CHAPTER 5
Bobby Fischer’s Battles
· 1 ·
Bobby Fischer, born on March 9, 1943, gave his single mother, Regina, a hard time starting very early. He wasn’t easy on his sister either. Joan, five years older and unusually smart and responsible, was often left in charge. One rainy day when Bobby was six, she got tired of his fits at Parcheesi. The family had just settled into a cheap apartment on East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan after moving around the country during the previous half decade. At the candy store nearby, Joan bought a plastic chess set. She wasn’t familiar with the game, but it seemed promising: Bobby liked puzzles a lot, and didn’t like outcomes determined by a roll of the dice at all. Several years later, after they had moved again, to Flatbush—and Bobby had bounced unhappily among schools—his mother began walking him over to the Brooklyn Chess Club, where he would tug on the trousers of the club regulars. Never looking the men in the eye, Bobby would ask, “Wanna have a game?” And then he would set out to win. When he did, one grandmaster remembered, his eyes “flooded with maniacal glee.”
In January 1958 Bobby, by then fourteen and a (lousy) student at Erasmus Hall High School, won very big. Three months after the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik sparked educational panic in America, he became the youngest U.S. champion in a brainy game long dominated by the Russians. In “a football country, a baseball country,” as Bobby later put it, his stunning rise was not immediately national news. On the television quiz show I’ve Got a Secret shortly after his triumph, he held up a mock newspaper emblazoned with the headline “Teenager’s Strategy Defeats All Comers.” Who was this gangly Mr. X, with dark circles under his eyes, notable for some sort of combative prowess and clearly uncomfortable in front of the cameras? The panelists took turns probing. Did his pursuit make other people happy? one of them asked. Bobby’s answer—“It made me happy”—got a laugh out of the audience (in on the secret). The panel was mystified.
For viewers who might have lately tuned in to the Quiz Kids on TV (a brief stab at reviving the popular wartime radio show in a new medium), Bobby was a reticent contrast to the adorably encyclopedic prodigies earning prize money to pay for college. What few words he said definitely didn’t fit the adult-pleasing wunderkind image cultivated over the course of the preceding half century either. Bobby, the antithesis of Shirley Temple in every way, may call to mind William Sidis—with the big difference that the wary loner in Brooklyn proceeded to become, of course, a huge success. More than that, Bobby insisted on calling the shots almost from the start and got away with it. His parent was the one who felt intimidated. That kids-are-boss power shift is likely to make Bobby seem not unfamiliar, particularly if your family life is scheduled around a young sports fanatic—though nobody could match Bobby’s single-minded, unwavering focus. He was an unprecedented handful.
Regina was trying her best, however, to broaden her obsessive son’s horizons. That was how Bobby got roped into appearing on I’ve Got a Secret, one of whose sponsors was Sabena Airlines. When nobody guessed his feat, he walked away with a prize in the form of two round-trip plane tickets to Russia. He was dying to see Soviet chess up close—to play their stars and visit the Young Pioneer Palaces where the nation’s, and world’s, best young talent was incubated. Eager to expose her very bright children to foreign culture and language, Regina was all for it. (Maybe Bobby would pick up new interests and buckle down at school, too.) But she couldn’t possibly afford it, so she had wangled him a spot on the show. Now, with Joan enlisted as chaperone, the summer trip was on.
The Fischer family was right in step with Cold War zeal to play educational catch-up. At the same time, characteristically, mother and son were marching to their own drummers. That fall Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, a response to Sputnik-inspired fears that a streamlined Soviet system of top-down talent development threatened the strategic superiority of the United States. The time had come to boost federal support for college study of science, math, and foreign languages in particular. The following year Harvard’s former president James Bryant Conant published The American High School Today, a best seller. An early champion of the SAT for a fast-expanding pool of college applicants, he urged greater academic rigor for gifted, test-acing achievers, along with general education for all.
The prewar message, sounded in different ways by prodigy promoters like Boris Sidis and Lewis Terman (and by Hollywood studios, too), had gotten through: young marvels, far from misfits, were ripe for newly systematic sorting and tending. Except Bobby bucked the trend in a well-timed way. Just when the meritocratic mission was catching on, here was a stubborn genius scripting his own rise off on the cultural margins. (No one would have imagined the weekend-consuming enterprise that scholastic chess has since become.) The democratic allure of a boy blazing a path into a field the enemy considered its own—not space, but chess—was hard to resist. What if this fiercely competitive young maverick could outplay the apparatchiks—without a Soviet-style machine assiduously training a cadre of high-ranked stars? The optics were exciting, even if the facts were potentially disconcerting.
In the corduroy pants, T-shirts, and cheap sneakers he always wore, Bobby with his blondish buzz cut and hazel eyes looked like an all-American boy. When a smile appeared, he seemed to beam. But that was mostly because a grin was rare, breaking through the scowl of a very prickly youth. Aloof arrogance, not dimpled confidence, was his signature. Unlike his prodigy predecessors, he stirred no concern that he might be subject to undue “forcing” by blinkered parents or mentors. Quite the contrary. Bobby, a forerunner of young computer-era upstarts, bucked authority. Inseparable from his pocket chess set, he said he needed no friends, and he bridled at adults—above all his mother—who presumed to hover or hound or just help. His IQ was sky-high, but he dismissed school as a place for “weakies” and a distraction from chess. He dropped out as soon as he could, at sixteen.
By then, Bobby had already made disruptive public scenes in the United States and abroad. His story, for all its rebel-with-a-cause allure, did not neatly vindicate a democratic approach to talent development, as the Soviets took pleasure in noting. Long before his paranoid retreat as an adult, Bobby’s obstinate spirit and obsessive temperament spelled trouble—as well as spectacular accomplishments. His elders’ attempts, such as they were, to encourage wider interests were a mixed blessing, too. And were their hearts really in those efforts anyway? This driven teenager, after all, looked like he just might be the one to rout the Russians. In any case, nudges toward well-rounded balance served only to fuel Bobby’s monomaniacal focus—for good and for ill.
· 2 ·
Regina Wender Fischer exerted greater influence on Bobby than she recognized. She didn’t, of course, choose the genes she passed on. She would have said her guidance, both as a role model and as a concerned mother, got ignored. More to the point, it routinely backfired: Bobby did take cues from her, and then typically proceeded to do the opposite. In his remarkably energetic defiance of help or direction, except on his own terms, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Shortly after he was born, Regina took up residence at the Sarah Hackett Memorial House for indigent single mothers in Chicago and promptly broke the rules: she tried to sneak in five-year-old Joan (who had been staying with her grandfather Jacob Wender in St. Louis during Regina’s pregnancy). Regina then refused to leave and was arrested for disturbing the peace. A year earlier, when dire straits had led her to try placing Joan with a foster mother, she had run into trouble, too. The woman returned Joan and quietly reported Regina as a possible spy, her suspicions aroused by various items she found in a box of clothes—a high-quality camera and a letter from a leftist friend, among other things. The FBI opened a file on Regina. Agents keeping tabs on her got a copy of the psychiatric report that was ordered when she waived a trial after her Chicago arrest. The prognosis sounds discouraging: “Stilted (paranoid) personality, querulent [sic] but not psychotic….It is difficult to see how she can unravel the complexities of her personal life. It is obvious that she will continue to refuse any agency or counsel.”
