained millions of used books. She knew it would probably be hours before Bobby’s game would be over and she’d have to return.

To that point Bobby hadn’t won a game in the tournament, but he’d drawn three, and he seemed to be getting stronger each round, learning from the other masters as he played. In chess tournaments, contestants are not only assigned opponents, they’re also given, for each round, a color: black or white. Where possible, the tournament director alternates the colors, so that a player will play with the white pieces in one game and with the black in the next. Since white always moves first, having that color can provide a player with a distinct advantage in that he can make immediate headway on a preferred strategy. Alas, against Byrne, Bobby was assigned the black pieces.

Having studied Byrne’s past games in chess books and magazines, Bobby knew something of his opponent’s style and the strategies he frequently used. So Bobby decided to use an atypical approach—one unusual for Byrne to face and for Bobby to try. He played what was known as the Gruenfeld Defense.

Bobby knew the basics of the opening but hadn’t yet mastered all of its intricacies. The point was to allow white, his opponent, to occupy the center squares, making the pieces a clear target that would be vulnerable to Bobby’s attack. It wasn’t a classical way to approach the game, and it leads to a very different configuration as the game progresses; but Bobby took the chance.

Because he hadn’t memorized the sequence of moves, Bobby had to figure out what to do each time it was his turn, and he became time-troubled early on. Increasingly nervous, he bit his nails, toyed with his hair, sat on his folded legs, then kneeled on the chair, put his elbow on the table, and rested his chin first on one hand and then on the other. Byrne had just defeated Samuel Reshevsky, the strongest American grandmaster in the tournament, and his chess ability was not to be disrespected. Bobby wasn’t panicked, but he was decidedly uneasy.

Kibitzers began gathering around his board, and each time Bobby had to get up to visit the tiny restroom in the back of the club, he almost had to fight his way through the scrum. It interfered with his concentration: Normally, an ongoing game resonated within him even if he left the table. “The onlookers were invited to sit right next to you and if you asked them to leave or be quiet they were highly insulted,” Bobby recalled. He also noted that the warm Indian summer weather and the press of a large number of people made the room stifling. Bobby’s complaints were heard by the club’s organizers, but too late to do anything about it that night. The next summer the Marshall put in its first air conditioner.

Despite his discomfort, Bobby plunged ahead with the game. Surprisingly, after only eleven moves, he’d almost magically built a positional advantage. Then, suddenly, he moved his knight to a square where it could be snapped off by his opponent. “What is he doing?” said someone to no one in particular. “Is this a blunder or a sacrifice?” As the onlookers scrutinized the position, Bobby’s ploy became obvious to all: Although not profound, it was cunning, perhaps ingenious, and even brilliant. Byrne dared not take the knight; though he would have won an important piece, ultimately it would have led to Bobby’s victory. The tournament referee described the electricity that Fischer’s audacious choice created: “A murmur went through the tournament room after this move, and the kibitzers thronged to Fischer’s table as fish to a hole in the ice.”

It was exactly the madding crowd that Bobby wished would stay afar. “I was aware of the importance of the game,” recalled Allen Kaufman, a master who was studying the game as Bobby played it. “It was a sensational game and everyone was riveted on it. It was extraordinary: The game and Bobby’s youth were an unbeatable combination.”

As the game progressed, Bobby had only twenty minutes remaining on his clock to make the required forty moves, and he’d so far completed just sixteen of them. And then he saw it: Using a deeper insight, he realized that there was an extraordinary possibility that would change the composition of the position and give a whole new meaning to the game. What if he allowed Byrne to capture his queen, the most powerful piece on the board? Normally, playing without a queen is crippling, almost tantamount to an automatic loss. But what if Byrne, in capturing Bobby’s queen, wound up in a weakened position that left him less able to attack the rest of Bobby’s forces and less able to protect his own?

The idea for the move grew on Bobby slowly, instinctually at first, without any conscious rationale. It was as though he’d been peering through a narrow lens and the aperture began to widen to take in the entire landscape in a kind of efflorescent illumination. He wasn’t absolutely certain he could see the full consequences of allowing Byrne to take his queen, but he plunged ahead, nevertheless.

If the sacrifice was not accepted, Bobby conjectured, Byrne would be lost; but if he did accept it, he’d also be lost. Whatever Byrne did, he was theoretically defeated, although the game was far from over. A whisper of spectators could be heard: “Impossible! Byrne is losing to a 13-year-old nobody.”

