24 January 2004 07:44
The essence of war: The showdown between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky encapsulated the Cold War, and captivated the world
Once the game of poets and lovers, imbued with ancient glamour, by the 1970s chess was associated more with nerds and
anoraks, and Soviet Communism. But in 1972, with the match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Iceland, the world
went chess mad. In New York a reporter toured 21 bars, and found that 18 of them were showing Spassky-Fischer on
television, rather than the Mets baseball game, while in Britain chess books were outselling romantic fiction. For the
next decade or so, if you played chess in a public place, strangers who did not know a passed pawn from a poisoned one
would invariably stop to ask, "Who's Fischer and who's Spassky?"
Chess is the quintessential war game. One version of its origins has two princes substituting the chessboard for the
battlefield, and in the age of Star Wars the game is at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. The Reykjavik match
was explicitly about the Cold War. As world champion, Spassky was defending a Russian hegemony that had lasted since
1948; Fischer, the maverick American, told the BBC: "It is really the free world against the lying, cheating,
hypocritical Russians... It's a microcosm of the whole world political situation."
This polarity was subverted, though, by the characters of the players. Spassky was cultured, charming and
gentlemanly, a bourgeois individualist, while Fischer was an oafish plebeian, interested in nothing but chess. As David
Edmonds and John Eidinow put it in their new book (their first was Wittgenstein's Poker, an intriguing
investigation of a philosophical quarrel at Cambridge), Fischer was rightly depicted in the media as "insolent,
arrogant, rude, uncouth, spoilt, self-centred, abusive, offensive, vain, greedy, vulgar, discourteous, disrespectful,
boastful, cocky, bigoted, fanatical, cruel, paranoid, obsessive and monomaniacal". There were those in the West who
hoped Spassky might win, and many in Russia who thought Fischer the greater player.
He was a genius, with an IQ over 180, and was able to listen to a conversation in a language he did not know and then
repeat it verbatim, but he had no sense of humour, and a warped view of women: "They are all weak, all women. They
are stupid compared to men." He was also a rabid anti-Semite, though both his parents were Jewish. Arthur Koestler,
who covered the Reykjavik match, coined the word "mimophant" to describe Fischer: "A mimophant is a
hybrid species: a cross between a mimosa and an elephant. A member of this species is sensitive like a mimosa where his
own feelings are concerned, and thick\u2011skinned like an elephant, trampling over the feelings of others."
For all his odious qualities, Fischer was well liked by his colleagues, who saw him as a damaged adolescent. In this
context, even his greed was understandable. "Bobby never made any money in his life," recalled his lawyer.
"Everyone who dealt with him when he was 14, 15, used him. If there was any money to be made, they took it.
They'd call him up and say, `Come on out here, we'll pay your bills and we'll give you a couple of bucks
on the side.' And when it was over, they'd stick him with a huge hotel bill. Here's a 15-year-old kid
with an enormous bill, no money, all alone, crying."
And it was thanks to Fischer's greed and weirdness that the Reykjavik match was such a compelling event. First
there were long delays while huge sums, in chess terms, were raised. Then, already several days late, he stopped to buy
an alarm clock at JFK, noticed a scrum of photographers, and bolted to Queens, where he hid out for several more days.
When he did arrive he made endless impossible demands about the board, chairs, lighting and cameras. Having lost the
first game by a dreadful blunder, he forfeited the second by failing to turn up (despite a telephone call from Henry
Kissinger: "You're our man up against the commies"), and then insisted that the third be played in a
closed backroom. In that game he crushed Spassky, and the champion never recovered.
Edmonds and Eidinow argue that Fischer, consciously or not, was operating according to the "Madman Theory"
Richard Nixon was then testing in Cambodia, inspired by the suicidal game of "Chicken" (as played in Rebel
Without a Cause by James Dean, whom Fischer admired). Bertrand Russell noted that Chicken is a game played by two
groups, juvenile delinquents and nations; in Reykjavik, Fischer was a terrifying amalgam of the two.
After the match Spassky was reprimanded by the Politburo, but recovered his equilibrium, continued his career as a
grandmaster and was eventually allowed to live in Paris. Fischer was showered with commercial offers, but turned them
down to join the Worldwide Church of God. He grew a beard, became a keen student of Mein Kampf and took to carrying a
suitcase full of pills ("If the commies come to poison me, I don't want to make it easy for them"). He
forfeited the championship by refusing to defend it, and never played top-level chess again, though there was a
Spassky-Fischer rematch in 1992, played in Yugoslavia during the civil war, in breach of UN sanctions; Fischer won, but
the games were lacklustre. An American warrant was issued for Fischer's arrest, and is still valid. He lived for a
while in Budapest and then Tokyo. His current address is unknown, but on September 11, 2001 he was heard shouting on
Philippines radio, "Death to the USA!"
Bobby Fischer Goes to War is a fascinating story, admirably told, but the appendices might usefully have included the
games themselves, as moves such as "B-Q6 ck!" are frustratingly meaningless without context.
Bobby Fischer Goes to War: the True Story of How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time
by David Edmonds & John Eidinow
302pp, Faber & Faber, pounds 14.99
T pounds 12.99 (plus pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 1557222
[The Daily Telegraph] |
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