The examiner underestimated her (and two decades of FBI surveillance, the extent of which she never knew, perhaps casts her paranoia in a different light). Regina, who stares out of photographs with dark-eyed intensity and gamine appeal, wasn’t trying to unravel complexities. She was a remarkably restless woman who sought them out. Born in 1913 in Switzerland to Polish parents who were Jewish, she had grown up in the United States and speedily, if circuitously, graduated from college in her teens: she studied at three different universities. She headed to Berlin at nineteen to study some more, and met a German biophysicist, Gerhardt Fischer. She followed him to the Soviet Union, where he—evidently a Communist—was perhaps a Comintern agent. They married, and Regina began studying medicine in Moscow. Not long after Joan’s birth in 1937 and before she finished her degree, Regina left and was en route to the United States in early 1939. Her husband, denied entry, ended up in Chile.
Regina bounced among cities and jobs, from schoolteacher to shipyard welder, taking whatever work she could get and often studying as well. (She ended up knowing six languages, several fluently, and she dabbled in Yiddish.) She paused long enough in Denver to have a brief liaison with a Hungarian mechanical engineer and mathematician teaching nearby, Paul Nemenyi. Bobby’s birth certificate listed Fischer as his father (and Regina told a social worker her son was conceived during a rendezvous in Mexico with her husband in 1942), but the evidence points strongly to Nemenyi. Regina apparently considered putting Bobby up for adoption but couldn’t bring herself to do it—or to settle down.
She kept the FBI busy. There were no subversive plots to unearth, but just tracking her whereabouts was time-consuming: Chicago, Oregon, St. Louis, California, Illinois, Arizona, Idaho (where she officially divorced Gerhardt Fischer from afar in 1945). Always scrounging for work and money, she turned to Jewish family agencies in various places for financial aid but not, it seems, for counsel or other help with the children. Nemenyi weighed in from a distance. In 1946 and 1947, according to the FBI records, he told one agency that he “considered the subject to be mentally upset and also described Robert as an ‘upset child.’ ” To another agency, he portrayed Regina as a “driving and aggressive person.” The social worker wasn’t sure how to weigh his concerns, judging him “somewhat of a ‘paranoid type.’ ” (Clarissa and Henry Cowell’s peregrinations forty years earlier, though the pair were similarly hard up, were an idyll by comparison.) All Bobby ever said he remembered about these years was living in a trailer “out west.”
Not long after they arrived in Manhattan in 1949, Joan resorted to the chess set. She and her brother figured out the rules together, but for Bobby chess wasn’t an instant passion. Nor did he get the sort of warm home support for playful exploration that can help launch a youthful talent. Joan’s interest flagged, and Regina, whom Bobby then taught to play, was terrible at it. “My mother has an anti-talent for chess,” Bobby later said. “She’s hopeless.” Working on her skills was not a priority, as Regina scrambled to earn a living and keep up her leftist political activities—and send her son to summer camp. During either his first season out on Long Island, when he was six, or the next one, Bobby stumbled on a book of annotated chess games. For a boy with an evident antitalent for friendship, it offered some comfort—but not enough. “MOMMY I WANT TO COME HOME,” Bobby wrote in big letters on a prestamped and addressed postcard.
Regina had been looking for a cheaper rental in Brooklyn, and a fight with the Tenants League in which she had been active precipitated a departure from Manhattan. (The FBI, never sure whether she belonged to the Communist Party, wondered if the fight got her expelled.) The chess set, minus some pieces, ended up in the closet of the apartment off Eastern Parkway where the Fischers moved in 1950. Bobby, cooped up and lonely, made a game of jumping off the bed (until the landlord complained). His Brooklyn school debut did not go well. Regina was in school herself, now juggling nursing classes with stenography jobs and her political work. At one point, as was noted in her FBI file, she picketed in defense of a “colored family” that had been forced out of a building. She was a member of a group called American Women for Peace and of the International Workers Order, too.
Regina sounds a lot like Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, busy saving the world while her family foundered. Certainly neither peace nor order prevailed in her personal life, at least from what the FBI’s neighborhood informants could tell. They variously described her as “antagonistic” and “argumentative,” a litigious woman with a “suit complex.” Someone else later said she was a “real pain in the neck.” A more sympathetic source, who had evidently talked rather than merely tangled with her, reported that Regina was “an unstable, mixed up person who cannot settle on one objective….She advised that the subject has moved about considerably and appears to encounter difficulty in everything she does.”
That her son posed special problems was obvious to all—including Regina. Very unlike Mrs. Jellyby, she was doing her maternal best with few resources, and Joan, a conscientious honors student, could help only so much. By the time he reached fourth grade, Bobby had been in and out of six schools, unable or unwilling to engage with peers or seatwork, or homework, despite Joan and Regina’s efforts. He was obviously very bright, so Regina tried a school for gifted children, where he lasted a day; he refused to go back. Bobby, small for his age but with an oversize will, was impossible to budge. For Christmas in 1950, he had asked for a new chess set. Almost eight, Bobby was soon as preoccupied as his busy mother and sister. He had found an all-absorbing way to tune out both their well-meant bugging and their absences.
In the most cerebral of games, he discovered an intricately rule-bound realm where a young mind can make phenomenal progress with no life experience. As fertile ground for prodigies goes, few pursuits supply better. Glacially though it moves, chess also rewards deep competitive urges, luring in the restless and the driven: there are more positional variations in the game than atoms in the solar system. Maybe by this stage, the fact that his mother and sister weren’t interested served as a goad. For an uncooperative, uprooted boy who needed rules yet thrived on obstacles, the fit was obvious. “Thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance”: Stefan Zweig’s appraisal of chess in his novella The Royal Game evoked the uncompromising purity of its allure.
Regina, having lived in Russia, surely appreciated the game’s cultural lineage and aura, but mainly it bought peace in the apartment—and she was pleased that Bobby was no longer so stuck on comics. Right away, though, she worried about his isolation. Energetic organizer that she was, she wrote to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (the newspaper that had made Nathalia Crane famous), seeking young opponents for “my little chess miracle,” as she referred to him. Who knows what might have happened anywhere else, but Brooklyn was the chess-rich corner of the U.S. chess capital. In January 1951 the Eagle’s septuagenarian chess editor suggested she take her son to the nearby Grand Army Plaza library the following week, where several masters were holding a simultaneous exhibition. Soon to turn eight but still looking like a six-year-old, Bobby went with his new chess set in hand and found himself face-to-face with the pipe-smoking former champion of Scotland and New York State. “He crushed me,” Bobby said out loud fifteen minutes later, and burst into tears.