Byrne took the queen.

Bobby, now so focused that he could hardly hear the growing murmur from the crowd, made his next moves percussively, shooting them out like poison darts, hardly waiting for Byrne’s responses. His chess innocence gone, he could now see the denouement perhaps twenty or more moves ahead. Yet, other than the rapidity with which he was responding to Byrne’s moves, Bobby showed little emotion. Rather, he sat still, placid as a little Buddha, stabbing out one startling move after another.

On the forty-first move, after five hours of play, with his heart slightly pounding, Bobby lifted his rook with his trembling right hand, quietly lowered the piece to the board, and said, “Mate!” His friendly opponent stood up, and they shook hands. Both were smiling. Byrne knew that even though he was on the wrong end of the result, he’d lost one of the greatest games ever played, and in so doing had become part of chess history. A few people applauded, much to the annoyance of the players whose games were still in progress and cared not that history had been made just a few feet away. They had their own games to worry about. “Shh! Quiet!” It was midnight.

Hans Kmoch, the arbiter, a strong player and internationally known theoretician, later appraised the meaning and importance of the game:

A stunning masterpiece of combination play performed by a boy of 13 against a formidable opponent, matches the finest on record in the history of chess prodigies.… Bobby Fischer’s [performance] sparkles with stupendous originality.

Thus was born “The Game of the Century,” as it was dubbed by Hans Kmoch.

Bobby’s game appeared in newspapers throughout the country and chess magazines around the world, and international grandmaster Yuri Averbach, among others, took notice, as did all of his colleagues in the Soviet Union: “After looking at it, I was convinced that the boy was devilishly talented.” The British magazine Chess relaxed its stiff upper lip, calling Bobby’s effort a game of “great depth and brilliancy.” Chess Life proclaimed Bobby’s victory nothing short of “fantastic.”

“The Game of the Century” has been talked about, analyzed, and admired for more than fifty years, and it will probably be a part of the canon of chess for many years to come. In the entire history of the game, in terms of its sheer brilliance, not only by a prodigy but by anyone, it might only compare to the game in Breslau in 1912 when spectators showered the board with gold after Frank Marshall—another American—also employed a brilliant sacrifice and beat Levitsky. In reflecting on his game a while after it occurred, Bobby was refreshingly modest: “I just made the moves I thought were best. I was just lucky.”

David Lawson, a seventy-year-old American whose accent betrayed his Scottish birth, was one of the spectators that night. Earlier he’d invited Regina and Bobby to dinner after the conclusion of the game, whenever it was finished, whoever won. A tiny man, Lawson was a collector of chess memorabilia and had a particular interest in the diminutive Paul Morphy, America’s first (though unofficial) World Champion. Lawson saw a connection between Fischer and Morphy in their precocious rise, although Bobby had yet to prove himself the world’s—let alone America’s—greatest player. Lawson was an opportunist, and although he was soft-spoken and possessed Old World manners, his invitation wasn’t proffered completely out of courtesy. He’d wanted to acquire one of Bobby’s score sheets in the boy’s own handwriting to add to his collection, and by coincidence he chose to attend the Byrne-Fischer encounter, not knowing, of course, that the game would become one of the most memorable in the two-thousand-year history of chess.

Lawson’s preference for dinner was Luchow’s, the German restaurant that had been far beyond the Fischer family’s means when they’d lived across the street from it some seven years before. But since it was past midnight, the kitchen was closed, so the trio repaired instead to an all-night local eatery on Sixth Avenue, the Waldorf Cafeteria—a Greenwich Village hangout for artists, writers, and roustabouts. It is here that the story of the score sheet becomes cloudy. Normally, in important tournaments, a score sheet is backed up with a carbon copy, the original going to the tournament organizers or referee for safekeeping should there be a subsequent dispute of any kind. The carbon is retained by the player. That night Bobby kept his copy—the carbon—which he wouldn’t part with for many years. Indeed, upon request, he’d take out of his pocket the folded and slightly worn sheet and show it to admirers. So what happened to the original?

Kmoch, the arbiter, sensing that Bobby was a champion in the making, had already begun collecting the prodigy’s original score sheets as if they were early Rembrandt sketches. And somehow, most likely by paying for it, Lawson acquired from Kmoch the original “Game of the Century” score sheet, which bore Kmoch’s notation in large red-penciled numerals: 0–1 (indicating the loss for Byrne, the win for Fischer). Eventually, upon Lawson’s death, the score sheet was purchased by a collector, sold again, and for the last number of years it has rested with yet another collector. In today’s market, the estimated auction price for the original score sheet is $100,000.

