Endgame (44 page)

Garry Kasparov, the reigning champion, was one who discounted the match’s significance.
When asked at the time whether he’d like to engage Fischer in a match for the official championship, Kasparov snapped, “Absolutely not. I don’t believe Fischer is strong enough now. Boris and Bobby are retirees, not threats to me.” The
Daily Telegraph
of London offered an atypical reaction to the impending match: “Imagine that you can hear the end of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’ or Beethoven’s 10th, or see the missing arm of Michelangelo’s
Venus
. These are the feelings that Fischer’s return brings to the world’s chessplayers.”

Before the clock was set in motion for the first game, Bobby was receiving criticism for even
considering
playing in a war-ravaged country. The United States and some other countries, as well as the United Nations, were attempting to isolate Serbia because of its sponsorship of violence against Muslims and other minorities. On August 7, Kubat gave an interview to the
Deutsche-Presse Agentur
in which he claimed that the U.S. government had given Fischer permission to play in Serbia. Either Kubat was engaging in wishful thinking or the statement was just a public relations smoke screen to give the match more credibility.

Ten days before the match began, Bobby received the following letter from the Department of the Treasury:

Bobby, who had an almost anarchistic disdain for the U.S. government and had refused to pay taxes since 1977, was totally blasé about the receipt
of the letter and the threat of a $250,000 fine and ten-year imprisonment for violating the sanctions. As for the public, the sentiment among most people was: “What are they going to do, throw him in jail for ten years for moving wooden pieces across a chessboard?” Well, according to Charles “Chip” Pashayan, Bobby’s pro bono lawyer, the Treasury Department could and would fine and imprison him. He sent Bobby a letter on August 28, 1992, practically begging him to postpone the match, and pointing out that Vasiljevic, to show his good intentions to the world, had promised to donate $500,000 to the International Red Cross for those suffering in the Balkans. Pashayan believed that the Treasury Department might appreciate the humanitarian gesture and eventually might allow the match to go forward by giving Bobby a special license to play. If Bobby returned home immediately, the match could still take place at a later date once the sanctions were lifted. “It is absolutely imperative that you comply with the attached order,” he warned. Bobby was supremely obstinate, and although he could not really justify his decision to play, under the circumstances his tenacity, heart, and pocketbook prevailed. His response was to kill the messenger: He ultimately fired Pashayan.

The Yugoslav prime minister, Milan Panic, whose reasons for wanting the embargo lifted went way beyond chess, backed Bobby and said of the impending match: “Just think how it would be if the sanctions forbade a potential Mozart to write music. What if these games were to be the greatest in chess?” When the match’s venue was moved to Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, met Bobby and Spassky and asked to be photographed with the two. He used the occasion to trumpet his propaganda to the international press: “The match is important because it is played while Yugoslavia is under unjustified blockade. That, in its best way, proves that chess and sports cannot be limited by politics.” Milosevic was later charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, and died in prison.

Despite the missing years, Bobby was being Bobby again. His list of demands continued to grow. Vasiljevic’s strategy of appeasement was to give him whatever he wanted, even though the item might not have been mentioned in the contract. Bobby rejected six tables as inadequate, before asking for one from the 1950 Chess Olympics in Dubrovnik. Even that one had to be slightly altered by a carpenter to satisfy his demand. The pieces had to
have the right heft and color, and he chose the same set that had been used at the Dubrovnik Olympics; he particularly liked the small color-contrasted dome on the bishops’ heads, which prevented their being confused with pawns. It’s difficult to believe, but Bobby rejected one set because the length of the knight’s nose was too long; the anti-Semitic symbolism was hardly lost on those who heard the complaint. As a test of the size of the pieces and pawns in relation to the area of the squares, he placed four pawns inside a square to see if they overlapped the edges of the square. They didn’t, so he accepted the size of the pieces as well. He asked for the lighting to be adjusted so that it wouldn’t cast a shadow on the board. And oh yes, spectators were to be kept back sixty-five feet from the stage.