Whether or not you credit the notion of a “crystallizing experience,” the phrase psychologists have coined for early destiny-defining moments in some high-achieving lives, a defeat that might have been a deterrent for anyone else proved a catalyst for Bobby. Carmine Nigro, the newly elected president of the Brooklyn Chess Club, had been watching. He liked Bobby’s sensible moves and his intense concentration. When Nigro learned Bobby had no father, he invited him to stop by the club any Tuesday or Friday night—never mind that children, the world over, were generally barred from such premises. Regina’s effort to drum up peers had failed, but Bobby landed in peculiar company he found very congenial. His mother in tow, he proceeded to show up regularly and lose constantly.
H. G. Wells’s caricature of the chessboard-obsessed breed as “shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men,” however overstated, helps explain why things clicked. A field that took precocious talent in stride—then six-time U.S. champion Samuel Reshevsky, for example, had arrived as an eight-year-old prodigy from Poland in 1920—offered the right welcome for a boy like Bobby: gruff mentors lacking in interventionist zeal and overtly solicitous guidance. With little fuss, Bobby started going over to Nigro’s house on Saturdays to share in lessons with his son Tommy, slightly younger and better at chess. (For Regina, often on weekend nursing duty, the new routine was a godsend.) The boys didn’t become friends, but while Tommy bridled at paternal tutelage, Bobby bore down. He wouldn’t have admitted he was doing it to please Nigro, and he probably wasn’t. Leaving Tommy in the dust was perhaps an impetus. Sometimes Nigro took Bobby to Washington Square Park to face speedier players in the hustler scene there. In his first competition, early in 1952, Bobby emerged with a win and a draw.
That still left afternoons and non-chess-club evenings for a loner who before long was a latchkey child. (“I may get back after 3 to drop off groceries, and will then go back to study,” Regina jotted in a note she left in the kitchen.) Bobby, by now an avid reader of chess books, became enough of a fixture at the Grand Army Plaza library that its 1952 newsletter included a captioned photo of him. When Joan or Regina returned to the apartment, they sometimes found him at the board in the gloom, the lamps not switched on. Bobby took refuge in his room when his mother had political friends over, as she often did. He went out several times with another visitor, a heavily accented and rumpled fellow: before his early death in 1952, Nemenyi stopped by on trips up from D.C. where, after a succession of short-term teaching stints, he had found a job as an engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory. Apparently at Regina’s insistence, he didn’t reveal his identity to Bobby. But a former prodigy himself (Nemenyi had shared first place in a national math and physics competition in Hungary as a teenager), he surely talked chess with him. And the man who had once been advised by a fellow émigré to mend his disheveled ways passed on a social nicety that Bobby always remembered. It’s polite to break your roll before buttering it, Nemenyi told him when they were out at a restaurant together.
By the fall of 1952, Regina had found a small progressive school for Bobby, Brooklyn Community Woodward, where learning revolved around a student’s special interest and, no less important from his point of view, you could “get up and walk around the room if you wanted.” Bobby’s IQ of 180 and an agreement to teach chess to other students won him a scholarship. It would be great to report that he sparked a chess fad, but he didn’t. The thrilling development was getting picked for the school baseball team. Bobby, who lived mere blocks from Ebbets Field, now had another, more physical sport on his short list of interests. He mostly ignored his classwork, but his teachers were struck by his competitive zeal. “He had to come out ahead of everybody,” whatever the game, one of them later told a reporter. “If he had been born next to a swimming pool he would have been a swimming champion.” A photo of Bobby around this time suggests a boy quite pleased with his setup. He is sitting in the bathtub, a chess game in progress on a board laid across the tub and a milk carton by one hand. His other arm reaches up to touch a bare foot resting on his hair: Regina is nudging him to get out. He doubtless protests, but he is smiling.
Regina was worrying. Bobby had settled on one objective, just what his mother had trouble doing, and he pursued it with much the same zeal Regina dispersed among her various left-wing causes and her classes. (The FBI files note that Teachers College, yet one more place she studied, put her on a “special list” because of “her continued refusal to accept guidance and her attempts to change the…school curriculum to suit her personal whims.”) She was all for studiousness, but Bobby was absorbed with his pocket chess set even at breakfast. Nigro lent him chess magazines. Teachers recalled his pockets bulging with copies of the Russian chess publication Shakhmaty, which Regina surely helped him begin to decipher—at least here was a new skill. Then he plowed on himself. He demanded she take him to Washington Square Park to play. Cowed, and probably guilty about leaving him alone so much, she obeyed.
BOBBY FISCHER Credit 8
Regina’s efforts unwittingly followed what before long became a postwar talent development formula—pick up on a child’s interest, and seek out high-caliber guides and enriching contexts. But stardom wasn’t her aim, and the problem she hoped to solve had gotten worse. Chess drew Bobby out of the apartment, only to pull him into an obsessive, largely self-driven pursuit of specialization that meant he did ever less schoolwork—and that increasingly cut him off from the world. Now she set about trying to limit his fixation, yet her new undertaking carried the same risk. Bobby, who bore down harder in the face of impediments, was a self-made prodigy with a vengeance.
“For four years I tried everything to discourage him,” Regina later said, “but it was hopeless.” Carmine Nigro was not much of an ally in her mission, being a chess fanatic himself, although he had brief success in encouraging another pursuit. He gave Bobby accordion lessons until Bobby decided he couldn’t spare the time away from chess. Regina somehow got Bobby to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Kline, in 1952. (How she afforded it is a mystery, too; she was struggling to put decent meals on the table.) But when asked why he spent so many hours at the board, Bobby was curt. “I don’t know. I just go for it.” Dr. Kline reassured Regina it was a phase. She turned to another psychiatrist, a chess master himself. He didn’t predict an ebbing of the obsession—he admitted he hadn’t shaken it—but told her that as passions go, chess was a worthy one and Bobby needed to find his own way.
His mother’s mounting resistance helped ensure Bobby’s intensifying persistence between the ages of nine and thirteen—just the surge of commitment that growing ranks of talent developers were soon insisting should be attentively encouraged. Bobby did it his way. Nothing dissuaded him, not being nagged by his mother or getting regularly beaten at the Brooklyn Chess Club. Both girded him for further battle. And then he began to win against his elders.
“When I was eleven, I just got good,” Fischer later said, and the surge probably did feel as much like wizardry as the fruit of tenacity. In fact, Bobby was anything but a case of spontaneous mastery, or even of superspeedy takeoff. Congenital zealotry was key, and as was true for his prodigy predecessors, cultural timing proved unpredictably propitious. Bobby’s hard-earned leap in skill happened to coincide with a thrilling external goad: in June 1954 Nigro took him to watch the Americans play the Soviet chess team for the first time on home turf, the largest chess event in U.S. history. He was rapt through all four days in the grand ballroom of the first hotel he had ever stepped into, the Roosevelt. He meticulously kept score as the Americans were trounced, 20–12. Bobby had discovered the best chess players in the world—the men to beat.
