Glenn Cowan was an ordinary American nineteen-year-old – a child of his time who liked rock music, soft drugs and casual sex. His only distinguishing feature was his passion for ping-pong, but that was hardly earth shattering. Then, one day, during a tournament in Japan, Cowan boarded a bus and changed the world.
Cowan was part of the American team attending the table tennis world championships in Nagoya, Japan in 1971. On 4 April, after finishing a practice session, he flagged down a tournament bus. To his surprise, the bus was occupied exclusively by Chinese players, coaches and officials, all flabbergasted by his sudden invasion. A Martian would have caused only slightly more shock. Cowan, who fancied himself a revolutionary, met stares with aplomb: ‘I know all this . . . my hat, my hair, my clothes look funny to you. But there are many, many people who look like me and who think like me. We, too, have known oppression in our country and we are fighting against it. But just wait. Soon we will be in control because the people on top are getting more and more out of touch.’ A tremor rippled through the bus as a translator struggled with the strange remark.1
Since 1949, there had been an embargo on civility between the Chinese and Americans. The US pretended that the People’s Republic did not exist, insisting that the exiled government in Taiwan was the true China. The Chinese, in turn, considered America the counterrevolutionary running dog – the epitome of capitalist evil. Then came Cowan.
Silent panic engulfed the bus as the flustered Chinese struggled to react. For the previous six years, China had refused to attend the world championships because, during the Cultural Revolution, international sporting competitions were derided as ‘sprouts of revisionism’. By their mere presence, this team demonstrated that a semblance of normality was returning, but every player understood that the government still held a short leash. The decision to attend had been taken only after acrimonious meetings involving the Foreign Ministry and the State Commission for Physical Culture, chaired by Premier Zhou Enlai. The official aim was ‘friendship first, competition second’, but friendliness was not supposed to be extended to the Americans. ‘During the contest, if we meet with officials of the US delegation’, official guidelines advised, ‘we do not take the initiative to talk or exchange greetings. If we compete with the US team, we do not exchange team flags.’ Mao was blunter: ‘Regard a Ping-Pong ball as the head of your capitalist enemy. Hit it with your socialist bat, and you have won the point for the fatherland.’2
That explains the consternation over Cowan. ‘We were still in the Cultural Revolution,’ Zhuang Zedong, the former world champion, recalls. ‘Any exchange with Westerners would be [attacked] with vicious labels, such as “treason” or “spy”. So when this American guy got on the bus, nobody dared talk to him.’ Zhuang, however, felt torn between cultural conditioning and governmental stricture. Confucianism, burnt into the neurons of every Chinese person, taught politeness and harmony. ‘I was thinking, China has been well-known as a country of hospitality for more than 5,000 years. If everyone ignores that American athlete, it would be ironic.’ As the star of the Chinese team, Zhuang felt the need to set an example. ‘I looked at him and thought, he’s not involved in issuing policy. He’s just an athlete, an ordinary person.’ Much to the dismay of his teammates, Zhuang made his way up the aisle. A fellow player grabbed his sleeve, and the team manager blocked his way. ‘Take it easy,’ Zhuang retorted. ‘As head of the delegation you have many concerns, but I am just a player.’ He reached Cowan and, through an interpreter, welcomed him. ‘Even now,’ Zhuang recalls, ‘I can’t forget the naive smile on his face.’3
Zhuang wanted to give Cowan something, but most of the official gifts he had seemed too insignificant. ‘Since he is an American athlete, I thought I should give him a bigger present.’ He settled upon a silk embroidery of a Yellow Mountain scene, made in Hangzhou. The American, clearly taken aback by Zhuang’s generosity, searched in his own bag, but could find only a comb. ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t give you a comb. I wish I could give you something, but I can’t.’ Cowan hesitated and then, with a wry smile, put the comb back. The interpreter, clearly bemused, asked if Cowan knew who had addressed him. ‘Yes, the world champion Zhuang Zedong,’ he replied. ‘And I hope your team does well.’4
As the bus arrived at the main competition venue, photographers loitered, hoping for shots of those rare Chinese. Much to their surprise, Zhuang and Cowan disembarked together, wearing wide grins. The immense symbolism of that moment was lost on no one. Photographers pushed forward and reporters fired questions, but Zhuang was quickly hustled away and given a dressing down by Chinese officials. ‘Chairman Mao told us we should differentiate between American policymakers and common people,’ he retorted. ‘What was wrong with my action?’5
The following day, Cowan found the perfect gift for his new friend. He returned to the arena, located Zhuang and, sensing a dramatic moment, pulled him in front of some television cameras. He presented him with a T-shirt in which an image blending the American flag and peace symbol was printed below the message ‘LET IT BE’. Cowan then pulled from his bag the silk brocade picture, so that photographers got what looked like a spontaneous exchange of gifts. That image suggested that something very big was happening in Nagoya. ‘Mr. Cowan, would you like to visit China?’ a journalist shouted. ‘Well, I’d like to see any country I haven’t seen before – Argentina, Australia, China, . . . Any country I haven’t seen before.’ That wasn’t the answer reporters wanted, so they tried again: ‘But what about China in particular? Would you like to go there?’ He hesitated, then replied: ‘Of course.’6
Meanwhile, officials in Beijing frantically forged a response. A hastily convened meeting between the Foreign Ministry and the State Commission for Physical Culture drew up a report advising that the time was not yet ripe for an American team to visit China. That report was approved by Zhou, then sent to Mao, who took two days to concur. The Chinese were not, in principle, opposed to a visit, but they did not appreciate having their hands forced by athletes in Japan.
Photos of Zhuang and Cowan first hit the front pages of Japanese newspapers on the morning of 5 April. When the wire services picked up the story, it quickly circled the globe. The photos eventually made their way to Mao, who remarked: ‘Zhuang Zedong is not only a good ping-pong player, but also a diplomat. He is quite politically sensitive.’ On the evening of the 6th, after Mao had taken his customary heavy dose of sleeping pills and gone to bed, he had a sudden change of heart about an American visit. He instructed his nurse, Wu Xujun, to order the Foreign Ministry to extend a formal invitation. Pointing to the photo, he told Wu: ‘The friendly Sino-American relationship is definitely the trend. Look, the encounter between Zhuang Zedong and Cowan is so natural. They bear no grudge against each other.’ Wu, however, was under strict instructions not to act upon decisions made after the sleeping pills were administered. Mao nevertheless insisted, and forced himself to stay awake while the message was relayed to the Foreign Office.7
Keen to appear in control of events, the Foreign Ministry extended an invitation worded so as to cast the Americans as supplicants. ‘Considering that the American team has made the request many times with friendly enthusiasm, it has been approved to invite it, including its leaders, to visit our country.’ The Americans would be allowed to join an already scheduled tour that included teams from Canada, Nigeria and Colombia. As an aside, the message added: ‘If their traveling funds are insufficient, we can subsidize.’8
Back in the US, Vice-President Spiro Agnew provided his trademark knee-jerk response, dismissing the invitation as ‘propaganda’. What Agnew didn’t realize was that his boss, Richard Nixon, had been waiting anxiously for an opportunity of this sort. He immediately cabled back to Japan that the invitation must be accepted, and then told Agnew to shut up.
Prior to his election, Nixon had argued in Foreign Affairs that, ‘There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation . . . we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations.’ He reiterated that point when he told Time magazine that ‘We must always seek opportunities to talk with [China] . . . If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China.’ There were, however, a number of huge obstacles, among them the Vietnam War, the strident anti-communism of Nixon’s own party, and American promises to Taiwan. These obstacles were so significant that, when Nixon raised the possibility with his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, the latter concluded: ‘I think he has lost control of his senses.’9
Nixon nevertheless remained determined. For him, normalizing relations offered an opportunity to break a logjam in foreign policy. As William Smyser, a senior analyst at the National Security Council, recalls, the administration felt that ‘we were stuck in a rut. We were stuck in a rut in Vietnam . . . we were stuck in a rut in the negotiations with the Soviet Union . . . We were also stuck in a rut with the American people, who were discouraged about whether foreign policy could ever produce anything good.’ In Nixon’s view, China offered the possibility of an end run – a chance to recast foreign affairs so profoundly that adversaries would be left flailing. Friendly relations with the Chinese would, it was anticipated, pressure the North Vietnamese to negotiate an end to the war. It would also, more importantly, drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union, forcing the latter to make concessions, for instance at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. The idea also harmonized with the recently formulated Nixon Doctrine, which emphasized peaceful co-existence and disengagement in Asia. Since the US no longer felt obliged to roll back communism in every corner of the world, it no longer made sense to treat China like a pariah.10
An opportunity developed when festering Sino-Soviet border disputes destroyed once and for all the illusion of an impregnable communist bloc. Clandestine talks with the Chinese were held in Warsaw, but these stalled when the Americans invaded Cambodia in April 1970. Then, in October of that year, Nixon sent a message to the Chinese through a Pakistani intermediary, reiterating a willingness to talk. As a mark of his sincerity, at a banquet in honour of the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, he used the term ‘People’s Republic of China’ for the first time. Nixon realized that no one was better placed to pull off such a gambit. Liberal Democrats had long wanted better relations with China, but were not in a position to act on that desire, since to do so would provoke accusations of being soft on communism. Nixon, in contrast, was singularly well suited to open doors, since his anti-communist credentials were beyond dispute. As he later told Mao, ‘Sometimes those on the right can do things which those on the left can only talk about.’ He nevertheless realized that negotiations could be sabotaged if critics got wind of them at too early a stage. With typical secrecy, he instructed Kissinger to arrange back channel negotiations, while keeping the rest of his Cabinet, and the entire country, out of the loop.11
