David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

In 1962, Fischer, not yet twenty, came top by a large margin in the Stockholm Interzonal. He was the first non-Soviet to win an Interzonal, and in so doing he qualified for the Candidates tournament, held later that year in the island of Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies. He was now one of the favorites; certainly that is how he regarded himself. In the event, he got off to a terrible start, and although he managed to claw back some ground, he finished only in fourth place, several points behind the leaders, Tigran Petrosian, Paul Keres, and Efim Geller. Commentators were divided: either Fischer had not achieved full chess maturity or he was simply off form. The would-be champion had an alternative explanation, one that revealed his belief in his chess invincibility: If he had not won, he must have been the victim of a conspiracy.

In an article in the American weekly Sports Illustrated, he raged against the Soviet players, charging them with collusion. All twelve games between Petrosian, Keres, and Geller, he pointed out, had been drawn; many were quick draws. They had settled these games, he wrote, to conserve their intellectual and physical energies for struggles against the non-Soviets—Fischer himself in particular. And he concluded, “Russian control of chess has reached a point where there can be no honest competition for the World Championship.”

Even if it was true that the Soviet players went easy on one another (grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi—then a Soviet—says it is true), they were able to do so only because Fischer lagged behind on points. Otherwise, to finish ahead of him, they would have had to press for victories. The American player Arthur Bisguier, in Curaçao to act as chess aide to both Fischer and Pal Benko, is dismissive. “It’s absurd to say [the Soviets] were cheating. Of course they agreed draws; they were ahead in the tournament. Fischer’s complaint was just sour grapes.”

The need for control was incompatible with respect for the rights of others. Anger lay just below the surface. In Curaçao, Bisguier, who says his principal job was “to calm Fischer’s ruffled feathers when he had a bad result,” was himself caught up in the teenager’s dark moodiness. Fischer maintained that as he was America’s best prospect in the tournament, Bisguier should be there to support him alone, not Benko as well. Just before midnight on 9 May, the thirty-three-year-old Benko came looking for Bisguier in Fischer’s room; he needed some help in analyzing his adjourned game with Petrosian. Fischer and Benko started scrapping—what Bisguier calls “fisticuffs.” The following day, Fischer wrote to the tournament organizing committee, saying Benko should be fined and/or expelled from the tournament. It was a letter they chose to ignore.

Bisguier has a more disturbing memory of Curaçao. During a break in the tournament, they went to stay on the beautiful tropical island of St. Martin. “I used to look in on him every day to try to cheer him up. And I saw that there was a door open and he had a shoe in his hand. I said, ‘Why do you leave the door open? You get all these tropical bugs in here.’ And he said, ‘That’s what I want.’ And it turned out he had captured some poor creature and was banging on each one of its legs. There were other things of this sort. And it was scary. If he wasn’t a chess player, he might have been a dangerous psychopath.”

Tigran Petrosian went on to win the tournament and then to become world champion in 1963. Considered a strong bet for the 1966 title, Fischer stated that he would stay away from future Interzonals and Candidates tournaments unless the system was reformed to prevent collusion. He got his way: it was subsequently announced that, henceforth, the round-robin Candidates tournament would be replaced by a series of knockout matches.

Fischer’s difficulties with competition organizers had already begun to escalate. His attendance at tournaments became conditional upon high appearance fees, which the sponsors reluctantly found—they understood that the participation of the American added glamour to any lineup and stimulated public interest. But money was only part of it. Playing conditions had to be up to Fischer’s rigorous standards. The lighting had to be just right, the crowd had to be kept far enough back to limit noise. Less unusual, the rounds had to be prearranged so as to accommodate his religious practices. (Reshevsky, an Orthodox Jew, had the same requirement.)

In the mid-1960s, Fischer had become involved in the Worldwide Church of God, though he never formally joined. Based in Pasadena in Southern California, it was a rapidly growing fundamentalist sect, with over 75,000 members in 300 congregations across the country and abroad. The founder was an erstwhile newspaper advertising designer turned charismatic radio preacher, Herbert Armstrong. He served a Bible-based theological cocktail, part Judaism, with salvation through Jesus Christ, and a strict moral life. Followers were ordered to observe the Jewish Sabbath and such festivals as Passover and to adopt a kosher diet. With one exception, Fischer fitted in with the Church’s religious practices, broadly observing its dietary code as well as more strictly following its Sabbath injunctions. Even so, one has the sense that the American imposed his personalized interpretation on the rules of his Church, just as he did on competition rules. Yevgeni Vasiukov records seeing Fischer on the Sabbath at a tournament: “I have no wish to cast doubt on Fischer’s religious beliefs, but it was somewhat strange to see him come to the hall and analyze the games that had ended.” The pronouncement Fischer chose to ignore entirely was the Church’s doctrinal prohibition on board games, anathematized as “frivolous.”

In December 1963, Fischer entered the U.S. Chess Championship. He had already won it five times, but nobody could have foreseen the outcome. Against eleven of the highest-ranked players in the country, he won every game. It was an awesome performance; “historic” was the adjective used, rightly, in the press. To win a national tournament is one thing, to win it several years in succession is another, but to win it without losing or even drawing a single game is staggering. He had proved himself in a different league.

On such form, Fischer posed a real threat to Soviet supremacy, and the chess world buzzed in anticipation of his participating in the Amsterdam Interzonal of 1964. Not to participate—missing this world championship cycle—would mean that he could not hope to become world champion until the end of the following cycle, in 1969. Surely this was a chance he would not pass up.

But still raging against the “Soviet swindlers,” Fischer did indeed pass it up. His fury was turned in on himself, in the rejection of what he wanted most. He did not play competitive chess again for a year and a half. Offers came in, but Fischer turned them all down or asked for appearance fees beyond even the most munificent of sponsors. At the age of twenty-one, he staged his first retirement.

The tournament that brought him back was the Capablanca Memorial in Havana, which opened in August 1965—Fischer’s first international event since what he regarded as the catastrophe of Curaçao. For an American, participation was a diplomatic challenge. This was only a few years since the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis. Contact between Cuba and the United States was severely curtailed—when Fischer applied to the U.S. State Department for a permit to visit Cuba, they flatly turned him down.

Rather than fight the bureaucracy, Fischer’s ingenious solution was to offer to play by telex. (Some claim the idea originated with the Cuban chess organizer José Luis Barreras.) He would make his moves in New York while his opponents made theirs in Cuba. The solution would set the Cubans back $10,000. In the meantime, his lust for control was undiminished. Before the tournament began, Fischer read that Castro was proclaiming his, Fischer’s, involvement a propaganda victory. Fischer reacted with a cable to the Cuban leader withdrawing from the tournament unless “you immediately [send] me a telegram declaring that neither you, nor your government, will attempt to make political capital out of my participation.”