In the U.S. chess world, the Cold War overtones of the contest stirred professional envy more than political animus. Of course, the Americans didn’t stand a chance, an editorial in Chess Life lamented. They were mere amateurs in a country that had no stake in the game. In the USSR, chess was a national mission, as The New York Times emphasized, too: “They are out to win for the greater glory of the Soviet Union. To do so means public acclaim at home, propaganda victories abroad.” Since the mid-1920s the Soviets had been promoting chess as ideal training for the proletarian mind and, as a Soviet chess chronicler put it, “indisputable proof of the superiority of socialist culture over the declining culture of capitalist societies.” After a brief interlude of American chess dominance while the Soviets were absent from the international Olympiads, in 1945 the Russians triumphed in a tournament played over the radio. U.S. strength dwindled in the late 1940s. A top player, Reuben Fine, quit to pursue his psychoanalytic career, and the former U.S. champion Samuel Reshevsky scaled back. In the USSR, meanwhile, the number of registered chess players grew to a million by the 1950s, and elite ranks surged.
A rising young Soviet chess talent had every opportunity on a path that would have struck Regina as ideal—the answer to all her problems with her headstrong, lopsided son. Bobby’s future opponent for the world championship, Boris Spassky, who was six years older, was also the son of a single mother. She was so poor that she resorted to digging potatoes in Leningrad. As a lonely nine-year-old looking for entertainment, Boris spent the summer of 1946 watching games in a chess pavilion and fell in love, he said, with the white queen: “I dreamed about caressing her in my pocket.” On his own, Boris found his way to the local Young Pioneer Palace, where he shared his passion with peers and entered a national system of expert instruction and competition.
He was taken under the wing of a senior chess coach who prescribed physical exercise (swimming and skating) as well as cultural exposure (opera and ballet), along with rigorous chess training. A steady dose of patriotic songs and ideological indoctrination rounded out the regimen. At eleven, Boris was still bursting into tears whenever he lost, but he was also bringing in the family paycheck: he earned a monthly state stipend higher than the average salary of an engineer. In the early 1950s, Boris moved on to other coaches. They taught him life skills—table manners, how to knot ties—along with chess strategy. By then they knew the ideological lessons weren’t taking, but Boris mostly got away with his barely disguised disdain for the Party. By 1955, at eighteen, he had won the World Junior Championship.
That same summer of 1955, when Bobby was twelve, his chess regimen was a patchwork of his own making. He had no coach, but for several years he had been coaxed out of his shyness and exposed to new chess circles. Regina wanted to send him off to camp again, as she had for some part of every summer since he was six. He had come to at least love the chance to swim, but this time he refused. Nigro, who never expected to be paid, was ready to initiate Bobby into a new level of tournament play. Over Memorial Day weekend they drove to a Westchester County resort for the U.S. Amateur Championship. Bobby was nervous and tried to back out as they approached. Regina would have been overjoyed to hear him suggesting they instead make the most of the amenities, like tennis. Nigro pushed, sensing how much Bobby feared losing.
Bobby did fare badly. Nigro’s advice, though, left an imprint on the player whose “fighting spirit,” as Garry Kasparov has said, became a signature. He shouldn’t expect to win every game, Nigro reassured him—just to play his best in each game. Or, as Kasparov summed up Bobby’s version of the bromide, play “every game to the death, as if it were his last.” At summer’s end, he entered a tournament held in Washington Square Park that continued into the fall, sometimes crying when he lost (though he later denied it). He hung on, making his way up the ladder as a rainy chill set in, and placed fifteenth. Nigro would slip away and bring him back a burger, fries, and a chocolate shake. Never looking up from the board, Bobby ate. One day, half an hour after finishing his lunch, Bobby whispered, still focused on the board, “Mr. Nigro, when is the food coming?”
By then, Bobby had spent almost his entire summer at the Manhattan Chess Club, the strongest club in the country. Founded eighty years earlier, it was a mecca for serious chess players, and Bobby’s arrival there unfolded like a too-good-to-be-true screenplay. He and Nigro had been out rowing on the Central Park Lake; the boy, he felt, could use a change of scene, and his shoulders needed some beefing up. Spotting the plaque on the club’s Central Park South building, Bobby asked to go in. He quickly defeated two opponents, attracting a crowd. The men who gathered were impressed at the way he could take in the whole board. Bobby’s blitz games were enough to prompt one of the club’s directors to introduce him to the president, a millionaire garment maker, who offered him a free junior membership. Bobby, the youngest member the club had ever admitted, quickly became a star in the weekly speed tournaments and moved out of the club’s lowest group of players. The club regulars discovered this not-quite-teenager had phenomenal stamina, too. Bobby would arrive at the club in the early afternoon, and at midnight Regina picked him up (he cringed) for the subway ride home.
With the well-timed appearance of Nigro in his life, as much friend as teacher, yet with no systematic training, Bobby had cultivated an intense dedication to the game that rivaled the best-paid Soviet prospect’s prescribed chess discipline—and that lacked any of the balance the Russians emphasized. In a picture Joan snapped in a subway car, probably after one of his long days at the club, Bobby is asleep with his head on his mother’s shoulder. Regina is smiling, perhaps just a little uneasily. A woman seated nearby gazes fondly their way, with no idea what lies behind the sweet mother-son scene.
BOBBY WITH HIS MOTHER Credit 9
· 3 ·
On the July 4 weekend in 1956, Bobby won the U.S. Junior Championship and became the youngest chess master in history. He looked ten but was thirteen, and he knew how he intended to spend the rest of the summer: traveling on his own to meet the strongest opposition yet at the U.S. Open in Oklahoma City and after that at the First Canadian Open in Montreal. Regina resisted, and then gave up. He held a simultaneous exhibition to help raise money, and she found people for him to stay with. Bobby, chewing holes in his shirts as he played, tied for fourth in Oklahoma and second in Montreal (keeping the $59 Canadian prize for himself, not telling his mother).
By the fall he was a freshman at Erasmus Hall High School, but the only learning he cared about was happening a few blocks away. Jack Collins, a renowned player whom top U.S. talents sought out as a teacher, hosted a chess salon in the apartment he and his sister shared (complete with chess-piece-patterned upholstery and drapes). Bobby had first shown up at the door in June. Now he dropped by at lunch, in his free periods, after school—and accompanied Collins, who was wheelchair-bound, on outings, too, playing blindfold chess en route. Collins’s learning-by-osmosis method was made for Bobby. When Regina dragged him home, he took books from Collins’s extensive chess library with him. Hater of homework, he dove deep into research in his chosen realm—long before computers could instantly summon up centuries’ worth of games. Bobby’s herculean explorations of his predecessors complemented his upstart instinct to look beyond prevailing styles at the board. He was primed, starting very young, to see what others didn’t.
On an unusually hot evening in October, ignoring the dress code of the elegant Marshall Chess Club off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Bobby appeared for the prestigious Rosenwald Memorial Tournament—his first all-masters outing—in a striped T-shirt. He played what was immediately heralded as the “Game of the Century,” facing an opponent named Donald Byrne, a leading young player at twenty-six. Early on, Bobby offered up a knight—a move no one predicted but whose ingenuity the kibitzers quickly appreciated. And then, as his time was running low, Bobby realized that the extraordinary sacrifice of his queen could alter the entire game.