Bobby’s invention of a new chess clock that operated differently from those traditionally used in tournaments had to be specially manufactured for the match, and Vasiljevic had it made. Bobby insisted that it be used in the match. The game would start with each player having ninety minutes, and upon his making a move, two minutes would be added to each player’s time. Bobby’s theory was that in this new system, players would never be left to scramble to make their moves at the end of the time allotment with only seconds to spare, thereby reducing the number of blunders under time pressure. The pride of the game was the depth of its conceptions, Fischer contended, not triumph by mechanical means.

Not all of Fischer’s demands concerned the playing conditions. He also wanted the lavatory seat in his villa to be raised one inch.

According to the tale told by Washington Irving, when Rip Van Winkle awoke and returned to his village, twenty years had passed, and many things had changed. When Bobby Fischer, chess’s version of Van Winkle, emerged after twenty years, the thing that had changed the most was
him
. The smiling, handsome Bobby Fischer who immediately after the 1972 championship charmed audiences on television shows and crowds on the steps of New York’s City Hall, had been replaced with a swaggering Bobby Fischer filled with angst, irritation, and pique.

The very idea of Bobby Fischer wanting to talk to the press was astonishing,
but this new Fischer called for a press conference the night before the match was to begin. He’d been interviewed throughout his chess career, sometimes by assembled groups of journalists, but this was his first formal press conference in more than twenty years, and he was coiled, ready to pounce on any question. Most of the members of the press were ready to see a ghostlike Bobby Fischer appear, someone totally apart from the hero of Reykjavik; many of the journalists who were assembled had never seen him in the flesh before—nor had the public had a glimpse of him during the two decades of his Wilderness Years. Bobby strode in, looking larger and healthier than imagined, and swiftly took his seat on the dais. He appeared not quite as physically impressive as a football linebacker, but certainly looked like a broad-shouldered athlete, perhaps a retired Olympic swimmer.

He’d insisted that all questions be submitted to him in advance, and he sifted through the cards searching for those he chose to answer. Spassky, looking uncomfortable, sat on Bobby’s right, and Vasiljevic, smoking a meerschaum pipe and appearing relaxed, was on his left. After a few minutes of awkward suspense, Bobby looked up and read aloud a reporter’s name, his affiliation, and the first question. “
Let’s start with some impudent questions from
The New York Times,
” Bobby said impudently:

Traditionally, with rare exceptions, members of the media don’t applaud at press conferences, since it would be considered an endorsement of what the speaker is saying, rather than just reporting the information being given.
Although a large number of reporters had been interested in attending Bobby Fischer’s controversial press conference, journalists were forced to pay $1,000 for accreditation at Sveti Stefan. As a result, many chose not to cover the match—at least, not from the “inside.” There were only about thirty journalists present in the room that day, although there were more than a hundred people in attendance. The applause very likely came from the non-journalists in the crowd, who may have been handpicked claques for their anti-American and pro-Bobby leanings.

Bobby kept reading Cohen’s follow-up questions and not directly answering them, just making comments such as “We’ll see” or “Pass on,” until he read Cohen’s final question: “Are you worried by U.S. government threats over your defiance of the sanctions?”

Vasiljevic, also applauding, looked at him approvingly and smiled; Bobby leaned back in his chair, swiveled back and forth, and smugly basked, Mussolini-like, in his courtiers’ adulation.

Bobby Fischer’s spit was sprayed around the world.
His anti-Americanism was lambasted on the editorial pages of the
Daily News
(“Fischer Pawns His Honor”) and
The New York Times
(“Bosnia’s Tragedy and Bobby’s”) and reported in newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts on almost
every continent. The consensus reaction was that Bobby’s expectoration reeked of callousness regarding the carnage taking place in Bosnia, and was a clear flouting of, if not international law, then at least moral norms. Bobby’s bizarre act was likened to such other symbols of anti-American defiance as Ezra Pound’s “Heil Hitler” salute, Jane Fonda’s pose on a North Vietnamese tank, and even Tokyo Rose’s propaganda broadcasts during World War II.