Searching for Bobby Fischer (3 page)

Still, the game was in my blood, and over the years Bobby Fischer has occupied much time in my fantasy life. Like many fans of the Fischer-Spassky match, I have wondered what happened to Fischer after winning the championship, and often I have had shivery daydreams about his comeback, his blustery late entrance on stage, barely noticing Karpov or Kasparov as he sprawls into his swivel chair and contemptuously pushes ahead the king pawn. I have waited for Bobby as if his disappearance were no more than a tease, to be followed by greater victories than anyone had ever dreamed possible.

CHESS CLUBS PROLIFERATED
during the early seventies, inspired by Bobby’s success and charisma. Mothers pulled their sons out of Little League and ferried them to chess lessons. Talented young players with dreams of Fischer, television immortality and big chess money spurned college and conventional career choices to turn professional. For a brief time shy, introverted chess players basked in national glory, along with running backs and rock stars.

“There were even chess groupies,” recalls Bruce Pandolfini. “The chess world has always been essentially sexless, but these girls studied the U.S. Chess Federation rating chart and began working their way up. They were playing their own kind of chess game. They seduced the most ascetic grandmasters. They all wanted Fischer.”

In 1972, before Shelby Lyman put him on television, Pandolfini was an impoverished tournament player who subsisted on a variety
of part-time jobs. “One week I was sorting mail at the post office and the next I was on television. A few days after the show began, I was walking along Sixth Avenue when suddenly a big limousine screeched to a halt. A beautiful woman whom I had never seen before stepped out. She shouted, ‘Bruce! Bruce Pandolfini! Oh, wow!’”

Overnight this cerebral, slow-moving board game became supercharged with American glitz. Fischer was on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
,
Life
,
Time
and
Newsweek
; he appeared on the Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson shows. “Chess is like war on a board,” he told us. “The object is to crush the other man’s mind. . . . I like to see ’em squirm.” It was as if he had invented a new game.

Chess sets became a best seller at Brentano’s. Fischer’s two books on chess sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and his good fortune trickled down to other chess professionals. Pandolfini said, “I began charging up to a hundred and fifty dollars an hour for private lessons. Some of the Wall Street lawyers and rich doctors I taught were just terrible. They had no talent or appreciation for the game. Sometimes I fell asleep during lessons, but it didn’t matter. They thought they’d catch chess genius just being around the guy who’d talked about Fischer on television.”

BOBBY FISCHER WAS
born in 1943. From the time he was a six-year-old living in Brooklyn until he won the world championship at twenty-nine, he was totally preoccupied with chess. At the age of fourteen, he won the United States championship, an unparalleled feat. But he was already becoming bitter about the shabby treatment of chess in the United States. He was incensed, for example, that while the Russians spent lavishly to field a well-coached team for the Olympiad, Americans were hard pressed to raise the airfare to compete. In his biography of Fischer, Frank Brady suggests that the reason for Bobby’s grandiose financial demands after his rise to fame was as much the desire to give chess in the United States recognition and stature as the wish for personal enrichment.
*

In 1977, Bobby Fischer was offered a quarter of a million dollars to play a single game at Caesars Palace but turned it down: it was not enough money. President Marcos offered to sponsor a three-million-dollar championship match in the Philippines, and Bobby was said to have ten million lined up in commercial offers. Then, turning his back on fame unprecedented for a chess player and tremendous potential wealth, he surprised his fans by retiring from the game and becoming a recluse. He has not been seen in public for years.

With his disappearance, Fischer created a chess wasteland. The new clubs of the seventies disappeared along with him, and many of the old ones withered in membership and grew shabby. For example, the Marshall Chess Club has become badly run-down and is so financially depleted that frequently there are no chess pieces available for its members. It is empty most of the day, except for a few old men who snore in their armchairs, and its membership has shrunk from more than seven hundred in 1974 to only about two hundred today. Directors of both the Marshall and Manhattan chess clubs have speculated that without an unexpected infusion of money and interest in chess soon—perhaps the reemergence of Bobby or the coming of a new Fischer—New York City may not be able to support a clean and respectable chess club.