There were stunned whispers among the sweaty crowd of onlookers. Years later, Kasparov distilled Bobby’s brilliance as an “ability to look at everything afresh.” Already, while he was still more boy than teenager, his signature clarity jolted a chess elite that would go on to learn from Bobby that, again in Kasparov’s words, “simplification—the reduction of forces through exchanges—was often the strongest path as long as activity was maintained.” Seeing twenty moves or more ahead, Bobby proceeded to respond to Byrne with speedy calm, his long fingers propelling his pieces in unexpected directions and snatching his opponent’s off the board.
The game eclipsed Samuel Reshevsky’s victory at the tournament. Bobby’s feat evoked comparison with America’s most famous native chess prodigy ever, the Louisianan Paul Morphy. Many felt he had surpassed Morphy’s legendary win at almost thirteen in 1850. Bobby continued to stun the chess world the next year. He won the U.S. Junior Open again in July 1957 and the U.S. Open a month later, the youngest person ever to manage that—and the only player to hold both titles at once. In January of 1958, taller and gawky now, Bobby emerged the upstart winner of the U.S. Championship. His cool ruthlessness was intimidating, though his well-gnawed fingernails and knuckle cracking (he had stopped chewing on his shirts) betrayed the tension. He played thirteen games against a very strong field without a loss. When his spectacular victory became clear, the “Mozart of Chess,” as the Times called him, began to dance and jump around. But Bobby also sounded a querulous note. Upon being named an international master, he complained in a voice that was breaking, “They shoulda made me a Grand Master.”
The growing acclaim for Bobby during his chess surge of the previous two years had been mixed with unease behind the scenes. Regina had continued to worry about his obsessiveness, though her ever-balkier teenager’s success stirred a new ambivalence. She “lives in terror of him,” an FBI informant noted, “but at the same time seems to ‘gloat’ over his publicity.” Even for chess aficionados, well acquainted with single-minded eccentrics, Bobby’s increasingly obstreperous style was unsettling. When he sat down at the board, he was a paragon of rule-abiding respect. Away from it, everybody could see that Bobby, for whom all the attention coincided with puberty, needed guidance. (Much the same, under very different circumstances, had been true of Barbara Follett—a celebrated author suddenly emotionally at sea—during her rocky mother-daughter voyage.) Yet nobody was better than Bobby at rebuffing unbidden attempts to provide direction. The anxious efforts to tame his intransigence—by his mother and by a motley chess entourage—were singularly inept, sporadic, and halfhearted. Whether subtler, or stricter, or steadier handling would have met with greater success is anyone’s guess. And at what price, given a rare talent fueled by a defiantly individualistic temperament? That was the rub, especially since this was the United States, after all, not the USSR.
Lurking in the minds of apprehensive admirers was Paul Morphy, for reasons other than his youthful brilliance at the board. Bobby’s 1956 anointment as his successor paid tribute to half of his legacy, as “perhaps the most accurate chess player who ever lived,” in Bobby’s words. But Morphy wasn’t just the marvel who put the United States on the world chess map by triumphing over a European chess elite in 1858. He then quit chess in his twenties and became deeply paranoid before dying a recluse at forty-seven. Morphy also put madness on the American chess map.
For Regina, around 1957, proud though she was of Bobby’s streak, the recent publication of a monograph by the former-chess-star-turned-psychoanalyst Reuben Fine was a spur to give psychiatry another try. His Psychoanalytic Observations on Chess and Chess Masters opened with a nod to Ernest Jones’s classic paper “The Problem of Paul Morphy,” published twenty-five years earlier, and went on to pursue an Oedipal theme not irrelevant to the Fischer family. Chess, Dr. Fine declared, was a sublimated form of struggle with the father (the all-important yet weak king who must be checkmated). More useful was his division of chess greats into two groups: the “heroes,” near-monomaniacal players surrounded by worshippers, and the “non-heroes,” for whom chess was only a part of their life. The former, he noted, “showed considerable emotional disturbance.” Regina—more anxious than ever to get her son on a well-rounded academic track, especially now that college was in view—phoned Dr. Fine. He would be dealing, she warned him, with a very unwilling patient.
To allay Bobby’s astute suspicions, Fine agreed to invite him over to play chess in his family quarters—not the home office—in his huge Upper West Side apartment. The purpose wasn’t psychological probing, he assured Bobby, and he began by sending him copies of his chess books to establish a bond and, at the same time, his authority. The disingenuous paternalism annoyed Bobby, who set the terms over their next six or so meetings. Dr. Fine couldn’t win his respect without beating him, and being beaten prompted Bobby’s fury. “Lucky,” he seethed after every defeat. Flattering himself that there was at last some rapport and “hopeful that I might help him to develop in other directions,” Fine one day asked a question about school. “You have tricked me,” Bobby declared, and stormed off.
Bobby had seized his chance to confront a father figure—and a maternal accomplice—who played by deceptive rules. (No Oedipal gloss is needed to imagine how gratifying this must have felt.) Redoubling his commitment to dominating at the board, he continued his streak. Regina responded in her typically inconsistent yet fervent way. At first, she bore down in earnest on the school front. Languages were her specialty, and after Bobby failed a Spanish quiz, she exhorted focus while also urging the benefits of multilingualism for his chess travels, a savvy pitch. Regina started speaking Spanish to Bobby and tutoring him at home, and his grades soared. But soon she got swept up in his chess triumphs. After all, they made him happy. The “professional protester,” as Joan once called her mother, now turned Bobby’s career into a cause. Impatient over the lack of publicity and fund-raising, she wrote press releases and tried to get on television shows. She didn’t seem to notice how much Bobby, mortified, resented the intrusions.
Bobby’s peers, predictably, also hadn’t managed to curb his growing insistence that, whatever the circumstance, he got to set the terms. When Bobby joined the Manhattan Chess Club, he had been the still boyish near-teen in a mostly older youth contingent, but soon they were acolytes, deferring to him and his hard-driving pace. On the trajectory from one victory to the next, Bobby became more imperious. A fellow participant in the 1957 U.S. Junior Championship tournament held in San Francisco described a fourteen-year-old master of shock-and-awe drama—except the intimidating act suggested a boy out of control. Bobby had missed the ice cream social beforehand, where there had been lots of talk about the reigning champion. Striding in late, his hair shaved short and his Levi’s ragged, he ignored young fans as he headed straight for the director’s table to find out what the winner would get this year. “I do not want another typewriter!” he raged on learning the first prize was a repeat. When another player mocked his assurance as premature, Bobby turned on him: “You don’t know me.”
Working up to his encounter with Gilbert Ramirez, the highest-ranked junior, Bobby repeatedly rebuffed Gil’s invitation to play some speed chess in between his rounds. “Too weak,” he muttered. But Bobby relented before the two of them, each with four victories so far, were to meet at the board. In front of a large crowd, he sat down for a brisk preview of things to come. They played twenty-five or thirty blitz games, and Bobby didn’t lose or draw one. He spent less than a minute on each. “It’s like angels are moving his hand!” said Miguel Najdorf, a leading grandmaster of the time who was among the spectators. Bobby won the real games, too, retaining the junior title.