The Americans were pushing at an open door. The dispute with the Soviets had left the Chinese feeling deeply isolated. Like Nixon, Mao felt that something bold needed to be done to break the stalemate and allow China her rightful place on the world stage. Summoning four generals who had been disgraced during the Cultural Revolution, Mao asked for advice, making clear his desire for ‘unconventional thoughts’. They unanimously came to the conclusion that, of her two main adversaries, the Americans posed the least threat. Among China watchers, a subtle change in attitude toward Nixon became apparent. While official propaganda continued to call him ‘a gangster’ with ‘a blood-dripping butcher’s knife’, his conciliatory references to China were duly noted and sometimes reported in the press. On 18 December 1970, Mao told his old friend Edgar Snow that, if Nixon wanted to come to China, he would be welcome. ‘I don’t think I’ll wrangle with him’, he added, ‘though I’ll criticize him.’12
A mutual need to criticize proved the biggest obstacle. Neither side wanted to appear desperate for the other’s good grace. Each felt the need to censure past transgressions. Negotiations therefore proceded as if through treacle. ‘There had been about a year of back and forth,’ Kissinger recalls. ‘China had sent us a specific proposal to come to Beijing, and we were on course to answer favorably.’ The ping-pong incident came at the perfect moment because it opened a door, without cumbersome diplomatic fanfare. It also offered the opportunity to sidestep hardliners at home, who could hardly object to an innocent sporting exchange. ‘We wanted to play it all very low key,’ Kissinger reflected. ‘As it turned out, it worked out well for us.’ He eventually concluded that the invitation was an intentional ploy by the Chinese to break the deadlock in the back channel talks. ‘I think Zhou Enlai thought Westerners were slower than the Chinese in mental perception, and didn’t think we had understood the message. So just as we were drafting a response to the message we had received, we heard he had invited the Ping-Pong team.’ While that was probably true in principle, in fact the boldness came from Mao, not Zhou.13
On 10 April, nine players, two spouses and four officials crossed into the PRC. ‘The American team could not have been more representative of the U.S. if the State Department had handpicked it,’ John Roderick, the AP China correspondent, recalled. ‘It was what foreigners often thought of Americans: friendly, racially diverse, indi-vidualistic.’14 Suspicion and animosity were put on hold as both sides competed in a game of graciousness. The American public, for the most part, saw their table tennis team as intrepid explorers of a strange land. A fascination for all things Chinese suddenly developed. For the first time in over twenty years, polls showed a majority in favour of Chinese membership of the United Nations. As for the Chinese, they treated the Americans like friendly extraterrestrials. ‘We became VIPs from the moment we entered China,’ the coach Jack Howard later remarked. ‘Every meal had seven or eight courses with things I never saw before in my life . . . I think they were trying to kill us with kindness.’ Matches were shown live on television – unusual in China at the time. ‘If we were at a site like The Great Wall . . . they would all crowd around and look at us like we were from another planet,’ Olga Soltesz recalls. The strangest guest of all was Cowan. His match with a middling Chinese player attracted a crowd of 18,000 at Beijing’s Capital Stadium. ‘The Chinese had never seen a person with long hair and hippie ways,’ a fellow player recalled. ‘Thousands of people would surround him in the streets. They loved him but were also a little terrified of him.’15
In order to make the games competitive the Americans were pitted against good club players, not the national team. They were, nevertheless, no match for their Chinese opponents. Keen not to humiliate, Chinese officials instructed players to go easy on their opponents. ‘I knew they would be unlike any other games I’d ever played,’ Zheng Minzhi, one of the Chinese players, recalled. ‘I knew their significance and my responsibilities. I knew I was not only there to play, but more important, to achieve what cannot be achieved through proper diplomatic channels.’ The games ironically mirrored the relationship the Chinese were trying to cultivate with America – one in which they were gracious but still in full control. Chinese self-regard was boosted when American players heaped praise on their country, much to State Department dismay. ‘I like the way the Chinese people are united,’ John Tannehill told reporters. ‘In China there is no exploiting class. The workers have power. In the US, the workers are taken advantage of.’ He added that Mao was ‘the greatest moral and intellectual leader in the world today . . . he reaches most of the people. His philosophy is beautiful.’ Another player, Judy Bochenski, proclaimed that women’s liberation was far advanced in China because the women ‘all wear trousers, they all have jobs, they all work like the men’.16
‘Never before in history has a sport been used so effectively as a tool of international diplomacy,’ Zhou announced. He stage-managed the spectacle perfectly, extracting maximum publicity. The climax came at a reception held at the Great Hall on 14 April. ‘You have opened a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people,’ Zhou told his guests. ‘I am confident that this beginning again of our friendship will certainly meet with majority support of our two peoples.’ The only diversion from a carefully prepared script came when Cowan asked Zhou what he thought about hippies. The response was perfectly crafted: ‘Young people ought to try different things. But they should try to find something in common with the great majority – remember that.’ On learning of that exchange, Cowan’s mother wrote to Zhou, thanking him for speaking sense to her son.17
A few hours after Zhou’s speech, the Americans relaxed a twenty-year-old trade embargo with China. Confident of America’s good intent, Zhou sent a message to Washington on the 29th, explaining that Mao would welcome ‘direct conversations’ with Nixon, and suggesting immediate exploratory talks. Nixon was beside himself with joy. ‘This is the most important communication that has come to an American president since World War II,’ he told Kissinger. He found some rare brandy that a supporter had sent after his election victory and toasted his good luck. On 17 May he formally accepted the Chinese invitation and named Kissinger as his preliminary representative.18
Kissinger’s talks with Zhou were at times difficult, but too much had already been invested for either side to allow failure. Ritualized punches were traded, while the two boxers danced around the main issues of Vietnam and Taiwan. With respect to the former, Kissinger did not get Zhou to agree to pressure the North Vietnamese to end the war, but did get him to accept the sincerity of America’s desire to disengage. On the subject of Taiwan, Kissinger, to Zhou’s delight, made it clear that Nixon would not allow past loyalties to get in the way of new friendships.
‘We were embarking’, Nixon remembered, ‘on a voyage of philosophical discovery as uncertain, and in some ways as perilous, as the voyages of geographical discovery of an earlier time.’ Hyperbole aside, that was essentially true. Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 was important for the simple fact that it occurred more than for the detail of what was agreed. Both sides wanted a new era to begin. The visit’s significance can be measured by the Soviets’ panicked reaction. ‘The news hit us like a bolt from the blue,’ Georgii Arbatov, a senior adviser to Brezhnev, recalled. ‘My colleagues said, “America will be China’s ally . . . When Nixon visits Beijing, anything could happen. All this will make things very difficult for us. Where will it all end?”’ One could argue that it ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Rapprochement between China and the US meant that the Soviets were left to carry alone the burden of countering a rampant America. That burden eventually bankrupted her.19
Time magazine called it ‘The ping heard round the world.’ Granted, better relations between China and the US were inevitable. But they were undoubtedly helped along by a fortuitous encounter on a bus. In his memoirs, Kissinger praised the extraordinary proficiency of the Chinese in the game of power politics. Their skill came in making ‘the meticulously planned appear spontaneous’. The perfect example, he feels, was the invitation to the American ping-pong team. ‘Only Mao could have ordered this. And only Zhou could have orchestrated it.’ While that is true to an extent, neither had the power to make Cowan board that bus, or to make Zhuang decide to be friendly. Those two men forced open a door that had been jammed for years. As Zhou once said, ‘A ball bounced over the net and the whole world was shocked. The big globe was set in motion by a tiny globe – something inexplicable in physics but not impossible in politics.’20
Zhuang’s life reveals in microcosm China’s turbulent history. He spent much of the Cultural Revolution in prison, watching fellow players driven to suicide. Rehabilitation came when Mao decided that table tennis was useful on the world stage. As a reward for his gesture on that bus, he became a hero and was eventually made Minister for Physical Culture and Sport. After Mao’s death, however, he again found himself caught in the crossfire of political rivalry. The former government minister became a street sweeper and was then thrown in jail for wearing a Swiss watch. Driven to despair, he tried to hang himself in 1977. When China returned to her senses in the 1980s, he enjoyed another rehabilitation and restoration of his heroic status.
Today, the collectivist Chinese celebrate the individual heroics of Zhuang. In contrast, in America, where celebrity worship is a religion, but fame often fleeting, Cowan was quickly forgotten. He did not take part in the return visit of the Chinese team to the US in 1972. That year, he was diagnosed as bipolar. The erratic behaviour that had once been his greatest asset became instead a dangerous liability. During the 1980s he drifted from job to job, eventually finding himself homeless. When he died of a heart attack in 2004 hardly anyone noticed. ‘He was like a comet,’ says Robert Lange, his former doubles partner. ‘Flashed through the sky and then gone.’ Quite understandably, he found it difficult to be a shoe salesman after he’d helped open the door to China. ‘After China, everything seemed to be useless,’ Tannehill feels. ‘How could you do better than world peace?’21
Kinshasa: The Rumble in the Jungle
‘I belong to the world, the black world,’ Muhammad Ali once boasted. ‘I’ll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia.’ Around the globe, blacks and whites bought that line. In the process, he became the most famous, and widely loved, sportsman in history. He was, as he claimed, ‘the Greatest’.22
But what made him great? Boxing, yes, but also self-promotion. Ali was the king of hype, a man so skilled at selling himself that most people bought the pig without ever looking in the poke. As he grew older, he became immune to criticism, despite the profound contradictions in the saintly persona he constructed. No other hero has been so obsessed with the need to indulge in vulgar boasts about how many people love him.
By 1970, he was already a martyr – the cruel victim of American racism. He refused to serve in Vietnam supposedly because he was a pacifist, yet his pacifism was paper-thin. At one point he claimed that he should not have to serve since he was more valuable as a professional boxer than as a GI. ‘I buy a lot of bullets, at least three jet bombers a year, and pay the salary of fifty thousand fighting men with the money they take from me after my fights.’23 When he realized how selfish that line sounded, he abandoned it for an objection based on religion. His pacifism was opportunistic – he objected not to war, but to a specific war. His conscientious objection was an insult to those with a real conscience.
In 1967, Ali was banned from boxing because of his refusal to serve in Vietnam. Beaten by ‘the system’, he was widely reviled in his own country. Then, on 28 September 1970, a federal judge ordered that his boxing licence be restored. In the intervening period, America had turned against the war, rendering Ali’s faux pacifism commendable. He emerged from purdah a hero.