Bobby’s remuneration from the American Chess Foundation for his sparkling brilliancy? Fifty dollars.

It was his fourteenth birthday, a typically windswept March afternoon, bone-dry and cold, and as Bobby worked his way along Central Park South toward the Manhattan Chess Club, to the most important match of his burgeoning career, he was shivering from the wind, not from fear. It was a good feeling to get inside the well-heated club.

His opponent, Dr. Max Euwe, from Holland, was waiting. Fifty-six years old, conservatively dressed, and well over six feet tall, he appeared a giant next to Bobby. Aside from the four decades that separated their ages, they were a study in opposites. Euwe, a doctor of philosophy and a professor of mathematics at the Amsterdam Lyceum, was a former World Champion, having defeated his predecessor in 1935 with a studied and logical approach to the game. He was an even-tempered, soft-spoken, and mature grandmaster who represented the old guard, and over a lifetime of tournament warfare he’d played many of the game’s legendary figures. His gentle demeanor aside, he thrived on combat, and improbably, given his academic and chess prowess, he’d once been the European heavyweight amateur boxing champion. Bobby, in contrast, was nervous and volatile, the chess arriviste of Brooklyn, a colt of a player, and as it was beginning to develop, the spearhead of the coming generation of American players. He was pleased that he’d won the U.S. Junior Championship the previous summer, but above all, he’d begun to have increased confidence in himself after his celebrated “Game of the Century.” In just six months that game had established him as more than just a curiosity: He was now a new star in the international chess galaxy. As much as Bobby wanted to play Euwe, the renowned doctor was just as intrigued by the prospect of playing the prodigy.

Bobby greeted Dr. Euwe with a polite handshake and a gentle smile. Billed as a “friendly” contest—no titles were at issue—the two-game exhibition match was sponsored by the Manhattan Chess Club to give Bobby an opportunity to play against a world-class master. The stakes were pitifully small: $100 overall, $65 to the winner, and $35 for the loser.

Sitting at the chess table, the professor and the teenager created an almost comic tableau. Euwe’s long legs could barely fit underneath, and he sat obliquely, somewhat casually, as if he wasn’t truly a part of the action. In contrast, Bobby—all seriousness—had to sit upright to reach the pieces, his elbows just finding their way to the top of the board. A small crowd, hardly an audience, gathered around to follow the moves.

Euwe, in grandmasterly fashion, thoroughly outplayed Bobby until they reached the twentieth move, at which point Bobby, realizing that his position was hopeless, toppled his king in resignation. Feeling humiliated, Bobby burst out of the club in tears and ran to the subway. For his part, Euwe didn’t evince much pride in his swift victory, since he felt that Bobby “was only a boy.” He then quickly added, “But a promising one!”

The next day Bobby was back promptly at 2:30 p.m. for the second and final game of the match. This time he had the slight advantage of playing with the white pieces, which allowed him to employ his favorite opening strategy. Since he’d lost the day before, he was determined not to lose again. After an exchange of pieces, he emerged with a pawn ahead in an endgame that looked as though it would lead to a draw. When Bobby offered to trade rooks, Euwe responded by offering him a draw on the forty-first move. Bobby pondered for a long while and, with no apparent winning chances left, reluctantly agreed.

To wrest a draw from a former World Champion was neither small cheese nor minor chess, but Bobby was unhappy since he’d lost the match, 1½–½. Oddly, in the more than fifty years since, although virtually all of Bobby’s games have been analyzed and published—good games and bad; wins, draws, and losses—the complete score of the Fischer-Euwe draw has not only gone unpublished, but the game itself has gone unheralded in the chess press.

Contrary to the popular press’s portrayal of Regina Fischer as the absent mother who left Bobby alone to rear himself, she was actually a doting and caring parent who loved her son and was concerned about his welfare. Raising two children as a single parent and trying to complete her own education, she just didn’t have much time to spend with Bobby, nor did she have enough income to provide all the things she wanted to give him. One writer has claimed that the two didn’t speak to each other for more than thirty years; that’s simply false. They were always in touch, even when she remarried and went to Europe to finish her medical degree when Bobby was in his twenties. They shared messages, phone conversations, and gifts throughout their entire lives, all delivered with love, even though they might have been continents apart.