During the past fifteen years, the parents of some of America’s strongest young players have forbidden them to pursue the game lest it become a dead-end preoccupation. Noted chess teachers have become computer programmers, art dealers and bookies. To survive as weekend players, some of the talented young men who were lured to chess by Fischer fifteen years ago now drive cabs, unload trucks or hustle chess in the parks. One international master who for many years has supported himself by working at menial jobs says, “I can’t make a living from chess, but I’ve devoted so much time to the game that I have no other marketable skill. Sometimes when I look back, I wish I hadn’t seen Shelby Lyman on television. I would have done something else with my life.”

*
Frank Brady,
Profile of a Prodigy
(New York: David McKay, 1973), p. 211.

3

WASHINGTON SQUARE

T
he crooning of a saxophone mixed with the uneven click of plastic chess pieces on marble chess tables in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. Vinnie, a thirty-four-year-old black man, sat at one of the tables, nursing a paper cup of coffee. He was wearing a torn maroon sweater, soiled corduroy pants and unmatched socks rolled at the ankles. Seated beside him was a junkie, mumbling and swaying. In front of Vinnie, on a table stained with Coke and dried pizza sauce, chess pieces stood poised. A young man approached. He had a strong athletic build, which drew attention to the sickly pallor of his boyish face. In a tremulous voice, he asked if Vinnie wanted to play for a dollar a game. Vinnie tried to hide his smile as he reached into a shopping bag for his chess clock. He’d found a fish and was already tasting the Chinese dinner he’d eat that night. Vinnie is a master-level player, but he’s often short of change for a subway token.

The young man sat on a green park bench, and almost immediately the two players were surrounded by a crowd of kibitzers. Among them was my six-year-old son, chewing bubble gum and leaning familiarly on Vinnie’s arm. Although Josh could barely read, he sometimes beat some of the adults here and watched intricate speed-chess games by the hour with the same pleased expression as when he looked at cartoons on television.

“Two minutes a game?” the young man asked in a Germanic accent, suddenly confident and contemptuous.

Playing at this speed, the men raced through this most deliberate
and cerebral game as if it were pinball. Paced by the nerve-racking snap of the clock, chessmen flowed into lines of attack. Captures were made with a snatch, and sometimes, during last-second flurries, knights and bishops were knocked to the ground. Vinnie talked while he played. “To kill a vampire you gotta put a stake into his heart. Josh, I said you gotta put a stake in his heart. Remember that,” Vinnie repeated, playing to the crowd with operatic bravado. Then he announced, “Mate in three.”

Speed chess is thrilling to watch, and the onlookers were as tense and giddy with excitement as a fight crowd. Someone whispered that the pale young man was a grandmaster named Eric Lobron, one of the top chess players in the world. Vinnie the hustler was being hustled. Lobron blushed at being recognized and for a moment tried to pretend he was someone else.

“Let’s see what you know, Mr. Grandmaster,” Vinnie taunted while they set up the pieces for the next game. “What d’ya know, Grandmaster?” he chanted after each move, using his rap like an extra rook. “Whad they teach ya in Germany, Grandmaster. You wanna exchange queens? Okay, let’s go.” BAM. BAM. The pieces snapped against the marble table like caps. Lobron, who was used to playing in the sacred quiet of international tournaments, was disconcerted by Vinnie’s mouth and couldn’t play up to his strength. “Ya got nuthin’, Grandmaster. I said you got nuthin’. What you think you’re gonna do to my black ass? You think you’re gonna come into my office and take my money? Get outta here.”

Like Vinnie, Lobron had come to the park to hustle a few dollars for his dinner. As it turned out, each player won three games, and no one made a nickel.

JOSH DISCOVERED CHESS
in Washington Square Park when he was six years old. It was a cold March afternoon, with dirty clumps of snow on the ground. We paused to watch two men who were sitting at one of the tables. One of them was rocking back and forth as if he were reciting the Kaddish. The other man wore only a light nylon jacket and from time to time shivered violently. He was concentrating so hard on his game that he didn’t seem to notice how cold he was. It was hard for me to pull Josh away. The next
day he asked a teacher in his after-school play group to show him how the pieces moved.

