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The Fischer King
Daniel Marks
Scheduling a match in Yugoslavia, of all places, is just one of the astonishing elements in the story of a chess champion's long-awaited comeback.
Bobby Fischer may be the strongest chess player of all time. Some aficionados might quibble, placing him at number two or three. No one, however, will challenge the assertion that in the summer of 1972, when the Brooklyn-reared prodigy trounced Russia's Boris Spassky to capture the world championship, he was indisputably Number One.
Today Fischer is 49 and a contender in another realm: He is a world-class sulker, emulating such stars of sustained private pouting as Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes and J.D. Salinger.
For 20 years, Fischer has shunned competition, dodged journalists, lived incognito and alienated friends. Inevitably, his immersion in obscurity generated yarns and rumors: reports of wee-hours sightings in chess clubs from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, reports that he had grown a beard, reports that he was being manipulated by Svengalis from a Christian fundamentalist sect, reports that his teenage crankiness had blossomed into full-blown anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny.
After he declined to defend his title in 1975, thereby forfeiting the world championship to Anatoly Karpov, there were occasional intimations that Bobby was ready to make a comeback: a match with Karpov was in the offing; a match with Swiss grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi was percolating; a match with Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman was in the wind. No soap.
But now, there is a chance that the world will once again see Bobby Fischer in action. He has agreed to play an exhibition match starting September 2 against Spassky, the man he dethroned 20 years ago. Typically, everything about this match is startling. For openers, there's the purse, the largest in chess history: $5 million, with $3.35 million to the winner and $1.65 million to the loser. The purse in the Anatoly Karpov-Gary Kasparov 1990-91 championship match was $3 million. And the purse for the Spassky-Fischer match of 1972 was $138,500, then a major breakthrough.
Even more astonishing is the venue Yugoslavia. The match, which begins in the sumptuous resort island of Sveti Stevan and then moves to Belgrade, may in fact run afoul of U.N. trade and travel sanctions, a prospect regarded with relish by Belgrade-based banker Jezdimir Vasiljevic, who is sponsoring the event.
"By bringing Fischer to Yugoslavia we have broken the blockade in a most spectacular way," Vasiljevic chortled on July 24. "The world hit us with all its force, and I think that in this way we have returned at least one punch."
"The idea of defying a blockade has a special attraction for Bobby,"
British grandmaster Raymond Keene suggested in an interview with The Jerusalem
Report. "He sees `the establishment' as being responsible for him not having his terms met when he negotiated for title defense matches."
American grandmaster Arthur Bisguier has a more down-to-earth view of his former friend's looming resurrection. "I suppose he ran out of friends to mooch meals off," Bisguier volunteered in a phone interview from New York. He acknowledges that he is one of the disgruntled colleagues turned off by Fischer's predilection for making appointments and not keeping them. "I got tired of hanging around waiting for Bobby. I was a grandmaster in my own right," Bisguier said.
Spassky, 55, who now lives in France, hasn't played championship-contender for more than a decade. Fischer has reportedly kept sharp with intense study and casual games. But without competitive honing, he's bound to be rusty. Spassky looks like a relatively soft, and grateful, opponent. But there is also a significant bond between the two, one that grandmaster Larry Evans pointed out 20 years ago, on the eve of their historic match.
"Both had disturbed childhoods," Evans wrote. "Fischer's father, a German physicist, and his mother separated when he was two and he went to live
with his mother. Spassky was orphaned at a young age, when both of his parents were killed in the siege of Leningrad. The two have one other thing in common...Fischer's mother is Jewish and Spassky's mother is said to have been Jewish too."
Fischer's "Jewishness" is problematic. Recalls British master Stewart
Reuben, a friend of Fischer's in New York during the 1960s: "We always imagined him to be Jewish, but he claimed not to have been circumcised and demanded of `Who's Who' that they not list him as Jewish."
At one time, Fischer was a member of the Worldwide Church of God, a fundamentalist Protestant group that keeps the Jewish Sabbath and encourages its members to observe kosher food laws. Last July, filmmaker Darnay Hoffman, who tracked down Fischer in Los Angeles, told a Washington Times reporter that Fischer "reveres Adolf Hitler and calls world champion Kasparov `Weinstein the Jew.'" (Kasparov's father was a Jew named Weinstein; his son's name was changed to his mother's maiden name after his father died.)
German grandmaster Luthor Schmid, who will be the arbiter of the Yugoslav match and who is in close contact with Fischer, is very guarded in what he says about him. Still, when asked by The Jerusalem Report if he thought Fischer disliked Jews, he replied flatly, "Yes." Schmid refused to elaborate, except to observe cryptically, "He's just very strange."
Reuben Fine, a one-time world class chess player turned psychologist, had a number of sessions with the 12-year-old Fischer and has watched his career and life since then. "He believes he is chess," Fine told The Jerusalem Report from his New York office. "To Bobby, a defect at the chess board is more than a game lost. It implies a virtual destruction of his way of life. A loss today could be dangerous."
1992
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