Most biographers have failed to make the salient point that the Fischer family was exceedingly poor—bordering on poverty, in fact—and every decision about which tournaments to enter, where to play, even which chess books and periodicals to buy came down to a question of money or lack thereof. During the 1950s and 1960s, the time of Bobby’s initial and then most intense ascent, an expenditure of just $5 was considered burdensome by both mother and son. It could be that this penury was the catalyst for Bobby’s often-criticized “greediness” later in his career. Bobby, on his way up the chess ladder, at one point wrote, “Many people imagine that the chess club or some other chess organization would take care of my travel expenses, buy chess literature for me, or in some other way finance me. It would be nice, or it would have been nice, but it just happens not to be so.”

As worrying as the family’s financial state was to Regina, her concerns about Bobby’s mental health, personality, and behavior eventually became preoccupying. Aside from taking Bobby to meet a psychologist, and her talk with the doctor about what to do with her son, she was always trying to guide Bobby to broaden himself through attending cultural events, engaging in sports, meeting other children, reading, and paying attention to his academic studies. She was pleased that Bobby found self-esteem in chess. What concerned her was that his life lacked balance; she worried that his chess single-mindedness wasn’t healthy.

In 1956, Dr. Reuben Fine, an American who was one of the world’s best chess players from the 1930s through the 1940s, wrote a monograph entitled Psychoanalytic Observations on Chess and Chess Masters, which was published as Volume 3 of Psychoanalysis, a journal of psychoanalytic psychology. Afterward, it became available as a separate seventy-four-page book, with a red-and-white chessboard cover. A certain amount of skepticism and even resentment was felt by many of the chess players who took the time to read it. Regina Fischer bought a copy and read it carefully; the book was found in Bobby’s library years later, but whether he ever read it is unknown.

Fine, a devoted Freudian (he’d go on to write two book-length studies of Freud’s theories and a history of psychoanalysis), took the position that chess is symbolically related to the libido and has Oedipal significance: “The King stands for the boy’s penis in the phallic stage, the self-image of man, and the father cut down to the boy’s size.”

He also devoted a chapter to the psychoses of four chess masters, selected from the millions of normal people who’d played seriously over the years. This imbalance provoked criticism for its promotion of the belief that all chess players are seriously addled.

Regina was impressed enough with the book, however, and with Dr. Fine’s chess credentials (he was an international grandmaster and had been a contender for the world title) to think he might be able to help Bobby, or at least temper the boy’s slavish devotion to the game. She wanted her son to do well in high school, enter a prestigious university, and get down and do some real work.

Regina arranged for Dr. Fine to telephone Bobby and invite him to his home just for an evening of chess. Bobby was well aware of Fine’s chess reputation, having played over his games; he also owned and had read several of his chess books. Bobby was suspicious, however. He didn’t want psychological probing. Fine assured him that he just wanted to play a few games with him.

Reuben Fine was not a therapist in the strict sense of the word, but he was a renowned psychoanalyst. His theory was that the problems of many troubled patients rested in forgotten psychic traumas, and through free association and the interpretation of dreams the key to the problems could be unlocked. The cure was usually a long process—sometimes lasting years—starting first with childhood memories and even, if possible, memories formed in utero.

Fine’s office was located in a huge apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One wing of it was his home, which he shared with his wife and three children; the other part consisted of an analysis room, complete with a Freudian fainting couch, and a group room next door. Patients underwent a minimum of one hour a week of analysis at $55 a session, and some participated in group sessions in the evening. Fine would sit in on the groups for one hour, say nothing, and observe how the members interacted with one another, and then for the final hour he’d quit the room and the group would continue alone. He’d then briefly discuss that session the next time each patient appeared for psychoanalysis. With Bobby, Fine wanted to first gain the boy’s trust and respect by playing chess, and then begin classical Freudian analysis, in tandem with the group process.

So that Bobby wouldn’t think he was being psychoanalyzed, Fine avoided bringing the boy into his analysis room at first, instead inviting him to the home wing of the apartment. Bobby met Fine’s wife Marcia and their children, and then he and Fine played speed chess for an hour or two. The psychoanalyst was then one of the fastest players in the country, perhaps even stronger than Bobby had anticipated. Fine would later write that Bobby “was not yet strong opposition. My family remembers how furious he was after each encounter, muttering that I was ‘lucky.’ ”

After about six weekly sessions of chess, at the point when Fine believed Bobby had bonded with him, the psychoanalyst nonchalantly started a conversation about what Bobby was doing in school. Bobby was on his feet in seconds, recognizing that he’d been duped. “You’ve tricked me,” he blurted out, and stalked out of the apartment, never to go back. Fine later remarked that whenever the two saw each other after that, at a chess club or a tournament, Bobby would give him an angry look “as though I had done him some immeasurable harm by trying to get a little closer to him.”

