Frank Brady - Endgame

Bobby’s prediction was calm and direct, and reveals his belief in himself and his abilities. “I am the best player in the world, and I am here to prove it. I have waited ten years for this moment, but I was hindered by Russian maneuvers. I shall depart from Buenos Aires before the twelfth game is scheduled.”

Both players surprised everyone, and probably each other, by virtually reversing their normal playing behavior during the first game. Petrosian’s style was closed and defensive, like a motionless but watchful snake, ready to strike the moment his opponent made the slightest mistake. Bobby’s style was one of relentless aggression—usually. Experts expected that Petrosian would follow his conservative style and try to achieve a draw, to break Fischer’s winning streak. Instead, he was startlingly aggressive, forcing Bobby into the defensive position he hated. Petrosian introduced an innovative move not normally used, and probably provided by Soviet theorists working behind the scenes. He was clearly forcing a draw when the lights went out. Literally. The theater was plunged into darkness. Alarmed, Fischer asked, “What happened? What happened?” The players were told that a fuse had blown and would take a few minutes to replace. Petrosian left the board; Fischer and the audience of twelve hundred continued to sit in darkened silence. Eventually, Petrosian complained that Fischer was still studying the board—in total darkness—and that therefore his clock should be started. Fischer agreed, and Lothar Schmid, the German referee, who was himself a grandmaster, started the clock. For eleven minutes, Fischer continued to visualize the position in his head, evaluating it without seeing it. Then the lights came back on.

The interruption seemed to have hurt Petrosian’s concentration, because he made some mistakes and resigned on the fortieth move. It was Bobby Fischer’s twentieth straight win. The army of assembled reporters and photographers flocked around both players as they left the stage, but both hurried out of the theater, declining to give any statements.

Bobby was obviously sick with a bad head cold during the second round. Once again, the players seemed to switch personalities as they played, with Petrosian as the aggressor. Not able to focus clearly on the game, Bobby realized that he wouldn’t be able to play well enough: He offered a handshake and his resignation. The crowd went wild. Petrosian’s wife rushed to her husband to embrace him. Some members of the audience began to chant “Tigran un tigre! Tigran un tigre!” and the victory cheer spread to the outer lobby and street. Some players rushed onto the stage and tried to lift the joyful Petrosian to their shoulders, but they were stopped by officials. He didn’t care: He’d just accomplished what the finest players in the world had been unable to do on twenty occasions during the previous nine months. He’d won a game from Bobby Fischer.

Fischer screamed at Edmundson that he had been seeing too many people, and for the next ten days as he and Petrosian battled, Bobby agreed to see only the young Argentine player Miguel Quinteros.

Now supremely confident of his chances of winning both the eighth and the ninth games, which would give him the match, Bobby rather formally declared that he would dethrone Spassky. When the eighth round finally began, the lights went out again, but this time only for eight minutes. It had no effect on the results. Both players used attacking moves, but Petrosian resigned, giving Fischer his fourth victory of the match. Gone was the speculation that Bobby Fischer had played his best chess too soon. Rather, it seemed obvious that he couldn’t be stopped.

At the start of the ninth game, more than ten thousand fans packed the playing hall, the lobby, and the surrounding streets. Even in Russia, chess crowds this enormous had never been seen. Petrosian resigned on the forty-sixth move, and Bobby Fischer was the new challenger for the World Championship. Against a former World Champion who was known to be one of the most difficult to defeat, Bobby had won five games, drawn three, and lost one, for a total score of 6½–2½.

Fischer would now be the first non-Soviet or non-Russian in more than three decades to play for the title against the reigning World Champion. For years Soviet grandmasters had competed only against one another, ensuring that the championship would remain in the hands of the Soviet Union. For his labors, Bobby was awarded a $7,500 prize plus an honorarium of $3,000 from the U.S. Chess Federation. More significant, he ignited a phenomenon in the United States not seen before: Almost overnight, a chess boom arose. Sales of chess sets shot up over 20 percent. Virtually every major magazine and newspaper in the country ran a story about Fischer, often with pictures of him and a diagram of his final position against Petrosian. The New York Daily News reprinted the score of every game, and The New York Times ran an article on the cover of its Sunday Magazine section, and then a news story on its front page the following day. The last time chess had made the Times front page was in 1954, when the Soviet team visited the United States and Carmine Nigro had brought the eleven-year-old Bobby to witness the international match.

Bobby Fischer had become a national hero. After returning home, he appeared on television constantly and his face became so familiar that people on the streets of New York City asked him for his autograph. But he became more than a household name, more than the equivalent of a pop star. He was the American who had a fighting chance of defeating a Soviet champion. The Cold War—or at least a version of it—was about to be decided not on a battlefield or in a diplomatic meeting, but in a contest of intellect and will involving thirty-two enigmatic pieces.

10

The Champion

TO KEEP BOBBY FISCHER HAPPY, the American Chess Foundation provided him with a room at the Henry Hudson Hotel in early 1972. As Fischer goes, so goes the chess nation , organizers believed. Also, since he was preparing to play Boris Spassky for the World Championship, his lawyers and U.S. Chess Federation officials needed to know where he was at all times. Questions arose almost daily about such details as the prize money, the schedule, and the venue. Decisions had to be made.

Up to that point, much of Bobby’s life had been nomadic because he spent so much time traveling from one competition to another. Whenever he returned to Brooklyn to prepare for the next tournament or match, he tended to sequester himself in his apartment. He’d often disconnect the telephone and render himself incommunicado—sometimes for weeks. This modus operandi wouldn’t have been workable as officials scurried to arrange a host of details for the World Championship match. So the Henry Hudson Hotel made sense, and it had the right atmospherics. It was where Bobby had won several United States Championships, and should he grow lonely in his room or want to play or talk chess, all he need do was take the elevator down a few floors and enter the Manhattan Chess Club. As its most eminent member, he was always given the red carpet treatment whenever he entered.

So it was that one night, shortly after taking up residence at the hotel, Bobby found himself stretched out on his bed, his heels locked over the edge, unself-consciously talking with two of his closest friends. The 1970s were the years of Nixon’s visit to China, the advent of Transcendental Meditation, cigarette advertising being banned from the airwaves, and fast-food chains multiplying. But none of those topics interested the three men in the room that evening. They were there to talk about chess and the anxiety Bobby was feeling.