A contest against Jerry Quarry was arranged for 26 October. ‘I’m not just fighting one man,’ Ali remarked. ‘I’m fighting a lot of men, showing them here is one man they couldn’t conquer. Lose this one, and it won’t just be a loss to me. So many millions of faces throughout the world will be sad.’ He did not lose.24
The title stripped from Ali had meanwhile been won by Joe Frazier. He was reluctant to fight Ali, but after the Quarry bout, could not refuse. Since Ali had identified himself as the champion of Black Power, that meant that Frazier could be cast as a traitor to blackness. ‘Frazier’s no real champion,’ Ali claimed; ‘98 per cent of my people are for me. They identify with my struggle. Same one they’re fighting every day in the streets. If I win, they win. I lose, they lose. Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an Uncle Tom.’25
Because Ali was the acknowledged champion of blacks around the world, to criticize him became politically unacceptable – the definition of racism. This gave him enormous freedom. He called Frazier ‘an ignorant gorilla’ – a statement which, uttered by anyone else, would have been condemned as racist or cruel. ‘Joe Frazier is too ugly to be champ. Joe Frazier is too dumb to be champ. The heavyweight champion should be smart and pretty like me.’26
Frazier grew up in dire poverty in South Carolina. If the prerequisite to Black Pride was struggle, he was a card-carrying member of that club. Yet through no fault of his own, he became a pariah. Ali’s glorious martyrdom had the unfortunate side-effect of blighting the career of a man who, under normal circumstances, would have been recognized as a decent man and a sublime boxer.
Having conquered the kingdom of blackness, Ali ruled it like a despot. Those who defied him were traitors. In Sport Illustrated, a rather brave Mark Kram commented:
The disputation of the New Left comes at Frazier with its spongy thinking and push button passion and seeks to color him white, to denounce him as a capitalist dupe and a Fifth Columnist to the black cause . . . Among the blacks there is only a whisper of feeling for Frazier, who is deeply cut by their reaction. He is pinned under the most powerful influence on black thought in the country. The militants view Ali as the Mahdi, the one man who has circumvented what they believe to be an international white conspiracy.
Frazier later reflected: ‘Calling me an Uncle Tom, calling me the white man’s champion. All that was phoniness to turn people against me. He was helping himself, not black people. Ali wasn’t no leader of black people.’ He might as well have shouted into the wind. The all-powerful Ali had turned the contest into one of black vs. white. Those who hated Ali drifted to Frazier, including a sordid collection of bigots who still wanted Ali in army green.27
The only thing Ali could not control was what happened in the ring. On 8 March 1971, after fifteen punishing rounds, Frazier stood victorious. To many, that triumph seemed emblematic of the cynical Seventies, proof that the heavenly decade had passed. ‘Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand – at least not out loud,’ wrote Hunter Thompson. By the same reasoning, revering Ali seemed one way to preserve a golden past. Thus, despite his failure, his reputation did not suffer. He still called himself the Greatest and the multitude bellowed agreement.28
Fourteen fights followed, only one of which Ali lost. Then, in January 1974, came a rematch with Frazier, a contest now lacking some of its lustre since Frazier had earlier lost his title to George Foreman. Ali won a unanimous decision after twelve rounds, thus opening the door to a match with Foreman. That fight promised to be so much more than a contest between two superb boxers. Every punch would carry a political message. Foreman, after all, had proudly waved an American flag after his victory in the 1968 Olympics, when other blacks had been demonstrably unpatriotic.
The Ali–Foreman fight was scheduled to take place on 30 October 1974 in Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville, a place still haunted by the murder of President Patrice Lumumba, a Sixties socialist icon dwarfed only by Che. The Congo, now called Zaire, was ruled by Joseph Mobutu, the quintessential African despot and architect of Lumumba’s demise. For him, the fight was an opportunity to shine a bright light on his fiefdom. Sporting events are often used as opportunities to swagger; Mobutu simply took that phenomenon and multiplied it exponentially. Sadly, the Rumble in the Jungle was a party Zaire could not afford. Every dollar paid to Ali and Foreman was stolen from the mouths of starving Congolese.
For many blacks, Zaire was sacred simply because it was Africa. ‘The whole thing was being done by black people for black people, and Muhammad Ali was at the center of it all,’ wrote Lloyd Price. ‘It . . . [was] the perfect thing to do. Everything was starting to feel different. Black people were rising up and feeling proud.’ Given that assumption, sordid details could be ignored. The fight was to be held in a huge, brutally ugly stadium, a testament to Mobutu’s poisonous ego. In the basement below the ring were foetid cells in which political prisoners were mercilessly tortured. ‘The floor beneath the floor’, Norman Mailer admitted, ‘was covered in blood.’ If Ali was aware of that fact, one wonders why he agreed to the fight. If he was unaware, one wonders how he could claim to represent oppressed blacks everywhere. Ali would never have agreed to fight in South Africa, yet that regime’s oppression was mild compared to Mobutu’s. Ali seems to have been unaware that blacks can tyrannize blacks and that cruelty is not monochromatic. Ali was the master of profound political gestures, yet on this occasion he failed to use his celebrity to expose a tyrant.29
The fight also witnessed the emergence of the promoter Don King. After serving four years in prison for murder, King began systematically to impose his will on the sport of boxing, eventually dragging it into the gutter in which it wallows today. In promoting the fight, King brought together a rogues’ gallery of investors, which included the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The world got the fight it wanted, but the price was outrageous.
Foreman, a huge man, younger and more formidable than Ali, was the overwhelming favourite, making Ali an unaccustomed underdog. He took to that role with gusto. The old banter about how he was going to whup his opponent continued, but at the same time Ali felt safe in the knowledge that he did not have to win because he was not expected to do so. The match became one of the greatest moments in the history of sport because that is what everyone willed it to be. Ali was David to Foreman’s Goliath, his reputation enhanced by the glow of martyrdom. As with Frazier, he attacked Foreman’s blackness. Foreman was an interloper, a man who did not belong. ‘He’s in my country!’ Ali shouted, and the adoring crowds bellowed approval.30
Most of the world had long revered Ali; most of America had recently joined the chorus. In this sense, the match was more than just a heavyweight championship; it was also an assertion of truths Americans now found evident, namely that blacks were oppressed and that the Vietnam War had been immoral. ‘I’m not fighting for fame or money,’ Ali claimed before the fight. ‘I’m not fighting for me. I’m fighting for the black people on welfare, the black people who have no future, black people who are wineheads and dope addicts. I’m a politician for Allah.’ The purse, by the way, was $10 million, split evenly. Justifying that amount, Ali quipped: ‘Countries go to war to put their names on the map and wars cost a lot more than 10 million dollars.’ Fans enthusiastically swallowed that huge plate of tripe.31
The way the match was fought lent credence to the epic scenario Ali had crafted: he suffered terribly for seven rounds, soaking up all the punishment Foreman could deliver. Midway through the eighth round, he went on the offensive, putting his tired and frustrated opponent on the canvas with a savage left–right combination. The fight was suddenly over, justice had been done, and Ali was again champion.
The world rejoiced. ‘I think it was the sort of joyous reaction that comes with seeing something that suggests all things are possible,’ wrote George Plimpton in Sports Illustrated. And
the triumph of the underdog, the comeback from hard times and exile, the victory of an outspoken nature over a sullen disposition, the prevailing of intelligence over raw power, the success of physical grace, the ascendance of age over youth, and especially the confounding of the experts. Moreover, the victory assuaged the guilt feelings of those who remembered the theft of Ali’s career.
What followed was both coronation and redemption. Americans, now hopelessly in love with Ali, celebrated him with an enthusiasm withheld when he first beat Sonny Liston in 1964. Guilt magnified adulation. Endorsement offers flooded in, as businesses suddenly abandoned scruples about black Muslims promoting their products. Nearly every periodical which had anything to do with sport (and a good number which didn’t) named him person, boxer, or sportsman of the year.32
Ali is an empty vessel into which, over the years, have been poured the dreams of various constituencies. He did not change all that much between 1964, when he was a Muslim pariah, and 1974, when he became the hero of a nation. The United States, however, changed immensely during that period. It changed in a way that allowed accommodation and, in time, veneration of what had once seemed profane. By 1974, the race riots associated, rightly or wrongly, with Ali’s brand of Black Power were over. American participation in the war in Vietnam had also ended. The war itself was widely seen as a mistake. Those who had resisted the draft were folk heroes while those who had protested credited themselves with bringing the war to an end. Ali harmonized perfectly with the new zeitgeist. ‘The Ali that America ended up loving was not the Ali I loved most,’ the football star Jim Brown complained. ‘The warrior I loved was gone. In a way, he became part of the establishment.’33
Ali became an icon because his features were so simply drawn; a more complicated individual would have revealed too many points of contradiction to satisfy such a large and varied constituency. He was a product of the media age, a hero of loud noise and beautiful presence but not a man of depth. He suited perfectly the simplification of politics and the shallow tendency to assign heroic status to the man who shouts the right lines loudest. Ali’s admirers like to think that, in his heyday, the fighter reached beyond himself. He certainly made himself into a hero for oppressed people around the world. But a hero is a different thing than a leader. A leader would have confronted Mobutu by refusing to fight in his noxious fiefdom. The great problem with Ali was that it was a great deal easier to admire the man than to do something about the issues he supposedly symbolized. Loving Ali could be passed off as positive political action when it was nothing of the sort. That ultimately was the tragedy of the Rumble in the Jungle – a shallow and rather sordid boxing match marketed as a triumph of justice. No one bothered to look in the basement, where the blacks Ali claimed to represent were cruelly tortured, their screams muffled by the tumultuous ovation showered upon The Greatest.
Houston: The Battle of the Sexes
In the early spring of 1973, Margaret Court and Billie Jean King, the two dominant players on the women’s tennis circuit, found themselves sharing a hotel elevator in Detroit. ‘I’m going to play Bobby Riggs,’ Court abruptly announced. King’s jaw dropped.