Before heading to Cleveland to play (and emerge victorious) in the U.S. Open several weeks later, he killed time out west with Gil and some other boys who had played in the tournament. It was a rare occasion for bonding, which clearly did not go so well for Bobby. During a memorable fight on the drive across the desert, he bit Gil hard enough to leave scars. But Bobby was also doing his best to sound more calmly mature. Maybe someone had dared to offer him advice, though effective counsel had notably not been the pattern so far. “Yes, sometimes I did cry when I lost, but I don’t cry any more,” he had told the New York Times reporter Gay Talese before his summer conquests. “I’m thrilled about winning but I try to be nice to people. I don’t know if older persons are embarrassed about losing to me, but I do not feel awkward about playing them—or beating them. I beat them, or they’ll beat me.”
In his monograph, Fine noted the Soviets’ “determined effort to prove that in their society artists”—a category that included chess stars—“need not be the tormented prima donnas so often encountered in other countries, but can lead socially normal lives.” If anything, Bobby was reinforced in assuming the opposite: that bucking normalcy was a privilege of path-breaking genius. Such heady hero stuff was not exactly helpful, especially for a highly temperamental and vulnerable teenager with years of nonstandard socializing already behind him. Carmine Nigro had moved to Florida in 1956, and he and Bobby never saw each other again. Even with Jack Collins, who gave him a home away from home, Bobby began making occasional digs behind his back. Bobby was always “ahead of any plans his elders had for him,” noted Frank Brady, the founding editor of Chess Life who met him around this time and later became his biographer.
In any case, his elders’ plans were not exactly clear or firm. The upper reaches of the chess establishment were concerned enough to convene a meeting. The governors’ board of the wood-paneled Marshall Chess Club of course agreed on Bobby’s phenomenal talent. The problem was his attitude. The club manager, Caroline Marshall—the widow of the former long-standing U.S. champion Frank Marshall, for whom rich patrons had originally bought the brownstone—had threatened to keep Bobby out if he didn’t abide by its sartorial rules. Bobby paid no attention and provoked other sponsors with antics that were evidently far more disruptive. “Some of what he did was so outrageous it was decided maybe he had emotional problems,” Allen Kaufman, a chess master who had known Bobby and who attended the meeting, later told a reporter (without offering details). Someone suggested consulting—whom else?—Reuben Fine. But a board member broached a quandary that hadn’t occurred to Regina when she first asked for Fine’s guidance: in Bobby, they might have a case of neurosis bound up with chess genius. Did they want to run the risk that successful therapy might derail the United States in its suddenly promising quest for a world champion? They did not.
Though he doubtless wouldn’t have tolerated Soviet-style chess training, much less therapy, the mixed signals Bobby got during his chess and adolescent growth spurts arguably suited him too well. A conflicted mother and a muddled chess world—both filled mostly with permissive fervor on Bobby’s behalf—gushed, and knew how to get out of his way. That helped inspire his focus and abet his young genius. But by the time they faced an ever more combative teenager whose rare gifts they revered—and had their own reasons for promoting—they were singularly ill equipped to deal. They squirmed, went behind his back, flinched, hoping for the best. And when the new U.S. champion, who turned fifteen two months after winning the title, was heralded by “not one word from the Government…silence from the authorities,” as an outraged chess elder put it, a similar message got through to Bobby: you don’t owe anybody anything.
Another message also registered, which no fifteen-year-old would handle well: keep winning, and you’ll be owed big. As Bobby turned to face the world in 1958, America’s great chess hope felt he had license to conceive himself a lone ranger, now on a global stage. The United States had finally gotten a satellite into orbit in late January, and the National Defense Education Act was in the works. But funding was not forthcoming for a prodigy in the Soviet national sport: Bobby was eager for a summer trip to the USSR before heading to Yugoslavia for one of the qualifying tournaments for the world championship. Government money hadn’t been available for a spring visit to Moscow by a Texan piano prodigy, Van Cliburn, either. At twenty-three, he had just stunned the world by winning the Soviet Union’s first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition after adoring fans swooned, thrilled by his romantic Russian feel for their music. Starry-eyed Cliburn (“a boy, not a young man,” his hosts judged) had swooned, too, enthralled by the country and its people. No wonder, perhaps, the Soviets were favorably disposed to Regina’s suggestion that Bobby be invited to visit—and the U.S. government, nonplussed by the pro-Soviet effusions of one Cold War cultural emissary already, kept its distance.
Regina secured the airfare with the I’ve Got a Secret gambit, and the Soviets quickly found themselves with an anti-Cliburn on their hands. Bobby, too, was steeped in Russian prowess, but he aimed to do as he pleased. He and Joan arrived early, to give him extra time to “play against the best they’ve got,” as he told a reporter. “Their style gets me. That’s why I came here.” He rebuffed the sightseeing his hosts had arranged, well aware that his mother had conceived of the trip as culturally enriching for him. His goal was immersion in the Soviet way of chess, and the chance to battle with the best. “We have to throw him out every afternoon,” an official of the Moscow Central Chess Club said, initially charmed by Bobby’s passion. “We don’t know what to do with him. But he’s a wonderful boy.”
Soon Bobby asked when the games with their chess pantheon would begin, and was surprised to learn that the Soviets had no intention of trotting out their masters and methods. Exactly a century earlier, when Paul Morphy had taken his triumphant foreign tour, his trip had been marred only by the refusal of the top player (a Briton) to play a match. Bobby seized on the precedent, but he didn’t have Morphy’s “genial disposition, his unaffected modesty and gentlemanly courtesy,” as Chess Monthly had described him. Bobby was furious. An interpreter perhaps misunderstood him when he said he had been served enough pork at meals, or else she transcribed Bobby’s sentiments perfectly: “I’m fed up with these Russian pigs.” Feeling insulted and betrayed by his chess heroes, he vowed eternal enmity. Bobby conveyed a toned-down version in a postcard to Jack Collins: “I don’t like Russian hospitality and the people themselves. It seems they don’t like me either.”
Bobby returned home in the fall of 1958 from Yugoslavia, where he had become the youngest grandmaster ever and was lionized as a quintessentially American upstart, “laconic as the hero of an old cowboy movie,” a reporter wrote. He draped a scarf he had bought for Regina around her neck and gallantly told her, “That’s very Continental.” But before long their apartment was too small for them both. She had begun petitioning and picketing the American Chess Foundation, which she felt was offering inadequate support to U.S. chess efforts. So was the government, which wasn’t funding the Olympic team’s trip to Leipzig in 1960. To Bobby’s fury, she picketed in front of the White House and the State Department, and began a hunger strike for chess. Up-close-and-personal support didn’t suit her so well, or him either, so Regina moved out to live with a friend in the Bronx. “It sounds terrible to leave a 16-year-old to his own devices, but he is probably happier that way,” Regina wrote to another friend. “Maybe he is better off without my nagging him to get out for sports, etc, eat, get through his homework, go to bed before 1 am, etc. I am tired of being a scapegoat and doormat.”
