Frank Brady - Endgame

Lyman was eloquent in a homespun way, and in addition to his analysis of the match, he added explanations so that the analysis would be understandable to chess novices. For example, he once said: “It’s not enough to have respect for bishops in the abstract, you gotta watch out for them!” After the first few broadcasts, there were more than a million viewers following the games, and after two months Lyman became a star himself, with people stopping him on the street and asking for his autograph. So popular was the show that it crowded out the baseball and tennis coverage normally seen in sports bars in New York, and when the channel was covering the Democratic National Convention in Washington, the station was flooded with thousands of calls asking to have the chess match put back on. Station officials gave in to their viewers’ demands, dropped the convention, and went back to broadcasting the match.

Fischer’s quest and charisma transformed the image and status of chess in the United States and other countries, as well. In New York, intense demand quickly made chess sets an out-of-stock item at department stores such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Nor could the publishers of Bobby’s two books, My 60 Memorable Games and Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess , easily keep up with demand for the chess star’s perspective. Chess clubs everywhere saw memberships swell; during the match, the Marshall Chess Club’s roster doubled to six hundred, and the United States Chess Federation added tens of thousands to the fold. For the first time in their lives, chess masters could make a decent living giving lessons because they had so many new students. People were playing chess at work, during their lunch hour, in restaurants, on their front stoops, and in their backyards. There’s no reliable statistic documenting how many people embraced the game as a result of the publicity surrounding the Fischer-Spassky match, but some estimates put the number in the millions.

Off-the-board pressures were undoubtedly placing Spassky (who was less inured than Bobby to being at the center of a storm) under great stress. And that might, in turn, have affected the sharpness of his thinking, because in the fifth game, after committing perhaps the worst blunder of his career on the twenty-seventh move, he resigned, ending one of the shortest decisive encounters in World Championship history.

Grandmaster Miguel Najdorf, seated on the sidelines, likened the next game, the sixth, to a Mozart symphony. Fischer built a crushing attack and enveloped Spassky in a mating net, forcing his capitulation. Fischer later implied that this was his favorite game of the match, and many grandmasters, such as Larry Evans, have indicated that the game was so beautifully executed that it became the match’s turning point.

Fischer began telling friends that he thought the match would be over in his favor in two weeks. He was becoming convivial and even made attempts at dry, almost British humor. At the beginning of August, while gazing out the picture window of his hotel room at the northern void during a gray, raw day, he quipped: “Iceland is a nice place. I must come back here in the summertime.”

Although it’s never been revealed before, Regina Fischer, disguised in a blond wig and stylish clothing, flew in from England and visited Bobby at the Loftleidir to wish him good cheer and congratulate him on what appeared to be the certainty of his winning the championship. She didn’t want to be recognized. Journalists’ curiosity about her would simply take away, she felt, from her son’s shining moment. She slept in Bobby’s suite overnight but didn’t go to the Laugardalshöll to see him play. Instead, she flew back to the UK the next day.

In many ways, “unlucky thirteen” was the pivotal game of the Fischer-Spassky championship encounter. It was a nine-and-a-half-hour marathon in which Fischer, even though a pawn ahead, had a difficult position right up to adjournment. He could find no improvement with overnight analysis, and upon resumption he was forced to continue seeking what looked like a draw. On the sixty-ninth move, obviously exhausted, Spassky blundered. When he realized his mistake, he could barely look at the board, turning his head away several times in humiliation and frustration. Fischer, after moving to collect Spassky’s gift, sat back in his chair, grimly, staring at the Russian—studying him. For a long, long moment, he didn’t take his eyes off Spassky. There was just a bit of compassion in Fischer’s eyes, which turned the episode into a true Aristotelian tragedy: Spassky’s terror combined with Fischer’s pity. Spassky finally moved, but resigned on the seventy-fourth move.

At that point in the match, Fischer stopped taking the chances that are often necessary to win a game. Because of his unusual caution, the following seven games, numbers fourteen to twenty, were all draws. After the match, Fischer explained that he hadn’t been playing for draws but realized that his three-point lead was enough to win the title, as long as he could prevent Spassky from winning a game.

After twenty games, the score stood at 11½–8½ in favor of Fischer. He needed just two draws or one win out of the remaining four games to wrest the title from the Russian, and from Russia. Fischer’s future was manifest.

Shortly before the concluding week of the match, the Soviet delegation, by way of a long and preposterous statement, made an accusation that Fischer might be “influencing” the World Champion’s behavior by “chemical substances if not by electronic means.” Incredibly, an investigation was launched by the Reykjavik Police Department and Icelandic scientists. They field-stripped Spassky’s chair, x-rayed it, took scrapings of all the surroundings, and even examined the air on the stage. The image of a burly policeman traipsing across the stage with an empty plastic bag, attempting to “capture” the air, was the stuff of Chaplinesque comedy. One object was found in Spassky’s chair that was not in Fischer’s otherwise identical chair! But the secret weapon turned out to be a blob of wood filler, placed there by the manufacturer. Fischer guffawed when he heard of it and said that he’d been expecting rougher tactics from the Russians.

Donald Schultz, part of Fischer’s team, was there when the wood from the chair was x-rayed, and he saw the X-ray itself. He also saw a second X-ray and noticed that the blob was no longer there. He couldn’t help wondering if one of the Russians had planted something in the chair to embarrass Bobby but on second thought had somehow removed it so that the Soviets themselves wouldn’t be embarrassed if it could be proven they’d put it there in the first place.

The Russians insisted that a lighting fixture above the stage be taken apart to see if there was an electronic device hidden there that might be affecting Spassky’s play. As a policeman began to unscrew the globe, he yelled down from the ladder that there was something in there. The Russians and the Americans ran to the base of the ladder as the policeman descended with his discovery: “Two dead flies!”

The case was embarrassingly closed, it having become clear that the Soviets, stunned at the probable loss of “their” title, were searching for an alibi, one that would sully Bobby’s achievement. The London Times summed up the chess circus in humorous, though pointed, fashion: “It started out as a farce by Beckett— Waiting for Godot . Then it turned into a Kafka tragedy. Now it’s beyond Kafka. Perhaps Strindberg could do it justice.”

The twenty-first game commenced on August 31, and Fischer, playing black, conducted the endgame in stellar fashion; at adjournment it looked as though he could win. If that were to occur, the twenty-first game would be Bobby’s last. To conquer Spassky and become World Champion, he’d always needed to collect 12½ points, and a win would get him to that magic number.