Riggs was a fifty-five-year-old former Wimbledon champion. Over the previous year, he had openly derided women’s tennis, underlining that derision by challenging top players to a match. A small man with a huge ego, he sought to humiliate them in order to cast a light upon himself. He ensnared Court by offering $10,000, win or lose. At a time when most players on the women’s circuit had difficulty covering their expenses, it seemed like easy money. ‘That’s not enough,’ King protested, ‘and besides, this is not about tennis.’ Court, a political novice, struggled to understand the fuss. ‘Margaret,’ King shouted, ‘I’m just going to ask one thing of you: You have to win this match.’ Court nodded. ‘No, I mean it. You have to win this match. You have no idea how important it is.’34
Riggs’s preferred opponent was King, the main object of his vitriol. An outspoken campaigner for women’s rights, both on and off the court, she was instrumental in the founding of the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973. In that same year, after considerable pressure from King, US Open officials had agreed to offer equal prize money to men and women. All this annoyed Riggs. Since he equated entertainment value with physical power, he could not accept that female players deserved equal shares. He sought to prove his point by showing that even a long-retired professional had more to offer than the best females. A match might, he hoped, embarrass and silence the annoying Billie Jean. Because she understood his intent precisely, she recognized its danger. ‘Our reputation is at stake,’ she told friends. ‘We have nothing to gain.’35
King was a bulldog, Court a lamb – in this case one destined for slaughter. Politically conservative, deeply religious and astonishingly naive, she saw no need for feminism. ‘I always felt your gift made room for you . . . I didn’t feel you had to go over the top.’ When King formed the breakaway Virginia Slims tour in order to gain a fair deal for female players, Court stayed put, arguing that tennis was sufficiently lucrative. Because she did not recognize discrimination, she did not understand the political significance of playing Riggs. ‘I am not carrying the banner for Women’s Lib,’ she insisted before the match. ‘She didn’t get it. She just didn’t get it,’ King later remarked. ‘Margaret didn’t see the big picture.’36
Riggs began his match long before the first serve, wearing Court down with a relentless psychological barrage. He boasted that he would beat her with cleverness – dinked serves, drop shots and lobs. His trademark sexist banter was interspersed with occasional asides about the importance of the match. ‘Do you realize, Margaret, that this is the most important match ever played? Just think how many women are counting on you.’ Never grasping how Riggs was manipulating her, Court failed to adapt an effective defence. ‘With all the shouting and showbiz, I guess I was shocked,’ she later admitted.37
The match was played at a country club near San Diego on 13 May 1973 – Mother’s Day. By the second game, Riggs’s psychological machinations and annoyingly effective tennis had reduced Court to an emotional wreck. ‘I got her sidetracked,’ he explained later. ‘She was bewitched and bewildered.’ Court unwittingly played the straight man to his comedy routine, which everyone dubbed the Mother’s Day Massacre. The final score – 6–2, 6–1 – accurately reflected her humiliation. ‘I didn’t expect him to mix it up like that,’ Court confessed. ‘We girls don’t play like that.’ Riggs was not remotely surprised. ‘It went exactly as I thought. The whole thing was pressure.’ He added: ‘Now I want King bad. I’ll play her on clay, grass, wood, cement, marble, or roller skates. We got to keep this sex thing going. I’m a woman specialist now.’38
Watching the match, King felt her blood reach boiling point. All she had struggled for in women’s tennis risked being destroyed by Riggs’s mischief. She phoned her husband: ‘That’s it, I’ve got to play him. Larry, now we’ve got something to prove.’39
The Riggs cyclone arrived at a time of great turbulence in American gender relations. With dizzying quickness, feminism had changed from a noisy nuisance caused by a handful of rebels, to a mainstream movement posing painful questions for both sexes. Men found their patriarchal verities undermined, while women were confronted with injustice they had not heretofore noticed. For men in particular, but also for some women, Riggs represented a welcome reassertion of tradition. Those inclined to dismiss feminism as a load of nonsense saw him as their white knight, particularly because ridicule figured so prominently in his challenge. Cheers erupted when he argued ‘Women who can, do. Those who can’t become feminists.’40
Politics is usually not welcome in sport, but sport does provide an effective way to communicate political points to the unengaged masses. Riggs reduced a complicated gender issue to a simple contest. Though a match with King should not have had meaning beyond the tennis court, the context ensured that it did. The issue of women in sport had become highly contentious because of the passage of the Education Amendments Act in 1972. Title IX of that Act stipulated that no person could be excluded on the basis of gender from participating in any federally funded education programme. That clause was not originally intended to ensure greater participation of women in sport, but activists interpreted it that way. King, for instance, pointed out that, while she was at college, studies and tennis had to be shoehorned around the two jobs she needed to make ends meet. Her husband, in contrast, was given a tennis scholarship. Yet he was a very average player and she was already an international star. Giving teeth to Title IX, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) proposed regulations requiring federally funded institutions to offer women facilities and programmes comparable to those men enjoyed. For traditionalists within American college sports, that spelled doom – many feared that money earmarked for football would go to synchronized swimming. Caspar Weinberger, the HEW secretary, ignored those objections and forced through the regulations. King was delighted, but feared the Riggs match might endanger that progress. ‘I was nervous that maybe they would go back on Title IX if I lost that match. I know how things can change very quickly. And I knew the hearts and minds of people weren’t matching Title IX.’41
Feminists were split over the importance of Title IX. Many argued that women gained nothing by entering the macho world of sport. Competition implied adopting the worst attributes of men. The strength issue meant they would always come second. King profoundly disagreed. She believed that the benefits derived from athletic competition (both physical and emotional) were massively important to female self-esteem. In any case, competition could not be willed away simply because it contradicted the feminist worldview. A very practical feminist, she also argued that beauty and sex were important tools of communication. The first priority for women was to get noticed. ‘Sex is part of it . . . And it works in promoting sports. It’s not demeaning if it’s done with taste. It’s how attention works.’ While her ideas annoyed many feminists, they accorded with public opinion. At a time when most people were inclined to see feminists as dangerous rebels on the margins of society, King was busily mainstreaming gender issues. She was more interested in doors being opened than abstract principles being upheld.42
She was not, however, universally loved. Tennis fans preferred the dignified Court, or the charming Chris Evert. King’s outspoken nature and her relentless success seemed too masculine. This was especially true in 1971, when she became the first female player to make more than $100,000 in a single season. While that was a huge sign of progress for women in sports, the money nevertheless made it harder for her to complain about iniquities in women’s tennis, even though male players still earned more. As her star rose, so too did her vulnerability.
King and Riggs both understood the difficulties of fighting the tennis establishment. She campaigned against its sexism; he had fought its class snobbery. That struggle gave him the reputation of a battler, which he used to good effect. After his retirement, he satisfied his addiction to competition with huckstering – the naive were lured into bets they couldn’t possibly lose, but usually did. ‘Ride down the road with him’, a Time reporter related,
and he may bet you $100 that you would not jump out of the car and turn a quick somersault. Hole up in a hotel room with him and he will invent a betting game that involves tossing tennis balls over a curtain rod. Ask him to play golf with a tennis racket and he will not only oblige but win. Show up at one of his tennis matches and he may line you up for a side bet. Want to play him yourself? What kind of handicap do you want? A wet Bulgarian bear riding on his shoulders? A felled yak strapped to his side? One foot cemented to the court?
After retiring, Riggs briefly managed ‘Gorgeous Gussy’ Moran, the Anna Kournikova of the 1950s, famous for her frilly panties. Riggs lined up the less comely Pauline Betz to provide competition, but she proved too talented. Spectators felt cheated when Gorgeous Gussy was beaten. Riggs offered Betz a bribe to quit the tour, but she refused. When Riggs took a razor to Gussy’s panties, in an attempt to increase their allure, the arrangement went sour. Her objections convinced him that she did not really understand the point of women’s tennis. As Riggs saw it, the women’s game could not be profitable unless it was decorative. Spectators who wanted action would surely prefer men.43
In a lament crafted for every hard-luck misogynist, Riggs alleged that his wife, Priscilla, had deserted him after she had been ‘turned’ by feminism. ‘She began reading books about Women’s Lib, and she had liberal friends. I began to get all that stuff about “I want to discover who I am.”’ Like much of what Riggs said, the story was nine-tenths fabrication, designed for middle-aged male fans. As he boasted, ‘I’ve got Bobby’s battalions all over the country, the over-45 guys who want to see one of their own make it big.’ Sexist lines like ‘Women should keep their biscuits in the oven and their buns in the bed’ had precisely the same effect. The real Riggs was probably not quite that sexist, but the real Riggs stayed indoors. Since he lived life as a game, he seldom felt the need to be serious. He was, one reporter decided, ‘the most notorious, obstreperous and . . . obnoxious 55-year-old adolescent in the land’.44
Riggs ‘was a middle-aged divorced man who knew nothing about women’s liberation’, his son John admitted. ‘He was rather simple-minded when it came to politics and world issues.’ While he cleverly couched his challenge to King as a swipe at feminism, it was, in truth, all about himself. He was an attention junkie uncomfortable with growing old. ‘He wanted to be important again,’ his son admits. To that end, he tried to defy the ageing process by hooking up with a Hollywood nutrition specialist. The prescribed programme involved 450 pills a day. Prior to the Court match, he also adhered to a rigid training regime which included jogging and playing tennis six hours each day.45
‘Riggs is the Muhammad Ali of the Geritol set,’ the promoter Jerry Perenchio boasted. ‘The Ali–Frazier fight was “The Fight”. This is “The Match”.’ Perenchio was himself a measure of just how big the match was, since ‘small’ did not exist in his vocabulary. The president of Tandem Productions, he had earlier been involved in the Ali–Frazier fight and was a producer of All in the Family, Sanford and Son and Maude, three of television’s biggest sitcoms. Perenchio persuaded ABC and UPI to pay $750,000 for the TV rights, fifteen times what NBC paid to cover the 1973 Wimbledon championships. Advertising went for $50,000 a minute. The purse was $100,000, winner take all, plus $150,000 to each player in ancillary rights. King demanded a five set match, partly to make a point about female strength, but also in the hope that her stamina would tell. That delighted ABC, since it meant more airtime.46
‘I’ve played Billie Jean a dozen times in my mind,’ Riggs boasted. ‘Nothing she can do will be unexpected.’ He delighted in his self-assigned role as a one-man wrecking ball out to destroy the reputation of women’s tennis. ‘After Billie Jean’, he bragged, ‘it’ll be hot-and-cold running women, it’ll be the Super Bowl or Rose Bowl of tennis, the Riggs spectacular once a year – the best woman player of the year, that’s the one who’ll have to play Bobby Riggs.’ That, of course, all depended on beating King, but Riggs was supremely confident. He sounded exactly like Muhammad Ali:
Billie Jean King is one of the all-time tennis greats, she’s one of the superstars, she’s ready for the big one, but she doesn’t stand a chance against me, women’s tennis is so far beneath men’s tennis, that’s what makes the contest with a 55-year-old man the greatest contest of all time . . . You may want to ask me if I have a game plan for Billie Jean. I don’t need a game plan. I’ll let her start something and I’ll finish it. I have such a vast assortment of tennis weapons in my arsenal that I can handle anything she can throw at me. I’ll psych her out a little bit. I’m psyching her out already, she won’t admit it but I can see her coming apart at the seams already . . . She’ll choke just like Margaret did.
