David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

The next day, Euwe telegraphed from Amsterdam to spell out FIDE’s position. If Fischer did not appear for the third game, he would be defaulted on that one, too. And if he did not come to the fourth game, the match would be declared over; Spassky would retain the championship. At least that laid to rest Schmid’s fear that he would have to stand on the stage game after game, starting the clocks, waiting out the empty hour, and pronouncing forfeits until Spassky had the requisite twelve points for victory.

However, if the match officials thought the forfeit was history, they were mistaken. The challenger was now observing his Sabbath and had unplugged the phone. (That Fischer could not play between sundowns on Friday and Saturday was the cause of amused speculation in Reykjavik, where in July the sun does not set until nearly midnight and it is never completely dark. Fischer solved his theological dilemma by choosing an arbitrary time and sticking to it.) His cudgels were taken up by Paul Marshall, who arrived on Saturday, 15 July, like a legal tornado, replacing Davis and insisting on a rehearing of the appeal. The committee’s decision was not final—it could always be changed in the light of new evidence or deferred, said Marshall. He argued on and on; the committee listened until three in the morning. Then they confirmed their original decision, announcing that they found the conditions in the hall to be in line with the rules of the competition.

At last there was good news. Although Fischer had booked another return flight to New York, someone had persuaded him to stay. Perhaps it was Marshall, accusing him of cowardice. Perhaps it was the thin, gray-haired widow Lina Grumette, his intermittent surrogate mother, with whom he had had supper after emerging from his Sabbath.

Fischer’s decision to remain in the match came with strings: He would play game three only in the separate, private room at the back of the stage and without cameras, not in the hall.

Lothar Schmid had to find a way forward. But what possible rationale could the organizers have for moving the game when the appeal committee, the sound engineer, and the mass visit to the hall had established that it was a wholly appropriate site?

He tried reason. “I said, ‘Let’s start in the main hall. If the noise disturbs us, then we can move.’” Reason was not enough. Marshall, says Schmid, preferred unreason. If there were no current disturbance in the hall, he promised Schmid he would create one. “‘If you, Mr. Schmid, will not remove the third game into the separate room, I will go to the stage and take a big hammer and smash down the table and you won’t be able to play there.’ And I said, ‘In these circumstances, I have to think it over.’”

This was a world turned upside down. The normal response to Marshall would have been, “In that case, you will be arrested and charged with criminal damage while we use another board.” Instead, Schmid went to the champion. “I asked Boris if he would allow the third game to be played in the separate room. He said, ‘Pozhaluista,’ “That’s fine by me.’”

The Soviet team had not been involved in this decision. Spassky had capitulated without consulting his seconds or the deputy minister of sport, Viktor Ivonin. They discovered this only on taking their seats in the hall. Ivonin and the Soviet television and radio chess correspondent Naum Dymarskii exchanged startled comments.

Spassky had behaved like a sportsman, Schmid said later. Today his rationalization is less generous. “Of course, Spassky was in the lead. For him, it was worth agreeing to move the game to get Bobby back. So he was easy and friendly.” With Schmid and Thorarinsson frantic to save the match, one to safeguard Fischer, the other to safeguard his reputation and all the hard work and money that had gone into the championship, not to speak of his political future, the Soviet player became the sportsman or, rather, the pawn. The Americans broke the rules, and the ICF colluded with them. For Iceland, continuing the match was simply too vital; comparatively, too much was at stake. A larger country might have shrugged off Fischer’s wayward behavior and his lawyer’s aggressive gambits—“It’s his loss, not ours.” Iceland could not afford that, and the Americans knew it.

For Spassky, as for Schmid, worse was yet to come.

The board had been reset in the unwelcoming, bare back room behind the stage, used normally for table tennis. It was small, about seventy-five feet by thirty feet, with a sloping roof. On one side were windows that looked out over a grassed area toward the main road. The noise of passers-by and children frolicking could be heard.

Spassky arrived in time for the start and sat down at the board. Lothar Schmid was opening a window. Anxiously, Spassky looked around for Fischer. The challenger arrived and was immediately possessed by rage. Wrapped in blankets, a closed-circuit television camera had been installed to carry the action to the thousand-strong audience in the hall and the journalists and commentators in the press room. Fischer roared at Schmid: “No cameras!” He prowled the room, turning switches on and off. Schmid protested that Spassky was being disturbed. Fischer yelled back at him to shut up.

White-faced, Spassky stood. Lothar Schmid recollects, “When Bobby started to fight again, Boris became upset and he said, ‘If you do not stop the quarreling, I will go back to the playing hall and demand to play there.’” With the challenger turning the World Chess Championship into a verbal brawl, Schmid, panic-stricken, pleaded with the champion to continue the game. “Boris, you promised.” He turned to Fischer. “Bobby, please be kind.” Schmid remembers: “I felt there was only one chance to get them together. They were two grown-up boys, and I was the older one. I took them both and pressed them by the shoulders down into their chairs. Boris made the first move, and I started the clock.”

So on 16 July 1972 at nine minutes past five in the afternoon, the World Chess Championship match was finally saved.

Schmid is unrepentant about his unorthodox tactics. “I could have said to Bobby, ‘If you’re disputing the conditions, you don’t have to stay here in this closed back room. You are within your rights to lodge another complaint.’ But I thought—and I think that’s how it would have been—he would have gone away and never come back. This was the decisive moment in the match.”

Fischer was two down to the champion. He had never beaten Spassky, and now he had the black pieces. Nonetheless, early in the game he went into furious attack; at last the spotlight was where it was meant to be, on the chessboard. “This is wild stuff,” exclaimed a spectator. Fischer’s eleventh move, Nh5, was a shock; it left his pawn structure in a mess and removed a pawn from the defense of his king. One expert in Reykjavik described the move as “an entirely new conception”; Spassky spent half an hour studying it.

Grandmaster Reuben Fine, a psychoanalyst, thought Fischer’s ambiguous feelings toward women could be read off from moves like Nh5. Fischer, he maintained, liked to attack his opponent’s center from the side. Applying his professional insights, he concluded that Fischer’s tendency to hug the edge was “most likely the chessic equivalent of the running away that he was always threatening” and that this running away had to do with his apprehension about females.

Another grandmaster marveled, “Bobby’s attacking as though his life was involved.” Spassky was being outplayed. At the adjournment, Fischer wrote a move that, according to Frank Brady, left him exultant. “‘I sealed a crusher!’ he crowed, smashing a fist into his palm. ‘I’m crushing him with brute force! Haaaaaa!’”