Frank Brady - Endgame

“What’s your rating?” is one of the first things players ask each other on meeting for the first time, and whichever player has the lower rating is likely to get a snobbish reaction from the other and even be shunned, as if belonging to another caste. Fischer’s rating reached an average high of 2780. Collins’s rating never rose higher than 2400, light-years apart in winning predictability. If the separation in rating points had been minimal, Bobby’s opinion of Collins might not have been so deprecatory. Raymond Weinstein, a strong international master and a student of Collins, wrote that he’d been in awe of his teacher until he heard Fischer’s unkind remarks about him.

In addition to the rating disparity between mentor and student, Bobby didn’t like that Collins was getting publicity from being his teacher, and that other young players were flocking to him for lessons, eager to become the next Bobby Fischer. Bobby, perhaps because of the indigence of his childhood, hated the idea of people making money off his name. As New York master Asa Hoffmann once put it: “If someone was willing to pay $50 for a Bobby Fischer autograph, and you were going to make $5 for introducing the autograph seeker to him, Fischer would want that $5 too, or else he was willing to forfeit the $50.”

5

The Cold War Gladiator

MIKHAIL TAL’S STARE was infamous, and to some ominous. With his deep brown, almost black eyes, he’d glare so intently at his opponents that some said he was attempting to hypnotize them into making a vapid move. The Hungarian-American player Pal Benko actually donned sunglasses once when he played Tal, just to avoid the penetrating stare.

Not that Tal needed an edge. The twenty-three-year-old Latvian native was a brilliant player. Twice champion of the USSR, he’d won the 1958 Portorož Interzonal, becoming a front runner to play the incumbent title-holder, Mikhail Botvinnik, for the World Championship in 1960. Tal’s style was filled with wild, inspired combinations, intuitive sacrifices, and pyrotechnics. Handsome, erudite, and a packet of energy, the Latvian was a crowd-pleaser and the darling of the chess world. His right hand was deformed, but it didn’t seem to diminish his self-assurance.

Fischer was growing more self-assured, but his style was strikingly different: lucid, crystal-clear, economical, concrete, rational. J. H. Donner, the gigantic Dutch grandmaster, noted the contrast: “Fischer is the pragmatic, technical one. He makes almost no mistakes. His positional judgment is dispassionate; nearly pessimistic. Tal is more imaginative. For him, overconfidence is a danger that he must constantly guard against.”

The European crowds who were watching preparations begin for the Candidates tournament liked Bobby too, but for different reasons: Americans weren’t supposed to play as well as he did. And at sixteen! He was a curiosity in Yugoslavia, a chess-obsessed country, and was continually pestered for autographs and interviews. Lanky, with a loping gait, and dressed in what some Europeans thought was Western or Texan clothing, he was described as being “laconic as the hero of an old cowboy movie.”

Bobby had tolerated Tal’s stare when they first met over the board in Portorož. That game had ended in a draw. More recently, in Zurich, three months before this Candidates showdown, they’d drawn once again, with Bobby coming in third, a point behind the first-place Tal. But now the stakes were much higher—the Candidates results would determine who played for the World Championship—and Fischer wasn’t going to let an obnoxious eye-jinx keep him from his destiny.

The Candidates tournament, spread throughout three Yugoslavian cities—under the beneficence of the dictator Marshal Josip Tito, an avid amateur chess player—was a quadruple round-robin among the world’s best eight players, meaning that each would have to play everyone else four games, alternating the black and white pieces. It was a grueling schedule and would last more than six weeks. Four of the players—Mikhail Tal, Paul Keres, Tigran Petrosian, and Vasily Smyslov—were from the Soviet Union. Three others—Gligoric, Olafsson, and Benko—were indisputably among the world’s best. Fischer was the only American, and to many he was the tournament’s dark knight. In a moment of youthful bravado, though, he declared in an interview that he was counting on winning. Leonard Barden, a British chess journalist, claimed that Fischer was asked so often what his result would be that he learned the Serbo-Croatian word for “first”: prvi .

During the contest, Fischer habitually dressed in a ski sweater and un-pressed pants, and left his hair matted as if unwashed, while the other players donned suits, shirts, and ties, and were scrupulous about their grooming. With thousands of spectators appraising each player’s sartorial—as well as strategic—style, the match moved from Bled to Zagreb and ended in Belgrade.

Bobby’s second, the great Danish player Bent Larsen, who was there to help him as a trainer and mentor, instead criticized his charge, perhaps smarting from the rout he’d suffered at Fischer’s hands in Portorož. Not one to keep his thoughts to himself, Larsen told Bobby, “Most people think you are unpleasant to play against.” He then added, “You walk funny”—a reference, perhaps, to Fischer’s athletic swagger from years of tennis, swimming, and basketball. Declining to leave any slur unvoiced, he concluded, “And you are ugly.” Bobby insisted that Larsen wasn’t joking and that the insults “hurt.” His self-esteem and confidence seemed to have slipped a notch.

But that made him no less combative.

Still enraged from the disrespectful way he felt he’d been treated during his visit to Moscow a year before, Bobby began acting the role of a Cold War gladiator. At one point, he declared that almost all the Soviet players in the tournament were his enemies (he made an exception of the redheaded Smyslov, who displayed a gentility toward him). Years later, records released by the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, indicated he was right. One Russian master, Igor Bondarevsky, wrote that “all four of [Fischer’s] Soviet opponents did everything in their power to punish the upstart.” Tal and Petrosian, close friends, quickly drew all of their games, thereby conserving their energy. Although not illegal, indulging in the so-called grandmaster draw—in which neither player strives to win but, rather, halves the point after a few inconsequential moves have been made—bordered on unprincipled behavior.

Bobby, for his part, was livid at the seeming collusion: “I will teach those dirty Russians a lesson they won’t forget for a long time,” he wrote from the Hotel Toplice. That resolution would become a lifelong crusade.

At his first game against Tal, in Bled, Bobby was already at the board when the twenty-three-year-old Mischa arrived just in time to commence play. Bobby stood and Tal offered his right hand to shake. Tal’s hand was severely deformed, with only three large fingers appended, and since his wrist was so thin, the malformation resembled a claw. Bobby, to his credit, didn’t seem to care. He returned the gesture with a two-stroke handshake, and play began.

Within a few moves, though, Bobby’s mood soured. He became annoyed at Tal’s comportment at and away from the board. This time “the stare” began to rankle him. Tal, in a seeming bid to increase Bobby’s irritation, also offered a slight smile of incredulity after each of the American’s moves, as if he were saying: “Silly boy, I know what you have in mind—how amusing to think you can trick me!”