Although there may be some substance to Fine’s implication that Bobby’s hostility was all about the psychoanalyst’s attempt to “get closer,” to peel back his layers, the main reason that Bobby never talked to him again was Fine’s deception, and his use of chess to accomplish it. In a boastful statement, Fine wrote “that it becomes one of the ironic twists of history that of the two leading American chess masters of the twentieth century one almost became the psychoanalyst of the other.” Hardly.

Bobby, for his part, didn’t think that anything was wrong with him. At thirteen, his behavior at chess tournaments and in clubs was quite benign, but like many teenagers, he was sometimes too loud when talking, clumsy when walking past games in progress, unkempt in grooming, and a perennial “bobber” at the board. There was nothing in his actions, however—at that time—that indicated serious problems or advanced neurosis.

Perhaps Fine’s monograph gave impetus to the press; whenever they did chess stories, reporters would look for a certain amount of aberration among the players. Bobby, therefore, frequently became a victim of a twisted interpretation of his personality. When he was interviewed by a reporter, he was often asked patronizing or offensive questions (“How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” … “Are all chessplayers crazy?”), and it became clear to him that they were going to slant the story to make him appear weird. “Ask me something usual,” he once said to a reporter, “instead of making me look unusual.” To another he talked about newspapermen in general: “Those guys always write bad stories about me. They say I’m stupid and that I have no talent in anything except for chess. It’s not true.”

Some articles proclaimed Bobby an idiot savant, with emphasis on the first word rather than the second. Chess Life, indignant at the disrespect shown Bobby, came to his defense, calling such articles “Fischer-baiting” and proclaiming them “utter nonsense.”

Of course, Bobby was obsessed with chess and spent hours playing and studying it, but perhaps not any more than musical prodigies practice their craft. And he did have other interests, including sports. He saw as many hockey games as he could, was an active tennis player, skied, swam, and belonged to a Ping-Pong club in Manhattan. Science interested him most of all. What he was not interested in was hypnotism and prehistoric animals, as some pop-culture articles indicated.

The press was sometimes negative enough to cause those around Bobby to revise their opinion of him. Some players at the Manhattan Chess Club began huffing that he was a meshuggener—a Yiddish term of disparagement suggesting he was “a little crazy.” But others, also using Yiddish, referred to him as a gaon, a genius.

Despite all the discussion about Bobby, including the nicknames and the petty comments leveled at him, he just continued to play and study the game that he loved. During that one year, from 1956 to 1957, Bobby’s official rating soared. Just fourteen years old, he was now officially ranked as a chess master, the youngest person ever to achieve that ranking in the United States. By the rules of the U. S. Chess Federation he could no longer play in amateur tournaments, which was fine by him. Bobby always wanted to play the strongest players possible, seeing it as a way to hone his abilities. And every time he defeated a player with a higher rating, his own rating rose.

In July, four months after the match with Euwe, he traveled to San Francisco to play again in the U.S. Junior Championship, which he won for the second year in a row. For each Junior Championship win he was awarded a typewriter, as well as a trophy and a parchment certificate with his name imprinted. As a result of now owning two typewriters, he began to teach himself how to touch-type from a typing book, covering the letters with tape to memorize their positions, locating the starting position, and then checking to see if what he typed made any sense. He could quickly locate the keys that he wanted—memory was never a problem with him—but he never learned to build up real speed without first peeking at the keyboard.

On top all of the prizes he was winning, he defeated grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky at an exhibition at the Manhattan Chess Club, although Bobby later recalled that it was not much of an accomplishment: Reshevsky was blindfolded (and Bobby was not) and they played at ten seconds a move. It was, however, his first grandmaster scalp.

After winning the United States Junior in San Francisco, instead of going back home to Brooklyn and then journeying out again to Cleveland to play in the United States Open, Bobby stayed on the West Coast. That gave him three weeks to relax, play chess, and travel around California. Several other boys from the tournament traveled with him and he visited Los Angeles and Long Beach, where he stayed in the home of chess player/entrepreneur Lina Grumette and swam in her pool. An elegant public relations agent, Grumette conducted a regular chess salon in her home, which players paid to attend. During the 1940s she’d been one of the strongest female players in the United States. When she met Bobby, she took a maternal interest in him, and she became one of his few lifelong friends, ultimately playing an important part in his career.