Regina ended up miles away, though they corresponded. She went to California to embark on a peace walk from San Francisco to Moscow and en route found a new husband, an Englishman. She at last finished her medical degree in East Germany and continued to keep the FBI busy tracking her political activism, now on the Continent, where she tirelessly protested against the Vietnam War. Bobby retreated to a filthy apartment that was all his, with chessboards next to each of three beds and the radio often on. It was his idea of bliss—and it was a barricaded existence. He had already devastated Regina by dropping out of Erasmus High. Bobby spent the rest of his teens brooding even more over his beloved game, playing and studying ten to fourteen hours a day. “Chess and me,” as he later said, “it’s hard to take them apart. It’s like my alter ego.”
Frank Brady, by then not the only acquaintance being kept at arm’s length, offered a rare glimpse of his friend’s absorption at seventeen. He lured Bobby out for dinner, and in an unusually expansive mood after devouring prime rib, Bobby tried to lead Brady through some of his preparations for his next tournament. Out came the pocket chessboard. Like a magician revealing his moves in such sped-up motion that they remained a blur, Bobby set and reset pieces without a pause, re-creating moments in games that went back more than a century. His eyes fixed on the world he held in his palm, now murmuring to himself, Bobby never saw that Brady “began to weep quietly, aware that in that time-suspended moment I was in the presence of genius.”
Soon, though, Bobby was in restless search of recognition and self-definition. Eager to discard the image of an “uncouth kid,” he began wearing bespoke suits. He took to carrying around a blue box much bigger than his pocket chess set. Inside, though he kept it secret, was a Bible, which he was reading intensively. He had been impressed by the pastor of the Worldwide Church of God, a sect that blended Christian tenets and Jewish observances. Its emphasis on austere self-control suited him (and so did its suspicion of doctors). Bobby held on to his U.S. champion title again and again, undefeated in the tournaments. He made phenomenal showings against the best in international matches.
Yet Bobby was not a coolly self-reliant cowboy. He wrangled over rules and playing conditions, got riled up by opponents, and retreated from people who had thought they were his friends. The Soviets cast him as an uncooperative product of crass capitalism, “unintellectual, lopsidedly developed, and uncommunicative.” The American chess world, too, now spoke out about the “colossal egotism” of an older teenager who had “managed to alienate and offend…almost everybody and anybody who might be in a position to help him in his career,” as a former U.S. champion put it. Of course, Bobby had also been hearing for years now (from many of the same people) that he was in a class by himself. Perhaps that helps explain the monumentally immature snobbery on display in an interview with the writer Ralph Ginzburg in Harper’s when Bobby was eighteen—further grist for everybody’s and anybody’s worst impressions.
Bobby took swipes at just about all of the company he had ever (uneasily) kept: women, Jews, high school teachers and students, Russian “potzers,” phonies, cheap millionaires who scrimped on prize money, chess club riffraff, “barbaric” subway riders, his mother. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She ought to keep out of chess.” He extolled his fancy clothes. Driven home by Ginzburg, he paused in front of his walk-up on a noisy, grubby Crown Heights block to describe his dreams of getting rich and living in a grand house, “built exactly like a rook,” complete with “spiral staircases, parapets, everything.” Ginzburg at least took note that Bobby “does not show malice” and included Joan’s comment that her brother was “a boy who requires an extra amount of understanding.”
When the magazine came out, an irate Bobby accused Ginzburg of misquotations. Whatever the particular inaccuracies (Ginzburg said he had destroyed the transcript), the interview was a cruel exposé of the broader truth: Bobby, for all his bluster, was deeply insecure, clueless about how to behave and convinced no one could be counted on. Young adulthood nearly at hand, he was sure only of what he was counting on. Yet the next year his vision of becoming the youngest world champion in history vanished. Bobby was devastated when he placed fourth in the tournament in Curaçao that decided the challenger for the world championship in 1963. In need of a culprit, he accused the Soviets of throwing games to each other to ease their way to the top. (There is a good chance they did collude, although they had no need to.)
As he entered his twenties, Bobby staked his identity ever more rigidly on being the ultimate nonteam player. He threatened to withdraw from international chess, charging that its rules favored the Soviets. After the unprecedented feat of a clean sweep of the U.S. Championship of 1963–64—not a single draw as he faced eleven top players—he kept his word. He didn’t play in the qualifying tournament for the next world championship. Even his staunchest defenders in the chess realm were ready to conclude that a nation that didn’t take the game seriously had perhaps gotten what it deserved. “Finally the U.S.A. produces its greatest chess genius,” one chess veteran remarked, “and he turns out to be just a stubborn boy.”
· 4 ·
“He is still very young; he is still capable of growing in many directions” was the more optimistic view of Bobby’s friend Frank Brady, writing at the same juncture. Bobby was only twenty-one, and had recently blurted out that he wished “all this controversy”—by which he meant “all this about the Russians”—were over. Brady hoped it was a sign that he would soon be ready “to fulfill his immense promise, whatever the conditions.” Bobby did rally over the next decade, but not by ceasing to demonize the Russians. As he had ever since boyhood, he clung to the self-image of the hero facing long odds and obstacles—in this case, the Soviet sabotage of his original championship dream. Bobby was more his mother’s son than he ever recognized: even a solo crusader draws strength from a sense (however distorted) of having a larger cause.
As Bobby told it, he finally stopped stalling and showed up in Reykjavík in the summer of 1972 to play the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky, because he felt “an awful lot of prestige of the country is at stake.” Now twenty-nine, he cast the contest as a political morality tale: “the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians.” Culturally, it looked like a battle between untrammeled genius and the totalitarian engineering of expertise. But in Iceland, as in Brooklyn, temperament in fact took center stage. It proved more important than any particular approach to talent development—and more recalcitrant than Soviet trainers or American admirers hoped.
In Reykjavík, Bobby and an independent-minded Spassky presented a spectacle of Cold War role reversal. Bobby was ready with fierce rhetoric, a stickler for rules even as he broke them, a master of mind games with his delays and ultimatums. He got marching orders from the government: Henry Kissinger prodded by phone (not that the match was a policy priority—détente was in full swing, and American officials simply hoped to avoid an embarrassing fiasco). Spassky, to his regime’s displeasure, refused to make ideological speeches. His superiors were eager for pretexts to walk out. But Spassky’s decision to go along with Bobby’s demand to play in a closed room, away from cameras—a decision “taken on his own,” his Soviet critics scolded in the postmortem—guaranteed that the match went on. Spassky waited and sweated through Bobby’s antics for the chance to play chess against the best. After a surreally suspenseful two months of chess and drama, Bobby was a point away from the title as the twenty-first game adjourned on the last day in August. The next day Spassky phoned in his resignation. At the grand banquet two days later, Bobby was bored and pulled out his pocket chess set. Side by side at the head table, he and Spassky played out other possible last moves, none of which would have made a difference.