‘I was terrified,’ King later admitted. While Riggs had endless fun, she was engaged in a deadly contest – sadly, the most important she would ever face. ‘My stomach would be going in knots. Just to think about it, it was like whoa, in the bottom pit of your stomach. Oh my God. I can’t lose. I’ve got to win.’ She later reflected: ‘It was not about tennis. It was about social change. It was about changing a way of thinking, about getting women athletes accepted.’ To her intense dismay, she discovered that her comrades on the women’s circuit, while vigorously voicing support, were quietly placing bets on Riggs.47
Court had remained polite, returning Riggs’s banter with a smile. King was incapable of composure. ‘He’s not going to jive me,’ she spat. ‘If he gets too dirty, I can get tough too.’ She gave the public the grudge match it wanted – a genuine battle of the sexes. ‘That creep runs down women. That’s why my feeling is like – hate . . . I hate him for putting down women, not giving us credit.’ That took Riggs by surprise; no one had ever taken him so seriously. ‘Please don’t call me a creep. You don’t mean it.’ ‘Creep,’ she replied.48
King prepared obsessively, combining intense physical training with lengthy strategy sessions. Riggs, in contrast, had fun. For two months he held court at a friend’s Beverly Hills mansion, a sybarite’s paradise with wall-to-wall women. ‘Instant fame has done a lot to improve my social life,’ he remarked with a lascivious grin.49 The house had a tennis court, but Riggs used it mainly for photo shoots. ‘From the time he beat Margaret, he didn’t pick up a racket for four months,’ his son confessed. ‘I said, “Dad, we need to practice.” It was always, “I need to do this interview,” or that “I need to do that TV show.” I kept telling him, “Dad, you’re going to get killed.” He kept saying, “I know what I’m doing.”’50 As a journalist noted, ‘There were too many blondes to squeeze, too many reporters to hustle, too many products to hawk.’ His confidence meanwhile remained high. ‘I don’t need to practice for Billie Jean King. She’s terrible. She’s got no forehand. She slices the ball, and comes to the net; I’ll lob over her head. No problem.’51
King, like Riggs, understood that tennis, despite the political importance of this match, was still entertainment. She realized that she needed to impress the enormous number of viewers who had never watched a match before. A special dress, full of sequins, was ordered from the famous designer Ted Tinling, and blue suede tennis shoes were custom made by Adidas. When Perenchio suggested that she be brought to the court on a Cleopatra-style litter, complete with huge orange and red feathers and a gold lamé throne, carried by six muscle-bound athletes, she surprised him by agreeing. ‘It was lights, showtime, and glitter. I loved that stuff.’52
On 20 September 1973, 30,492 fans flooded into the Houston Astrodome to watch the libber face the lobber. No larger crowd had ever attended a tennis match. The television audience was estimated at 90 million, also a record. ABC rolled out its big gun, Howard Cosell, the sportscaster made famous for his verbal jousts with Muhammad Ali and his idiosyncratic commentary on Monday Night Football. King’s friend Rosie Casals, hired to play the shrew, flanked him. ‘The producers told me exactly what to say . . . They wanted me to play a certain role.’ The former tennis professional Gene Scott was, in contrast, brought along to provide calm, masculine solidity.53
King arrived on her litter, while Riggs was brought in on a glittering red rickshaw, surrounded by his aptly named Bosom Buddies. As arranged by Perenchio, he presented her with a giant Sugar Daddy lollipop; she gave him a piglet. In a pre-match interview, Riggs boasted: ‘I’m going to try to win for all the guys around the world who feel, as I do, that the male . . . is supreme.’ King was more restrained, mentioning that she was well-prepared and that Riggs probably was not. ‘He’s been living a pretty fast life.’54
The pattern of the match was clear by the fourth game. King unleashed a ferocious backhand down the line that Riggs just managed to reach but couldn’t possibly control. That one shot proved that King would not be intimidated. At 4–4 in the first set, Riggs looked doomed. He had depended upon overwhelming King psychologically, yet that wasn’t happening. His tricks weren’t working. He needed a lopsided victory, but got a brawl. While the score suggested an evenly fought match, Riggs lacked the stamina for a long struggle. Looking crestfallen, he started making unforced errors, something he had depended on King to do. Serving to stay in the match at 4–5, he double faulted on set point. Instead of rattling King’s nerves, he was unravelling.
The rest of the match proved a fait accompli. Riggs tried desperately to hang on, but found himself trying to board a train already gathering speed. The second set followed the pattern of the first, with Riggs losing 6–3. Cosell was perplexed:
Funny, going into the telecast, one couldn’t be sure how to treat it. Would it be high humour? Well, of course it couldn’t be all that because too many women in this country were taking this match seriously in the wake of all of Bobby’s talk and in the way he victimized Margaret Court. But it would seem there would be a mixture, some antics on the court by Bobby. None of this has so far eventuated. It has not been a comic night for Bobby.
Riggs found the gap steadily widening. Down 2–4 in the third set, he took an injury break in a last act of desperation. He frantically munched vitamins, gulped water and, ever the promoter, unwrapped a Sugar Daddy. None of that helped. The final score was again 6–3. It was, as Time remarked, ‘a mixed singles mismatch between one excellent tennis player in her prime and another champion pathetically past his. To make matters worse . . . the psycher seemed to become the psychee.’55
‘I underestimated you,’ Riggs whispered when they shook hands at the net. That was true, but also irrelevant. One can speculate on what a fit Riggs, prepared as he had been for the Court match, might have achieved. But he wasn’t fit, for the simple reason that it hadn’t seemed necessary. ‘It was like Bobby finally realized that the final exam was here and he hadn’t studied for it,’ his friend Lornie Kuhle remarked. Hubris had defeated him. That attribute was as relevant as his forehand or serve, since this was not just a contest between two tennis players, but between two agendas. His lack of preparation was typically male, a manifestation of his sense of entitlement As his son admitted: ‘Bobby was perfect, perfect for Billie Jean King . . . The guy was a bigmouth and put his foot in it . . . Wouldn’t train. Wouldn’t work out. Overconfident. Played her in her backyard with her own balls, her own court. The idiot just stepped right into her trap.’56
Sports Illustrated captured the gravity of what had happened: ‘What in the world kind of occasion was this in which the woman not only defeated the man but swamped him: outplayed and beat the living bejeezus out of him as well? Perhaps it was something like life. Or death.’ ‘How did Bobby play?’ King was asked. ‘He played like a woman – like a lot of the women I’ve beaten on tour.’ For his part, Riggs had the good grace to turn off the hype: ‘She was too good. She played too well. She was playing well within herself, and I couldn’t get the most out of my game. It was over too quickly.’57
The match was a snapshot of the times. As Time commented: ‘Five years ago these superheated matches could not have happened, and five years from now they would not mean anything.’ So much of America was condensed into a single night at the Astrodome. Serious politics danced with garish spectacle. But, as the pragmatic King understood, the hype was essential because it drew attention to an important point. Glamour provided an exclamation point at the end of a sentence describing how the world had changed. ‘What began as a huckster’s hustle in defiance of serious athleticism’, wrote Curry Kirkpatrick in Sports Illustrated, ‘ended up not mocking the game of tennis but honoring it. This night King was both a shining piece of show biz and the essence of what sport is all about.’58
Donna de Varona, the Olympic swimming champion turned sports commentator, agreed: ‘The guy was older and was this and that, but the truth is, it was a worldwide movement that needed a finishing sentence. And Billie Jean King gave it to us.’ That took immense courage. Riggs could walk away having lost nothing, except perhaps the big paycheck he would have earned from playing Evert. King, however, had so much more at stake. ‘You felt this was a symbolic match that was going to be used against women and to humiliate them if Billie Jean lost,’ the feminist Gloria Steinem remarked. ‘And for her to take that on, to put herself under that pressure, is the true meaning of heroism.’ King’s most important match was not about tennis at all. ‘This was about history,’ she remarked, ‘getting us on to a more level playing field . . . all that was very close to my heart.’ Reflecting on the match thirty years later, she found that the importance had not faded: ‘The little boys that were watching, that are in their 40s now and early 50s, I call them the first generation of men of the women’s movement. I can’t tell you how many men have come up to me to tell me: “Billie, that match changed my life.” These men are the first to insist that their daughters and sons have equal opportunities, and that’s amazing.’59
According to the KGB, Bobby Fischer was a psychopath. Though that might have been an exaggeration, he was certainly mentally unstable, his psychosis contained by the sixty-four squares on a chessboard. Competitive chess, in other words, kept him sane. When he quit playing, madness descended. For a brief period in 1972, however, his mental instability proved useful to his country. Fischer became a Cold War hero.
He played like an assassin, combining cold logic with ruthless brutality. ‘Chess is war over the board,’ he once said. ‘The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.’ He achieved this by scorning predictability – the unwritten rules of competitive chess were contemptuously broken. While opponents played for safe draws, he ferociously attacked, usually to good effect. At the board, he oozed disrespect, playing as if his opponent did not exist. ‘I like the moment when I break a man’s ego,’ he sneered. Gary Kasparov called him a chess centaur – part human, part the very elements of the game. ‘A loss to Fischer’, wrote the New York Times, ‘somehow diminishes a player. Part of him has been eaten, and he is that much less of a whole man.’60
Fischer’s peculiar behaviour suggests a congenital disorder. At various times, he seemed a schizophrenic, a sociopath, or an autistic savant. Then again, his condition might have been acquired – he might have been driven mad. His neglectful mother, Regina, put her responsibility for saving the world above that of caring for her son. She was a communist and a Jew, characteristics enormously significant to her son’s emotional development. His legal father was Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist who abandoned his family before Bobby was born. His actual father was probably Paul Felix Nemenyi, a Hungarian Jewish physicist with whom Regina had an affair in 1942.