After their three-week hiatus, the young players borrowed an old automobile from the editor of the California Chess Reporter, Guthrie McClain. Since most were too young to have a driver’s license, William G. Addison, a twenty-four-year-old who also was going to play in Cleveland, got behind the steering wheel and they headed east to the tournament. The car kept breaking down, and everyone chipped in to have it repaired so that they could keep going. Riding through the hot desert with no air-conditioning led to petty arguments, and a fistfight broke out between Bobby and Gilbert Ramirez (who’d taken second place in the United States Junior). Bobby bit Ramirez on the arm, leaving scars that remain fifty years later. (Ramirez proudly displays them, as if to say, “This is the arm that was bitten by Bobby Fischer.”) Eventually, the car broke down entirely and had to be abandoned. The boys arrived in Cleveland by bus on the evening before play began at the U.S. Open.

Before he was to play his first game, Bobby was rated at 2298, making him among the top ten active players in the country. There were 176 players in the two-week, twelve-round tournament. For his first round, Bobby was paired to play white against a Canadian player who’d registered in advance and paid his entry fee but was nowhere in sight. When the tournament began, Bobby made his first move and pressed his clock, which then started counting down against his invisible opponent. After an hour of waiting, the game was declared a forfeit, and Bobby received a gratis point. Curiously, later in the tournament that “free” point almost led to his downfall. In his next five games, Bobby won three and drew two; one of the draws was with twenty-seven-year-old Arthur Bisguier, the defending United States Open Champion and one of the strongest players in the nation.

In the second half of the tournament Bobby won five games straight, and it was certain that he’d be among the prizewinners. But could he win the title? Several players in the tournament had come down with the flu—including Bobby’s teacher, Jack Collins—and had to forfeit games. Bobby tried to keep himself fit by getting enough sleep, eating healthfully, and staying in his room as much as possible, away from the other players. As it developed, the flu forfeits didn’t affect Bobby’s pairings or score.

In the final round Bobby had to face Walter Shipman, the man who’d first welcomed him at the Manhattan Chess Club. Shipman had a reputation as a fearsome and stubborn player. The game didn’t evolve to Bobby’s liking, so he offered Shipman a draw on the eighteenth move. It was quickly accepted. Bobby had a score of 10–2 and hadn’t lost a game. Arthur Bisguier, the highest rated player in the tournament, also finished with a score of 10–2. Who then was to be the United States Open Champion?

Bobby, Bisguier, and about twenty other players and spectators stood around the tournament director’s desk as he applied the tie-breaking system to determine the winner. The ideal way to break a tie is to have a play-off between the two players. However, in American tournaments, where hotel ballrooms are rented and contracted for a specified period and players have made arrangements for flights home, it’s necessary to apply a tie-breaking system to determine the winner. There are many such systems used in tournaments, and they’re as complicated as abstract mathematical theorems. Few are applied without controversy.

While they were waiting for the results, Bisguier asked Bobby why he’d offered the draw to Shipman when he had a slight advantage and the outcome wasn’t certain. If Bobby had won that game, he would have been the tournament’s clear winner, a half point ahead of Bisguier. Bobby replied that he had more to gain than lose by the decision. He’d assumed that Bisguier would either win or draw his own game, and if so, Bobby would have at least a tie for first place. That meant a payday of $750 for each player, a virtual gold mine for Fischer. Recognizing Bobby’s greater need for money than the capture of a title, however prestigious, Bisguier noted: “Evidently, his mature judgment is not solely confined to the chessboard.”

The tournament director continued to make calculations, finally looking up and declaring that Bisguier had won. Bobby, crestfallen, recalled: “I went to the phone booth and called my mother to tell her the bad news. In the booth next to me was Bisguier, phoning his good news to his family.” After that, both players returned to the tournament hall to watch the conclusions of the other games.

