Frank Brady - Endgame

Sensing the building drama, Bobby took his time and seemed to peer even more deeply at the hand. Then, with a look on his face that promised he was going to reveal the meaning of life, he said in stentorian tones: “I can see in your palm, Mr. Tal, that the next World Champion will be …”

At that point Bobby and Tal spoke simultaneously. Fischer said, “Bobby Fischer!” And Tal, never at a loss for a quip, said, “William Lombardy!” (who happened to be standing to his immediate left). Everyone assembled screamed with laughter.

A short while later, Chess Life , in describing the incident, chose to find in it an augury of things to come. Said the magazine: “By the look of confidence and self-assuredness on Fischer’s face, we wonder if in fact, he did ‘see’ himself as the next World Champion.”

7

Einstein’s Theory

BOBBY LEFT THE BALLROOM of the Empire Hotel, just steps away from the construction site of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts cultural complex. He’d just clinched the 1960–61 United States Championship, and he walked briskly through the snow-covered streets with his mother and Jack and Ethel Collins. Jack found it tough going with his wheelchair, so he and his sister took a taxi to a victory dinner for Bobby at Vorst’s, a German restaurant a few blocks from the tournament site. If there was any question of his accomplishment, Chess Life set the record straight:

By winning the United States Championship for the fourth time in succession, Bobby Fischer, 17-year-old International Grandmaster from Brooklyn, has carved an indelible impression in the historic cycle of American chess and has proven without a doubt that he is both the greatest player that this country ever produced and one of the strongest players in the world. Fischer has not lost a game in an American tournament since 1957.

There was only one problem with Chess Life ’s semi-hagiography: Reshevsky didn’t agree with it, nor did many of his supporters.

Some chess players felt that it was an insult to proclaim Fischer the greatest American player at seventeen, and thereby diminish the reputation of Reshevsky at fifty. It didn’t help that a study had been published that year in American Statistician magazine, “The Age Factor in Master Chess,” in which the author posited that chess masters go downhill after a certain age, “perhaps forty.” Reshevsky wanted to prove the study wrong.

For many years Reshevsky had enjoyed a reign as America’s “greatest,” and now all the spoils and baubles seemed to be going to Bobby, whom many thought of as simply a young, irreverent upstart from Brooklyn. That said, at least an equal number of observers couldn’t get enough of “the upstart.” They believed that he signaled the possibility of a chess boom in America.

The officers of the American Chess Foundation maintained that Reshevsky was the better player, and they arranged to have him prove it. During the summer of 1961 a sixteen-game match between the two players was negotiated and a prize fund of $8,000 was promised, with $1,000 awarded to each player in advance. Of the balance, 65 percent would go to the winner and 35 percent to the loser. Such a match evoked the drama of some of history’s great rivalries—clashes such as Mozart vs. Salieri, Napoleon vs. Wellington, and Dempsey vs. Tunney. When four world-class chess players—Svetozar Gligoric, Bent Larsen, Paul Keres, and Tigran Petrosian—were asked their opinion of who would prevail, all predicted that Reshevsky would be the winner, and by a substantial margin.

Reshevsky, a small, bald man who dressed conservatively, had a solemn and resolute personality. He was an ice king who was courteous but curt. Bobby couldn’t have been more different. He was a tall, gangly, intense, quarrelsome teenager, a quixotic chess prince who exhibited occasional flashes of charm and grace. And their styles on the board were just as divergent. Reshevsky’s games were rarely poetic—they displayed no passion. The longtime champion often lapsed into time pressure, barely making the control. Fischer’s games, though, were crystalline—transparent but ingenious. Bobby had taught himself, after years of practice, to budget his time and he hardly ever drifted into time pressure. (The regimen Jack Collins had imposed when he imported a German clock for Bobby had proved its worth.)

The other differences? Fischer was thoroughly prepared—“booked up,” as it was called—with opening innovations. Reshevsky, though, tended to be underprepared and often had to determine the most effective moves during play, wasting valuable time. Fischer was more of a tactical player, with flames of brilliance, while Reshevsky was a positional player. He maneuvered for tiny advantages and exhibited an obdurate patience. He was methodically capable of eking out a win from a seemingly hopeless and delicate position.

Ultimately, though, the match wouldn’t be rendering a judgment on which player’s style was the best. Its agenda was more basic—that is, to determine who was the best American player period .

Hardly a pas de deux, there was a seesaw of results: wins for Bobby … draws … wins for Reshevsky. One day Bobby was King Kong; the next, Fay Wray. By the eleventh game, which was played in Los Angeles, the score was tied at 5½–5½. There was difficulty scheduling the twelfth round, which fell on a Saturday. Reshevsky, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t play on Saturday until after sundown. (Early in his career he did play before sundown, but he came to believe that this was a transgression that had caused the death of his father, and thereafter he refused to compete on the Sabbath.) The starting time was therefore changed to 8:30 p.m. When someone pointed out that the game could easily last until two in the morning, it was rescheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. the next day, Sunday afternoon.

Complications set in. Jacqueline Piatigorsky (née Rothchild, a member of one of the richest families in Europe) was one of the sponsors of the match and was paying for all of the players’ expenses. She was married to the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, who happened to be giving a concert in Los Angeles that Sunday afternoon. So that she could attend her husband’s concert, Jacqueline asked that the game begin at 11:00 a.m. When Bobby, a classically late sleeper, heard of yet another change of schedule, he protested immediately. He simply couldn’t play at that time, he said. “It’s ridiculous.” Bobby also didn’t see why he had to cater to Mrs. Piatigorsky. She could always come to the game after the concert, he argued. They’d probably still be playing.

At the tournament site—the Beverly Hilton Hotel—Bobby’s chess clock was started promptly at eleven a.m. Reshevsky paced up and down, a few spectators waited patiently, and when the little red flag fell precisely at noon, the tournament director declared the game a forfeit. The thirteenth game had been scheduled to be played back in New York at the Empire Hotel.

Bobby said he was willing to continue the match, but the next game had to be a replay of the twelfth game. He didn’t want to play burdened by such a massive disadvantage; the forfeited game could possibly decide the match’s outcome.

Reshevsky nervously paced the stage, once again waiting for the absent Bobby to arrive, this time to play the disputed thirteenth game. About twenty spectators and as many journalists and photographers also waited, staring at the empty, lonely board, and at Reshevsky, who never stopped his pacing.

When an hour had elapsed on the clock, I. A. Horowitz, the referee, declared the game forfeited. Then Walter Fried, the president of the American Chess Foundation, who’d just burst into the room, noticed that Fischer was in absentia and declared Reshevsky the winner of the series. “Fischer had a gun to our heads,” he later said, explaining the abrupt termination of one of the most important American chess matches ever played.