Nemenyi’s probable parentage is ironic given Fischer’s virulent anti-Semitism. He lived his life in revolt against his mother, particularly her Jewish roots and socialist politics. Indeed, his two hatreds – of communism and of Jews – eventually fused when he came to the conclusion that both were conspiring to take over the world. Soviet communism, he claimed, was ‘basically a mask for Bolshevism, which is a mask for Judaism’.61
In 1949, at the age of six, Fischer was given a cheap chessboard bought from a corner shop. He taught himself to play, and before long his obsession with the game crowded out all other aspects of his life. He performed poorly at school, probably because he did not see the point of anything other than chess. When a psychiatrist was consulted about this obsession, Regina was told that her son seemed perfectly normal. At the age of seven Bobby joined the Brooklyn Chess Club, immediately finding that only the most gifted adult players could challenge him. He later moved to the Manhattan Chess Club, one of the best in the world, where the master John Collins briefly provided a fatherly influence. His effect on Fischer’s game was, however, limited, since the young prodigy was already in a different orbit. ‘Nobody taught Bobby,’ Collins later admitted. ‘Geniuses, like Beethoven, Shakespeare and Fischer come out of the head of Zeus . . . they seem to be genetically programmed, know before instructed.’62
At the age of thirteen came a quantum leap in ability, what Fischer called the moment he ‘just got good’. In the Rosenwald Memorial Tournament, he beat the highly respected Donald Byrne, thirteen years his elder. Chess Review called it ‘The Game of the Century’. Experts drooled over the unique fusion of relentless aggression and poetic grace. ‘While we have learned to distrust superlatives, this is one game that deserves all the praise lavished on it,’ wrote Fred Reinfeld. When word reached the Soviet Union, the reigning world champion Mikhail Botvinnik remarked: ‘We will have to start keeping an eye on this boy.’63
By fourteen, he was US national champion, and a year later he became the youngest grandmaster in history. He continued attending school, but otherwise spent most of his time in the New York Public Library reading about chess. In 1959 he dropped out of school. ‘All I want to do, ever, is play chess,’ he explained. The deeper he became involved, the further he distanced himself from his mother. By 1962, he was living on his own, his mother preoccupied with her own obsession, a love affair with Russia.64
At the time of Fischer’s emergence, thirty-three of the eighty-eight grandmasters were from the USSR, as had been every world champion since 1937. For the Soviets, chess was a sublime expression of revolutionary spirit – a contest which demanded iron determination, self-discipline and cold rationality. It was, according to Vasilyevich Krylenko, creator of the Red Army, ‘a political weapon in the proletarian revolution’. Young prodigies were carefully groomed by grandmasters. Successful players became symbols of national pride and were given the sort of perks – high salaries, luxurious dachas, automobiles, food and clothing – usually reserved for atomic scientists, cosmonauts or senior military commanders.65
In the Soviet system, the team, not the individual, mattered. In tournaments, members cooperated to help a predetermined leader, rather like cyclists in the Tour de France. During the preliminary stages, they would erode the strength of outside challengers with long gruelling matches, in order to make life easier for their leader when he reached the final. Fischer, the lonely American, entered this milieu a solitary warrior fighting an entire army. He quickly grew disenchanted at having to endure a punishing sequence of contests, only to find a hand-picked champion waiting in the final, his strength still fresh because of matches arranged in his favour. To complain was to violate chess etiquette, yet complain Fischer did. ‘The Russians have fixed world chess,’ he told Sports Illustrated in 1962. His virulent hatred of communism was magnified by having to witness its cynical power first-hand. Individually, he insisted, ‘they have nothing on me, those guys. They can’t even touch me.’ The Soviets in turn dismissed Fischer as nyekulturni – ‘uncultured’. That criticism was appropriate, but so, too, was Fischer’s complaint. Grandmasters from outside the USSR had long been aware of Soviet tactics, but to complain about the situation was like lying down in front of a Red
Army tank.66
Despite his growing disillusionment, Fischer managed to carve a nice life for himself as a professional. Within his little world, he was a star. He did not, however, feel that his income matched his status. It seemed unfair that, despite being one of the best in the world at his game, he did not earn the kind of money champions in mainstream sports earned. Fischer wanted things: a Rolls-Royce, fancy clothes, a yacht, a private jet. He fantasized about owning a castle built to look exactly like a rook. When organizers refused his demands for more money, he grew increasingly bitter, and occasionally boycotted tournaments. ‘Bobby . . . wanted money because to him it meant that people thought he was important,’ the grandmaster Arnold Denker felt.67
A titan at the chessboard, Fischer was an emotionally stunted child away from it. ‘If you were out to dinner with Bobby in the sixties, he wouldn’t be able to follow the conversation,’ a former friend remarked. ‘He would have his little pocket set out and he’d play chess at the table. He had a one-dimensional outlook on life.’ Holed up in his apartment, he would play chess matches with himself that lasted for days. A board next to his bed meant that chess was his last act at night, his first in the morning. When a journalist asked how he spent his time away from the board, he replied: ‘There’s really nothing for me to do. Maybe I’ll study some chess books.’ Aware of his social inadequacies, he grew ever more inclined to hide among chess pieces. ‘Away from the board, Bobby suffered from a terrible inferiority complex,’ Allan Kaufman, one-time director of the American Chess Foundation, recalled. ‘In his mind he concocted lots of excuses: people were taking advantage of him; they were smarter than he was; if he had only had their education . . .’68
A tournament in Curaçao in 1962 reinforced his paranoia. After a series of gruelling round-robin matches, Fischer lost to Tigran Petrosian, chosen one of the Soviet team, and eventually finished a disappointing fourth. ‘I’ll never play in one of those rigged tournaments again,’ Fischer spat. ‘[The Soviets] clobber us easy in team play. But man to man, I’d take Petrosian on any time.’ Many years later, Nikolai Krogius, a Soviet grandmaster, admitted that Fischer’s complaints were valid. ‘There were some agreed draws at Curaçao.’ But the American player Arthur Bisguier, who accompanied Fischer to Curaçao, thought his complaints ‘absurd . . . just sour grapes’. During that trip, Bisguier witnessed Fischer passing time by systematically torturing insects. ‘There were other things of this sort. And it was scary. If he wasn’t a chess player, he might have been a dangerous psychopath.’ Fischer’s erratic behaviour also attracted the attention of the State Department, with questions raised about his suitability as a representative of America abroad.69
Angered by the Curaçao ‘fix’, Fischer retired from top-flight chess, switching to domestic events that he naturally dominated. His income plummeted, to the extent that he eventually took refuge at the YMCA. Removed from the controlled atmosphere of top-flight chess, he had time to indulge his delusions. His anti-Semitism grew more overt. ‘There are too many Jews in chess,’ he told Harpers magazine. ‘They seem to have taken away the class of the game.’ Late at night, according to Denker, he ‘prowl[ed] parking lots, slipping white-supremacist pamphlets under windshield wipers’. He read Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other anti-Semitic texts. A one-time friend recalls accompanying Fischer to a documentary about Adolf Hitler. Afterwards, ‘Bobby said that he admired Hitler. I asked him why, and he said, “Because he imposed his will on the world.”’70
Fischer returned to top-flight chess in 1966, played with erratic brilliance for about two years, and then left again in a huff. The decision by FIDE, the governing body of chess, to change the format of championships from round robin to knockout eventually tempted the star out of exile. He displayed no ill-effects from his absence, sailing through the qualifying stages of the 1972 world championship, and at one stage winning a world record nineteen games in a row, a feat that brought personal congratulation from Richard Nixon. Ahead of him was a showdown with Boris Spassky, superman of Soviet chess and reigning world champion.
The ‘clash of titans’ caused the world’s press to run short on hyperbole. Instead of a boring match between two Russians, the world would see the Cold War acted out on the chessboard, with ivory pieces becoming bombers and battleships. Fischer’s virulent anti-communism suddenly found perfect validation. ‘It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians,’ he said. ‘This little thing between Spassky and me. It’s a microcosm of the whole world political situation.’ For most Americans, those words were melody, the perfect expression of patriotism. But far from expressing love of country, Fischer was simply exercising the demons lurking inside his twisted mind.71
Fischer wanted the match to be played in Yugoslavia; Spassky preferred Iceland. Round one in the battle of wills went to the Russian when Reykjavik was selected. Fischer then threatened to pull out, on the grounds that the prize money of $125,000 seemed an insult. The contest tottered on the brink of collapse until the British chess enthusiast James Slater doubled the purse. Slater effectively challenged Fischer: ‘If he isn’t afraid of Spassky, then I have removed the element of money.’ Further pressure was applied by Henry Kissinger, who took time out from his troubles in Southeast Asia to remind Fischer of his duty. ‘This is the worst player in the world calling the best player in the world,’ Kissinger told Fischer. ‘America wants you to go over there and beat the Russians.’ ‘I told Fischer to get his butt over to Iceland,’ Kissinger subsequently boasted. Fischer, however, later maintained that Kissinger’s pressure had no effect – he supposedly refused to take his call.72
The championship seemed to bring together two perfect archetypes. Spassky, a quiet, urbane intellectual, was presented as the product of a system – the exemplar of the Soviet communal approach. Fischer, on the other hand, was the rugged individualist, the self-made man. These caricatures delighted promoters and television producers alike, but were, in truth, mere spin. Fischer, driven by hate, cared only for himself. ‘I am only interested in chess and money,’ he confessed. Spassky, on the other hand, was a decent man who found himself in a cockfight. Neither blind patriot nor doctrinal communist, he was simply a brilliant chess player who wanted the world championship to be a sublime contest between two chess-masters, not some fundamentalist brawl.73
‘Getting President Nixon and Mr Brezhnev together’, remarked the Guardian, ‘was child’s play compared with the Fischer–Spassky chess summit.’ After the wrangle over money was settled, Fischer fired complaints at tournament organizers like a mad sniper spraying bullets. The board was too shiny, the chairs too hard, the lights too bright, the cameras too close, the knight’s nose too long. For a while, it seemed that the championship would crumble under this fusillade of complaint. Then, quite unexpectedly, the match began and Fischer, clearly unsettled, made a series of stupid moves, gifting Spassky a win.74
Another torrent of complaints followed, most of them pertaining to television cameras and intrusive spectators. Keen to impose his will upon the tournament, Fischer refused to play the second game unless his demands were met. To his surprise, the organizers ignored him, granting Spassky a win by forfeit. Pundits speculated that Fischer was playing a clever psychological game, designed to unsettle his opponent. ‘I don’t believe in psychology,’ he countered. ‘I believe in good moves.’ That might have been true, but very few good moves had so far been played. If this was indeed a psychological gambit it was a very risky one, since Fischer was already down 2–0 against the best player in the world. The novelist Arthur Koestler, in Reykjavik to cover the match, coined the term ‘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-skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of others.’75
Keen to placate Fischer, Spassky consented to playing the next game behind closed doors. The Russian was flustered, evidence perhaps that Fischer’s antics were wearing him down. Fischer won relatively easily, after which the match was moved back into the auditorium. Though the complaints did not stop, order had nevertheless been restored, with the result that the main news now concerned movements on the board. The world was captivated. In America, televised matches on PBS attracted the largest audiences the public network had ever enjoyed. A surprising proportion of the viewers were not chess players.
