Frank Brady - Endgame

Over the years, Icelanders have sponsored many international tournaments and matches, and the possibility of holding what was being billed as the Match of the Century was more than exhilarating to chess players throughout the country. As it developed, the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match was one of the most expertly organized World Championship matches ever conducted, intoxicating for Icelanders as well as the tourists and members of the international press who descended on the capital city of Reykjavik. Photographic blowups of Fischer and Spassky adorned the windows of almost every shop, with black-and-white checkered displays serving as backdrops for huge papier-mâché chess pieces.

Most of the residents started out wishing for Fischer’s victory, but after the numerous false starts, threats, and general difficulties Bobby caused, sympathy began to swing to the gentlemanly Spassky. Fischer wasn’t satisfied with the financial arrangements. The winner was to receive $78,125 and the loser $46,875. Beyond that, each was to be given 30 percent of all television and film rights. Fischer, though, demanded 30 percent of the gate receipts in addition , arguing that paid admissions might amount to $250,000 and that he and Spassky should receive a share.

The Icelandic chess officials—who weren’t at all sure how they were going to fill the three-thousand-seat Laugardalshöll, the site of the match, game after game for as many as twenty-four sessions, not counting adjournments—argued that gate-receipt income should go entirely to them to cover their outlay for the stakes and the arrangements.

Fischer canceled his flight to Iceland at the last minute, on the evening of June 25. The airline had reserved a full row of seats just for him and had stocked the plane’s refrigerator with oranges so that Fischer could have fresh juice “squeezed in front of him,” as he’d requested, during the four-hour trip across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, talks continued between Bobby’s lawyers, Paul Marshall and Andrew Davis, and the Icelandic Chess Federation concerning the matter of the gate receipts. Both sides stood firm. During the ensuing week, additional flights were booked and then canceled by Fischer as headlines began to question whether he’d appear at all. Icelandic papers were asking HVENAER KEMUR HINN DULARFULLI FISCHER? (“WHEN COMETH THE MYSTERIOUS FISCHER?”) A few days after Fischer’s first flight was changed, Bobby and Davis drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport, apparently to board a Pan American flight. But, strangely, Fischer paused to buy an alarm clock and was seen by reporters and photographers (there were more than a hundred members of the press waiting to interview and photograph him). He fled the airline terminal and missed the flight. Later, he was observed at a nearby Howard Johnson’s restaurant, having dinner. When, indeed, would Bobby goeth to Iceland?

Although money was the focal point of the controversy, it wasn’t just about dollars (or kroners); rather, it was about Bobby getting his way. In this case, he was pretty confident he could receive what he demanded. As an editorial in The New York Times suggested: “If he plays in Reykjavik and wins—as he has an excellent chance of doing—his prospective earnings would make the amount he is arguing about now seem infinitesimal.” Fischer knew that. He also knew that the world was clamoring for the match and that if he held out a little longer, more money might be forthcoming.

The world press was, to say the least, not amused. Foreign papers reflected the outrage of their readership. RUSSIANS DISDAIN FISCHER FOR CONCERN WITH MONEY, blared a headline in The New York Times , and Tass, the Soviet press agency, editorialized: “Whenever the matter concerns Fischer, money comes first while sports motives are relegated to the background. Characteristically, his confidants are not chessplayers, but lawyers to whom he [entrusts] all his chess affairs.” The leading German Sunday newspaper, Bild am Sonntag , reported: “Fischer has dragged chess down to the level of a wrestling match. We’ve never known of such arrogance and snobbism.” The London Daily Mail stated: “Bobby Fischer is quite certainly the most ill-mannered, temperamental and neurotic brat ever to be reared in Brooklyn. As far as the international prestige battle goes, the Soviet Union has won the opening round 10 to 0.” What the press—and seemingly everyone else—failed to understand was that it was Bobby’s shrewdness in protecting his financial interests, rather than temper tantrums or neuroses, that was making him hesitate. He knew instinctively that the longer he waited, the more swollen the prize fund would become.

Bobby felt that journalists weren’t really interested in how or why he moved the chess pieces, but rather in the scandal, tragedy, and comedy of his life. To him, the press was a puzzle that he could never quite solve. He felt that he couldn’t lie if asked a direct question, and yet if he simply refused to answer, the assumption was that he was hiding something crucial.

Whispers had been bandied about as far back as 1958, when he played at Portorož, that he was an anti-Semite, but privately, he categorically denied it when playing at Netanya, Israel, in 1968. One of Bobby’s closest friends, Anthony Saidy, said that he never heard Fischer make an anti-Semitic remark until at some point after the 1972 championship.

During the match, Bobby didn’t issue any statements that were either anti-Semitic or anti-American—on the contrary, he appeared deeply patriotic and included many Jews among his friends, lawyers, and colleagues. But Wilfrid Sheed, an American novelist and essayist, penned a comment just before the match ended that many would later regard as prescient. In his The New York Times Book Review of a work by Ezra Pound, Sheed likened Bobby to Pound, the infamous anti-Semite and anti-American who was indicted for treason by the United States for his fascist broadcasts. Sheed wrote: “Of Ezra Pound, as of Bobby Fischer, all that can be decently said is that his colleagues admire him. There is no reason for anyone else to.”

By the time the opening ceremonies took place at Iceland’s National Theatre on Saturday evening, July 1, less than twenty-four hours before the beginning of the scheduled first game, reporters and spectators were making reservations to return home, in the belief that Fischer wouldn’t appear. Bobby had moved from the Yale Club to the home of Anthony Saidy, who lived with his parents in a large Tudor house in Douglaston, Queens. As Saidy later related, the house was subjected to an unending media barrage. Fischer was besieged with calls and cables, and photographers and journalists staked out the grounds in hopes of just a glimpse of him. Fischer headlines dominated the front pages of newspapers all over the world, crowding off such “secondary” news items as the 1972 United States presidential nominations.

Saidy suggested that there was an actual plot to keep Fischer from becoming World Champion, and this involved the wiretapping of his parents’ phone. “At one point, when Bobby was talking to Davis, who was in Iceland,” Saidy said, “Bobby made a reference to one of the Icelandic Chess Federation officials as being ‘stupid.’ Suddenly, he heard a woman’s voice cutting through the line saying: ‘He said: “He’s stupid.” ’ The line was obviously tapped.” Saidy added that Fischer also believed that the line was tapped.

Anything is possible, of course. There was a theory prevalent among a number of Americans, such as Fred Cramer, who was on Bobby’s team, that the Icelanders were underhandedly working with the Russians to repel Fischer’s assault on Soviet chess hegemony. Aside from the personal dislike for Fischer that a number of the Icelandic chess officials, such as Thorarinsson, openly felt, though, not one instance emerged suggesting that they did anything to hinder Fischer’s World Championship bid. Indeed, some of the Icelandic officials were convinced that Spassky was the better player and that he was going to defeat Fischer rather easily anyway. At the commencement of the match, they were privately expecting to see Fischer humiliated on the board .