After two hours had passed during which people congratulated Bisguier as the champion, the tournament director announced that he’d made a mistake in the calculations. Under the Median System of tie-breaking, which was to be used in all tournaments conducted by the United States Chess Federation, all of the scores of all of the opponents of the players who are tied are totaled, the top two and the lower two are deleted, and whoever played the highest rated (and therefore more difficult) opponents would be declared the winner. Under this system, Fischer emerged a half point higher than Bisguier. But wait a minute, argued Bisguier: Fischer’s first game was won by a forfeit; his opponent didn’t show up, so he didn’t even play the game! If that game was discounted, he claimed, then he would be the winner. The counterargument was that the forfeited player in the first round was of such a low rating that it would have been almost statistically impossible for Bobby to have lost the game, and the result would have been discounted anyway. Back to the telephone booths.

This time, Bobby told Regina the good news, admitting that even though he was splitting the prize money with Bisguier, “it was the title that really mattered.” One wonders, then, why he didn’t fight for the win against Shipman and win the title outright.

No one as young as Bobby had won the United States Open before, and no one had ever held the United States Junior and Open titles concurrently.

When Bobby returned to New York, both the Marshall and Manhattan chess clubs conducted victory celebrations, and he was lauded as America’s new chess hero. Even Bisguier, not prolonging any resentment, proclaimed Bobby Fischer as the strongest fourteen-year-old chess player who had ever lived.

After a summer of chess, Regina insisted that Bobby devote more attention to his sporting interests. So he swam at the YMCA and began to take tennis lessons, while also playing on the free city-owned courts. He hated going to the free courts, since it took two buses to get to the closest one, and then he’d have to wait sometimes for more than an hour to get a game. Nevertheless, he continued to play into late fall, until the weather became too cold and damp. Mother and son looked into his joining an indoor tennis club for the winter months, but when they discovered there was an initiation fee and a $10-per-hour charge, “it was, of course, ridiculous for us to consider,” Bobby lamented.

Returning home from school one afternoon in September, Bobby sorted through his mail. He’d started to receive fan letters and requests for photos, autographs, even some selected game scores to autograph and inscribe—not just from the United States but from different corners of the globe. The letters didn’t pour in at the level experienced by Hollywood stars, but hardly a day would go by that several pieces of request mail did not arrive at 560 Lincoln Place. Additionally, Bobby regularly received unsolicited advice from fellow chess players, as well as offers from companies that wanted him to sponsor products. Sporadically, Bobby would select a letter at random and reply with a personal note. To speed up the “fan relations” process, Regina had Bobby’s photograph placed in an inexpensive greeting card on which was printed his signature, and she’d mail that out to the various requesters. She also responded to the commercial offers, but for reasons of his own, Bobby showed almost no interest in them, whatever the price offered.

One letter he almost skipped over came in an envelope on which was imprinted the Manhattan Chess Club logo. When he opened it, all he could do was smile:

Mr. Robert J. Fischer

560 Lincoln Place

Brooklyn, 38, N.Y.

New York, September 24, 1956

Dear Mr. Fischer:

You are hereby invited to participate in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament for the United States Championship, co-sponsored by the United States Chess Federation and the American Chess Foundation.

This tournament will also be the official Zonal Tournament of FIDE in its World’s Championship competition.

The tournament will be held in New York City at the Manhattan Chess Club from December 15, 1957, to January 6, 1958. There will be fourteen participants. The playing schedule is enclosed herewith.

Please advise us at your earliest convenience but not later than October 10, 1957, whether or not you will participate in this tournament. If we do not receive your acceptance by October 14, 1957, we will assume that you are declining this invitation.

THE TOURNAMENT COMMITTEE

M.J. Kasper, Chairman

Walter J. Fried

I.A. Horowitz

William J. Lombardy

Edgar T. McCormick

Walter J. Shipman

As the newly reigning United States Open Champion, and a participant in the Rosenwald the previous year, Bobby had anticipated getting this invitation for the 1957 tournament. What particularly intrigued him, though, was that this tournament would be the qualifying tournament for the Interzonal, which was the beginning of the path to the World Championship. Interzonal tournaments were only held every four years, and this coming year happened to be the year. He should have been thrilled with the invitation, but he faced a conflict, and thus was forced to puzzle out what to do.

The problem was that the Rosenwald overlapped with the great Hastings Christmas Congress in England, the annual international tournament that, over the years, had seen some of the greatest chess legends capture first prize. Bobby had been invited to that tournament and wanted to enter its elite winner’s circle. It would be his first real trip abroad, and his first international event, and it would be against some of the world’s finest players.

He couldn’t decide what to do.