Several weeks later on a sunny Sunday morning, while crossing the chess corner on the way to the swings on the other side of the park, Josh broke away from his mother and ran up to a distinguished-looking man with a beard and asked if he could play. The man, David Hechtlinger, who was waiting for a friend, was willing to give him a game. He was fond of children who want to play chess because his son had been a young master, and he had often wondered how good his son might have become if he had continued to work at it. After the game was over, he explained to Bonnie that Josh had used pieces in combination to launch an attack, a sign of chess talent in a beginner. Hechtlinger wrote Josh’s name on the masthead of his newspaper. “I’ll look for your name someday,” he told our son. After that game, Josh began to pester his mother to take him to watch the men in the park after school. He said he liked the way the chess pieces looked.

WASHINGTON SQUARE IS
six blocks from our apartment, and now it became Joshua’s chess playground. Many afternoons after school, while other little boys played touch football under the trees or jumped bicycles over the nearby asphalt mounds, he played chess with school dropouts, retired workers, talented winos and down-and-out masters. Some days he’d look up mournfully at the kids on their bikes and lose his concentration, but mostly he didn’t seem to notice them and would surprise adults by winning a few games.

Chess players greet each new young talent with curiosity and expectation; it’s almost as if they are waiting for the messiah. Josh was affectionately referred to as “young Fischer” by some of the old-timers, who recalled the games Bobby played in Washington Square as a little boy in the fifties.

If Josh ever becomes a grandmaster, he’ll owe a lot to the guys in the park who helped him. These early teachers couldn’t have been more caring, enthusiastic or perceptive. For example, Jerry, a short black man who wore a bandana and played without a shirt whenever it was warmer than fifty degrees, pestered Josh to be an aggressive player, reminded him not to make passive moves and
emphasized that even when his position was difficult he should try to attack and defend at the same time.

Jerry worried about Joshua’s chess and Josh worried about Jerry. He was a strong A player
*
with sweet chess tactics, but he was also a thirty-eight-year-old alcoholic. Ten years ago he had been an auto mechanic. That part of his life ended one night when he had a fight with his wife and she put five bullets in his back. Jerry said it had been his fault but never explained why. After he got out of the hospital he began living in flophouses and playing chess in the park.

Jerry had a way of helping Josh without patronizing him. “You lost because you didn’t castle, Josh, and you’re gonna keep losing until you castle.” He always played his hardest against Josh and beat him game after game, all the while showing him that he hadn’t developed his pieces or had split his pawns so that they were vulnerable to attack, or pointing out the mates Josh had missed. When occasionally Josh beat Jerry he felt he’d accomplished something special—unless Jerry was drunk or high. Then it didn’t mean anything; Jerry would stumble all over the park and couldn’t beat a patzer.

When Josh turned seven and began playing in a few scholastic tournaments, it made Jerry nervous. He had never been good in tournaments himself. He said it was too much pressure for a kid, and he was always relieved when the weekend children’s competitions were over and Josh was back playing in the park after school. In turn, Josh was afraid that Jerry would starve to death, and he brought food to the park almost every day for six months. He was particularly concerned on rainy nights when Jerry didn’t have the money for a room and had to sleep on a bench.

One summer before we left for vacation, things were looking up for Jerry. He’d been on the wagon for nearly two months. Financed by the Veterans Administration, he was about to begin a six-month course as a computer repairman. He showed us the brochure; it
was a new chance, he said, and he wouldn’t mess it up by starting to drink again. The V.A. was giving Jerry a set of tools worth five hundred dollars. In the afternoon after school he was going to study his manuals under the trees behind the chess tables, but maybe in the evening there would be time for a couple of games. Josh, Jerry and I all agreed that computer repair was more important than chess.

One afternoon Jerry proudly showed his new red toolbox to Josh, and as the two of them sat on the grass, Josh tutored his friend on the multiplication table, which was part of the course requirement. At night Jerry slept on a bench with his hand slung over the toolbox so that it wouldn’t be stolen.