The Daily Mail called it ‘SPASSKY SMASHKI’. With Fischer now winning, the Soviets took over the production of histrionics. Fischer, it was alleged, was being coached through a miniature radio receiver. Another variation on that theme came when it was claimed that the Americans were bombarding the room with radio impulses in order to scramble Spassky’s brainwaves. The room was swept for bugs and the furniture X-rayed, but all that was found were two dead flies in a light fitting. A sample of Spassky’s orange juice was sent to the Soviet Union to be tested for poisons. At one point a Soviet official circled the dais with an open plastic bag which was then carefully sealed, labelled ‘air from stage’ and sent for analysis.76
The sixth game was beautiful. Afficionados compared it to a classical symphony. Replay it today and even the novice can notice something decidedly strange. The game was supposed to pit two near-equals, but Spassky clearly seems at sea, while Fischer is in complete control, launching raid after audacious raid into the heart of the Russian’s defence. Ripped to shreds, the gentleman Spassky acknowledged the presence of genius and graciously joined in the applause at the end of the match. Fischer, feeling decidedly uncomfortable, rushed from the room, unable to handle kindness from a man he needed to despise.
After that pivotal game, the outcome was inevitable. The Soviet fortress could do nothing to stop the American juggernaut. Fischer grew ever more confident and contemptuous. When one game was adjourned with Spassky in a seemingly unassailable position, Fischer’s helper, Bill Lombardy, suggested that they meet back at the hotel to analyse possibilities for an escape. ‘What do you mean, analyze,’ Fisher spat. ‘That guy’s a fish. Let’s go bowling.’77
Fischer won 12½–8½, a score that does not adequately reflect how comprehensively Spassky had been beaten. The Soviets were dumbfounded, unable to explain why the ‘psychopath’ had won. Dark allegations of dirty tricks were muttered. ‘How come you yielded the crown to an American?’ a suspicious interior minister asked the head KGB man in Reykjavik, Colonel Baturinsky. ‘If I had my way, everyone who was . . . with Spassky would have been arrested.’ A delighted Fischer confessed that he never thought ‘there would come a day when chess would become headline news in our country and produce only a small comment in Pravda.’ He readily offered a remark calculated to please American propagandists. ‘The Russians had it all for 20 years. They talked of their military might and their intellectual might . . . It’s given me great pleasure . . . as a free person . . . to have smashed this thing.’ To believe that, however, required ignoring Fischer’s massive character faults. As one correspondent to the Washington Post wrote: ‘Fischer is the only American who can make everyone in the US root for the Russians.’ In the closing ceremony in Reykjavik, he refused to thank his hosts or say kind words about his opponent. Instead, he tore open the envelope containing his winner’s cheque, keen to make sure that the amount was correct.78
Fischer returned home a conquering hero, a man who, like Mark Spitz that same year, had demonstrated the superiority of the American system. With defeat looming in Vietnam, the match provided a boost to battered American pride. America was suddenly in love with Bobby Fischer – and chess. He was flooded with lucrative product endorsement offers and invitations to talk shows. Women swooned over an oxymoron – a chess player with sex appeal. Fischer, however, grew increasingly uneasy, perhaps realizing how shallow was American love. ‘The creeps are beginning to gather,’ he complained. When Nixon invited him to the White House, Fischer declined. He refused, he told friends, ‘because I found out that they wouldn’t pay me anything for this visit’. Later, after the fog of madness descended, he complained: ‘I was never invited to the White House . . . They invited that Olympic Russian gymnast – that little Communist, Olga Korbut.’79
Botvinnik once remarked that ‘chess is an art which illustrates the beauty of logic’. In that sense, the game makes an imperfect metaphor for real life, which is neither beautiful nor logical. Chess has defined boundaries and strict rules; life does not. Once Fischer moved away from the board, he found himself checkmated by the capriciousness of his world and the instability of his psyche. Champion quickly morphed into madman and America’s love dissolved.80
He retreated into the safe cloisters of the Worldwide Church of God, substituting fundamentalist religion for the certainties of chess. But the church was more interested in Fischer as poster boy than worshipper. They rewarded his celebrity with access to a private jet, a luxury apartment and fancy dinners, but the perks made it harder for Fischer to keep ugliness at bay. He’d craved escape from the creeps, but found creepiness multiplying exponentially. In 1977, he formally broke with the church, claiming that it was the tool of a ‘satanical secret world government’. He later complained about being fleeced. He was referring specifically to money, but also felt that his soul had been stripped.81
The world chess champion became a hermit who had foresaken the game. FIDE found a challenger for the 1975 championship in the form of another Russian, Anatoly Karpov. Fischer, however, refused to play, dismissing the entire Russian team as ‘the lowest dogs around’. Karpov consequently became champion by default. Those close to Fischer (and they were a diminishing number) desperately sought explanation for the forfeiture. ‘Bobby was always afraid of losing,’ Denker decided. ‘I don’t know why, but he was. The fear was in him.’ Shelby Lyman felt that the explanation lay in Fischer’s need to preserve unsullied a sublime moment in Reykjavik when he had single-handedly destroyed the Soviet chess machine. ‘Hating to lose, and having the myth destroyed’, Lyman felt, ‘was a big part of him not playing.’ Karpov offered his own explanation: ‘I don’t want to claim that Fischer was afraid of me. Most probably he was afraid of himself. He believed that the world champion has no right to make mistakes. But with such a belief you can’t play chess, because you can’t avoid mistakes.’ In truth, however, it is probably futile to try to provide rational explanation for reasoning warped by paranoia, fear and hate.82
His income dwindling, he moved into seedy hotels, an existence suited to the hermit he wanted to be. He complained that dark forces were trying to pollute his precious bodily fluids and became a fanatical consumer of quack potions, which he kept in a locked case that never left his side. ‘If the Commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them,’ he explained. Each bizarre act was quickly trumped by behaviour even weirder. At one point, he had the fillings in his teeth removed, explaining, ‘If somebody took a filling out and put in an electronic device, he could influence your thinking . . . I don’t want anything artificial in my head.’83
Reporters who managed to contact Fischer discovered a man more interested in Jewish ‘perfidy’ than chess. Jews, he claimed, were kidnapping Christian children and using their blood for satanic rites. The Holocaust was invented to make Jews filthy rich. Jews were cheating him out of book royalties and stealing his patents. A reporter who tried to talk chess was told: ‘We might as well get to the heart of the matter and then we can come back to chitchat . . . What is going on is that I am being persecuted night and day by the Jews!’ Chess was dismissed as ‘mental masturbation’. To the horror of his devoted fans, who still craved a god, he announced: ‘Not only is the game dead, it’s fixed.’84
A gaggle of Seventies tyrants, coveting the publicity a match would bring to their vile regimes, tried to lure Fischer out of retirement. Offers from Augusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos were all rejected. When a millionaire Francoist offered the unimaginable sum of $4 million for a match in Spain, Fischer scorned it as too little. Instead, he made ends meet by selling his celebrity like a street-corner hooker. A couple of thousand dollars could buy an hour on the phone with Bobby Fischer. A game cost $10,000. Fischer became the perfect gift for the person who had everything. Bob Dylan got an hour with the master as a gift from his manager.
In 1992, he agreed to a rematch with Spassky for the sum of $5 million. He won easily but incurred the wrath of the State Department by agreeing to play in Serbia. He became a fugitive from the law, a status perfectly suited to his persecution complex. Along with Jews and communists, Fischer now despised his native land. When Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, Fischer remarked: ‘This is all wonderful news. I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years . . . Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out . . . Death to the U.S.!’85
As the tirade continued, it became clear that the issue was not Palestine, Jews, or America, but Bobby Fischer. ‘Nobody has single-handedly done more for the U.S. than me,’ he spat. ‘When I won the world championship, in 1972, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, a baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country. I turned all that around single-handedly . . . But I was useful then because there was the Cold War, right? But now I’m not useful anymore. You see, the Cold War is over and now they want to wipe me out, steal everything I have, and put me in prison.’ The inclination to dismiss that statement as sheer lunacy is blocked by the bothersome germ of truth that lurks within.
‘Entertainment has become a necessity,’ proclaimed the Annual Report of Warner Communications in 1977. While that was a blatantly self-serving statement, it was inescapably true. Animal behaviourists have speculated that the otter’s remarkable playfulness might arise from the fact that it does not have to spend every waking minute in search of food. The same can be said of humans, another species with a surplus of spare time. As Warner added: ‘Having allowed technology to create the problem, man has begun using technology to redress it.’ No wonder, then, that the computer’s first direct intrusion into the lives of ordinary people came in the form of a game.86
Enter Nolan Bushnell – the perfect computer revolutionary. The new industry craved youth, and he was appropriately young. He also had a natural gift for electronics and the instincts of an explorer. While that suggests a typical computer nerd, Bushnell was not a typical member of the nerd-ocracy. What set him apart was business acumen – he was a natural entrepreneur who started in management at the age of fifteen when he was left to run the family business due to his father’s death. ‘It was extremely hard’, he confessed, ‘all of a sudden going from childhood to adulthood in 24 hours.’87
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are credited with bringing computers to the masses. But their revolution did not take hold until the 1980s. The person who first put ordinary people in front of computers was Bushnell, through a rather simple game called Pong. His computer could do only one thing, but was no less remarkable for that limitation. Pong was the first successful venture in an industry that would eventually transform entertainment. Fifteen years after its arrival, Americans would spend more on Space Invaders than they spent on space exploration.