After he had talked the situation over with his mother and his friends at the club, his mind was finally set. Youth believes it has no limits, and shows little patience. In the end Bobby could not tolerate a denial of his destiny. He notified the Rosenwald Committee that he’d accept their invitation to compete for the United States Championship—the prelude, he hoped, to eventually capturing the World Championship as well.

In December, just before play began in the United States Championship, Bisguier predicted that “Bobby Fischer should finish slightly over the center mark in this tournament. He is quite possibly the most gifted of all players in the tournament; still he has had no experience in tournaments of such consistently even strength.” Bisguier’s crystal-ball divination seemed logical, but of course Bobby had had experience from the previous year’s Rosenwald. And although many other tournaments in which he’d played may not have included the very top players in the country, there were enough that skirted the summit. Throughout 1956 (when Bobby traveled some nine thousand miles to compete in tournaments) and through 1957, he never stopped playing, studying, and analyzing.

It seemed that his strength grew not just from tournament to tournament and match to match, but from day to day. Each game that he played, or analyzed, whether his or others’, established a processional of insight. He was always working on the game, his game, refining it, seeking answers, asking questions, pulling out his threadbare pocket set while in the subway, walking in the street, watching television, or eating in a restaurant, his fingers moving as if they had a mind of their own.

The New York winter wind began to blow snow flurries through the trees of Central Park as Bobby entered the Manhattan Chess Club for the first round of the United States Championship. Immediately, a buzz of awe passed among the spectators, some of whom called out—as if Jack Dempsey had entered the ring—“There’s Fischer.”

Perhaps Bisguier was right. The field did seem stronger than the previous year. Players who turned down the invitation in 1956 accepted readily in 1957, as Bobby had, because of the importance of the tournament. Almost all of the fourteen entrants wanted an opportunity to go to the Interzonal, and it was rumored that some had entered to take a crack at Bobby Fischer. It was a chance to play against a growing legend.

Bobby walked to his board and silently sneered at the chess timer. It looked like two alarm clocks side by side and had a plunger on its flanks for each player. Bobby disliked the timer because it took up too much room on the table—plus, you had to push the plunger forward to stop your clock and start your opponent’s. That took too much time, especially when a player faced time pressure and every second counted. In contrast, the new BHB clocks from Germany featured buttons on top, which made them much faster to operate: As one’s hand quit the piece, in a swift motion one could hit the button with one’s retracting hand, thereby saving a second or two. There was rhythm that could be established with top-button clocks, and Fischer had become a connoisseur of that kind of clock. Nevertheless, in the 1957 championship he put up with the old push-plunger clunkers.

Bobby started off with a win against Arthur Feuerstein, defeating the young up-and-comer for the first time. Bobby then drew with Samuel Reshevsky, who was the defending champion, in an extremely intense game—and the fourteen-year-old was on fire after that, at one point amassing five wins in a row.

Bobby’s last-round opponent was the rotund Abe Turner, a perpetual acting student whose great claim to thespian fame was that he’d been a contestant on Groucho Marx’s television program, You Bet Your Life. Turner, who exhibited an opéra bouffe appearance but was a slashing and dangerous player, had beaten Bobby in the previous year’s Rosenwald. So Bobby was especially careful when playing him. After only a few minutes, though, Turner, in his high-pitched voice, offered Bobby a draw on the eighteenth move. Bobby accepted and then nonchalantly walked around the club as the other games were still being contested. He’d amassed 10 ½ points, and just as at the United States Open, he hadn’t lost a game. The peach-faced Lombardy, who wasn’t in the running for the title, was playing the venerated Reshevsky, and the Old Fox stood at 9 ½ points. If Reshevsky defeated Lombardy, he’d equal Bobby’s score and they’d be declared co-champions: In this championship there were no tie-breaking systems or play-offs. To while away the time, and perhaps to feign indifference until the deciding game was finished, Bobby began playing speed chess with a few of his chess friends. Occasionally, he’d wander over to the Lombardy-Reshevsky game and scan it for a few seconds. Eventually, after making one of these trips, he declared matter-of-factly, as if there was no room for debate, “Reshevsky’s busted.” Lombardy was playing the game of his life, steamrolling over Reshevsky’s position. When it was entirely hopeless, Reshevsky removed his lighted cigarette from its holder, pursed his lips, and resigned. Bobby came over to the board and said to his friend, “You played tremendously.” The twenty-year-old Lombardy smiled and said, “Well, what could I do? You forced me to beat Sammy!” With Reshevsky’s loss, fourteen-year-old Bobby Fischer was the United States Chess Champion.