As “a propagandist for the free world,” Arthur Koestler remarked of Bobby, “he is rather counter-productive.” But Bobby proved immediately effective as a propagandist for chess in the dominant nation of the free world. Suddenly America’s best-known sports celebrity, he was famous not just for his genius but for his fancy suits, the snits he threw, and his push for real prize money—not to mention the way he snatched up an opponent’s pieces. He made the slow-moving game seem thrillingly aggressive with declarations like “the object is to crush the other man’s mind….I like to see ’em squirm.” At the same time, the PBS chess master–turned–commentator in Reykjavík, Shelby Lyman, revealed “a gift for democratizing chess,” Fred Waitzkin later wrote in Searching for Bobby Fischer. Lyman was a guide good at “clouding distinctions between ability and ineptitude.” The moment was ripe for “persuading the United States that chess was within reach of all of us.”
In the USSR, Spassky’s loss elicited a fourteen-point plan from a sports bureaucracy intent on renewed rigor and more state resources for chess. In the United States, Fischer and his triumph gave a marginalized pastime associated with oddball brainiacs a big status boost. He inspired grassroots enthusiasm among all ages for a game long linked with unworldly, innately gifted eccentrics. Yet the man who had complained that chess got no respect in America soon made it clear he wasn’t about to preside over, or profit from, the newfound zeal to popularize and professionalize the game. Rejecting deal after lucrative deal, Bobby turned his back on becoming another high-rolling sports star. “Nobody is going to make a nickel off of me!” he said, sensing potential exploitation in every offer.
What were he and his talent worth? In Iceland, Bobby had at last confirmed the answer he had dreamed of. He had given away most of his winnings to the Radio Church of God, which had predicted doom that very year, 1972. And then the world didn’t end, and Bobby now reigned supreme. Yet he was a stubborn outsider who needed uphill battles. He demanded rule changes for the next championship, designed to spur more daring play and cut down on draws. When the international chess federation refused, he resigned his title in 1975.
Already in retreat, Bobby now dropped out of sight, into a life of near vagrancy and delusions of Jewish conspiracies—more radically adrift than William Sidis ever was, yet with an anchor: for years, Bobby depended on the full amount of Regina’s Social Security checks, relayed to him by Joan, who deposited them for their mother. When he surfaced in 1992 in war-torn Yugoslavia and defeated Spassky in an unofficial rematch, he won a purse of $3.5 million. For a man now filled with anti-American animus, the chance to violate U.S. sanctions (and to spit on the notice prohibiting him to play) was perhaps a bonus. After an itinerant decade and a half abroad—emerging from obscurity one more time to hail the 9/11 attack—Bobby died of renal failure in Iceland in 2008.
If only Bobby’s star power had persisted, went the refrain as American chess mania ebbed. Then the game could have secured its place as a well-remunerated, publicly venerated arena of exceptional achievement. Yet Bobby’s early departure from the stage arguably helped save chess in the United States from becoming too, well, Russian: a streamlined, hierarchical enterprise aimed at precociously winnowing, honing, and systematically steering hyped young talent toward the rewards not just of expertise but of officially approved prestige and cultural privilege.
Instead, in an era when athletics are big business—and loom large in competitive college admissions—the “sport of thinking” in the United States has held on to a certain purity along with its penury. The result is truer to Bobby’s own spirit than it might at first seem. Against a backdrop of neo-Sputnik alarm in the 1980s, when the presidential commission’s report ominously titled A Nation at Risk stirred panic about the state of American education, chess became pedagogically correct. It acquired cachet both as an elite extracurricular activity for private school students and as an innovative supplement in inner-city public schools. At one end, “chess parents” nursed proto-prodigy dreams, eager to seize on signs of a “knack” for the game as evidence of superintelligence. At the other, the goal was to engage at-risk students in a pastime that promised crossover academic payoffs. Proponents of all stripes cited studies correlating chess programs with better reading scores, problem-solving skills, critical and creative thinking (improvements of the sort likely to be found with just about any activity that gives kids extra attention).
Bobby hated school but certainly would have vouched for the power of chess to teach children, from tuned-out students to smart ones, a lot about learning. As he discovered early, the game requires focusing on how to focus—breaking down challenges and cultivating patience and persistence. Meanwhile, the neural plasticity that also makes children good language learners can propel gratifying progress at chess. Goaded ever onward by a rating system that shows them every increment of improvement, young players get hooked. With its blend of rigid rules and absolutist rankings on the one hand, and its infinite possibilities and competitive allure on the other, chess is ideally designed to spur what performance experts call “effortful training.”
At the same time, Bobby would have said what the coaches of good school chess teams will tell you, too: don’t bill the game to young players as a high-GPA goody-goody’s pursuit, or as special education in disguise. And don’t count on habits of effortful study in chess to inspire academic conscientiousness. Regina learned otherwise. Asked to name the crucial ingredients of chess prowess, Bobby gave a list—“a strong memory, concentration, imagination, and a strong will”—that omitted the brainy brilliance and math aptitude often associated with the game. Cognitive research backs him up, revealing that chess masters aren’t distinguished by either. Nor, studies have found, do top players’ phenomenal recall for chess combinations translate directly into other feats of memory: tested with random positions, or different material, they aren’t likely to excel. The truth is that Bobby is the best—and the saddest—evidence that lessons learned at the board don’t transfer seamlessly to school, or to life. The game’s attraction, for those who get caught up in it, is rarely instrumental. “I just go for it,” Bobby told the shrink. That love was a factor he left off his list, but it belonged at the top. Of all the touted pedagogical uses for chess, the indisputably effective one—it can sweep students up in a dizzying, demanding pursuit for its own sake, not its résumé potential—would surely have won his approval.
Bobby didn’t mind being anointed “the greatest natural player in history,” a tribute that reflects the mystique of innate genius long associated with chess. But he never tried to disguise how much self-driven nurture was involved—yet another corroboration of the latest research on high-level chess performance. “The ability to put in those hours of work is in itself an innate gift,” Kasparov proposed. Or perhaps it was an urge that gathered force in a lonely boy in an empty apartment. Starting early, and summoning rare curiosity and energy, Bobby amassed an unmatched trove of combinations to deploy in unprecedented ways. He worked endlessly—in both senses: his dedication was unceasing, and his obsession was in the service of ends no one else should presume to dictate. That left his talent at the mercy, ultimately, of the many hurdles he set himself.
Nobody was going to force Bobby to defend his primacy at the board, fighting for the cultural superiority of the free world. It might have been liberating if someone had. In vain, Regina tried to appeal to his legacy beyond the board. “Don’t let millions of people down who regard you as a genius and an example to themselves,” she wrote him as he veered into anti-Semitism. But after so many years, she knew she couldn’t set him straight. The best she could hope for was that Bobby still knew she wouldn’t let him down, as in her own way she never did. “Remember,” her letter went on, “whatever you do or whatever happens I am still your mother and there is nothing I would refuse you if you wanted or needed it.”