The idea originated in 1958 when Walter Higinbotham, a physicist and veteran of the Manhattan Project, was searching for a gimmick to spice up the annual open house at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He programmed a small analogue computer to graph the trajectory of a moving sphere, which was then displayed on an oscilloscope. The device, called ‘Tennis for Two’, proved a huge hit, with visitors paying little attention to other exhibits. An improved version was unveiled the following year, to even greater acclaim. Unlike Bushnell, however, Higinbotham was not an entrepreneur. To him, the game was too simple to be special. He neglected to patent it, and, by 1960, had moved on to other things.
The games bug then spread to MIT, where boffins developed a tennis simulation, an electronic maze, and a computerized version of Tic-Tac-Toe. The arrival of a brand new Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 magnified their ambition. Three members of the self-proclaimed Tech Model Railway Club – Wayne Witanen, J. Martin Graetz and Steve Russell – teamed up to develop Spacewar. ‘We had this brand-new PDP-1,’ Russell recalls. ‘It was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there . . . the obvious thing to do was spaceships.’88
Their game, featuring two spaceships in deadly battle, was unveiled at the 1962 MIT Open House. Like Tennis for Two, it was a huge hit. Witanen, Graetz and Russell refused to patent the invention, however, since to do so violated the nerd’s moral code, which stipulated that ideas must be shared, to ensure development. In any case, Spacewar did not seem marketable, since it required a ‘micro’ computer the size of three refrigerators, which cost $120,000. Instead, the program was circulated around tech labs via ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet. Hackers – as they proudly dubbed themselves – would improve the program and then pass it on. Before long, an electrical engineer at MIT developed an easy way of manoeuvring the spaceships with a device he called a joystick. ‘The first few years of Spacewar at MIT were the best,’ industry journalist Albert Kuhfeld reflected in 1971. ‘The game was in a rough state, students were working their hearts out improving it, and the faculty was nodding benignly . . . The students [were] learning computer theory faster and more painlessly than they’d ever seen before.’89
Hackers might not have understood the consumer potential of their work, but Ralph Baer, a television engineer, did. In the early 1950s, he began thinking about how viewers might interact with television, instead of passively watching. His employers, however, pooh-poohed the idea, forcing Baer to confine his musings to his spare time. In 1966, he devised a single-purpose ‘computer’ which could be connected to a standard television set, allowing the viewer to play simulated ball games. Certain that his device would be compact and affordable enough for the general public, Baer applied for the first patent for a video game in 1968.
The major television manufacturers were at first sceptical. In 1971, however, Bill Benders, previously of RCA, joined Magnavox. He had witnessed a demonstration of Baer’s toy at a trade fair and decided to gamble. Baer had originally envisaged a simple system retailing for around $20, in which two players manipulating controls would propel a ball around a TV screen. The games could be changed by placing mylar overlays on the screen, thus transforming the ‘playing field’ from tennis court to hockey pitch, etc. Magnavox called the game Odyssey, added scorecards, dice, playing cards, play money and a fancy box, and slapped on a price tag of $100.
Promoted by Frank Sinatra, the game did reasonably well in its first year, selling 100,000 units nationwide. Sales were, however, limited by the common assumption that a Magnavox television set was essential – a misconception the manufacturer encouraged. Sales declined drastically after the first year, but big money was still earned in licence fees and legal penalties imposed on firms that plagiarized the technology.
One such pirate was Bushnell. In 1962, he was studying electrical engineering at the University of Utah, while also selling advertising. Finding he still had some spare time, he took an evening job at an amusement park, where he learned the gaming industry. Before long, he started a business selling equipment for fairground games. ‘It was kind of like an MBA, on-the-job training,’ he recalled. His dream was to combine his knowledge of amusement parks with his computer expertise and work for Disneyland, but that never happened.90
The university had a PDP-1, which allowed Bushnell to play Spacewar, an experience more formative than his actual studies. After leaving university, he embarked on a quest to adapt the concept onto a platform affordable as an arcade game. The big problem was not the technology, but attracting the financial backing. Investors seemed unaware that the computer age had arrived.
You’d go to these . . . multimedia conferences. And they’d say, ‘What’s the killer app?’ And I’d say: ‘Guys, the killer app for multimedia is games . . .’ And then they’d say: ‘But what’s really going to be important?’ . . . People would look at you like you had three heads. ‘You mean you’re going to put the TV set in a box with a coin slot and play games on it? Oh, and then you’re going to have people hook them up to their own TV set? Oh, I don’t think so.’
Stifled by this lack of imagination, Bushnell took a job at Ampex, the company that invented videotape, in Sunnyvale, California. In his spare time he perfected his version of Spacewar, with help from his Ampex colleague Ted Dabney. A breakthrough came when he discovered how to translate a game designed for an expensive computer onto discreet logic chips assembled on a circuit board. This meant that the ‘computer’ would have just one task and therefore needed relatively simple circuitry. That logic had not previously occurred to computer engineers, who wanted machines that could do more, not less.91
Bushnell sold his device to Nutting Associates, an arcade game specialist, who called it Computer Space. Effectively the first coin-operated computer game, designed for bars and arcades, it was unveiled at a Chicago trade fair in 1971, to a lukewarm reception. This lack of enthusiasm was partly due to the fact that buyers had never seen a video game before, but was mainly caused by the game’s complexity. Since the directions ran to a few pages and there were too many controls, it seemed beyond the capacity of the average barroom customer.
Despite the failure of Computer Space, Nutting remained keen on Bushnell. In May 1972, they sent him to a trade show in Burlingame, where Odyssey was unveiled. Though generally unimpressed, Bushnell was mildly charmed by the tennis game. His relations with Nutting subsequently broke down, however, convincing him to go it alone. He also left Ampex, taking Dabney with him. Both staked $500 in a new company called Syzygy, after the astronomical phenomenon in which the sun, moon and earth are in perfect alignment. That mouthful was jettisoned when Bushnell discovered that some hippies marketing candles had already claimed it. Syzygy became Atari, after a move in the Japanese board game Go.
Bushnell originally wanted Atari’s first venture to be a game of similar complexity to Computer Space. In the meantime, however, he assigned Al Alcorn, an engineer poached from Ampex who was new to video games, a simple task, namely the tennis game witnessed at the Odyssey demonstration. That was technically product theft, but Bushnell wasn’t worried. ‘He figured we’d rip off the idea . . . but so what?’ Alcorn recalls. ‘It’s no good, we’re not going to sell it, we’ll throw it away, so what harm is there, right?’92
Designing the game was easy. The difficulty lay in the detail, for instance showing the score on the screen, and adding sound. Bushnell wanted the roar of a crowd when a score occurred, but that proved too complex. Alcorn instead stuck with simple computer sounds that were already available and have since become iconic. He also added a speed function to make the ball gain pace, so that the game wouldn’t become too easy. ‘One of my lessons learned, is that if you can’t fix it, call it a feature,’ Alcorn reflected. ‘The paddles on the original . . . didn’t go all the way to the top. There was a defect in the [circuit] . . . I could have fixed it, but it turned out to be important, because if you get two good players they could just . . . play the game forever. And the game has to end in about three or four minutes otherwise it’s a failure . . . So that gap at the top, again
– a feature.’93
Within just three months, Alcorn created a beautifully simple and hopelessly addictive game. Bushnell was delighted. He put it in a wooden box, added a coin-operating facility, and called the game ‘Pong’ in imitation of its sound. In contrast to Computer Space, Pong had six simple words of instruction: ‘Avoid missing ball for high score’. The game was placed in Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale on 29 November 1972. Within a few days, the tavern manager phoned to report that the device had broken down. Bushnell investigated and found that the fault lay in the coin box which had overflowed with quarters.
That jammed coin box convinced Alcorn that a new age had dawned. ‘When we first put it in I said, “Nolan, what if it’s a good game, how will we know?” He said, “If it makes one hundred dollars a week that would be great.” Well, it made that within the first two or three days.’ In a stroke, they had created a new leisure pursuit and, arguably, a new addiction. ‘It was sheer luck!’ Alcorn feels. ‘It was not like “Oh yeah, we’re going to start a whole new industry.”’ He was flabbergasted: ‘I mean, we’re all 24 years old and have a tiger by the tail . . . We had no management experience, no business experience, we were just engineers, picking it up as we went along. To me personally, coming out of Berkeley in the 60s . . . I had no aspirations of being a capitalist pig or anything, but this was . . . fun.’94
Bushnell originally intended to sell the game to an established arcade game manufacturer. On the strength of that test run, however, he decided to do the manufacturing himself. He turned an old roller rink in Santa Clara into a factory and, within a year, sold 2,500 machines. Even though Pong was so much simpler than pinball machines already on the market, it seemed sophisticated and modern because it was electronic. That made it a huge hit in bars catering to students.
Pong’s strength was also its weakness; its simplicity made it easy to imitate. Bushnell could not prevent interlopers from invading his market, and they often had better production capacity. Since the basic technology was easily adapted to different game formats, scores of versions were soon available. Adding to Bushnell’s woes, Magnavox noticed the similarity to Odyssey. They sued, and Atari settled out of court, paying Magnavox $700,000.
Bushnell made huge mistakes, but still managed to make a living. Even though imitators poached his ideas, the market was big enough to accommodate a lot of manufacturers. Competitors could outproduce him, but he could out-develop them – they had the muscle, he the brains. Among the brains he hired was Steve Jobs, who, after hours, would sneak his friend Steve Wozniak into the factory to play the new games. Jobs tried to persuade Bushnell to enter the home computer market, but he declined. Before long, Jobs quit Atari and incorporated the lessons he had learned designing software and creating visually pleasing formats into his new company, Apple Computers, formed with Wozniak.
Production problems caused Atari to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy until 1975, with new games like Tank! and Breakout providing only brief rescue. A lifeline was thrown when the consumer giant Sears agreed to distribute Pong for the home market. The idea had earlier been offered to a number of big television manufacturers, but they were put off by the limited success of Odyssey. Tom Quinn, the buyer at Sears, initially ordered 50,000 units, but then increased that to 150,000 in time for Christmas 1975. The deal grossed $40 million in sales, with Atari earning $3 million. ‘[Sears] paid the bills, did all the advertising,’ Alcorn recalled. ‘It was the best thing that ever happened to us.’95
That success caught the attention of Time Warner, who bought the company in 1977 for $26 million. The original management team was left intact but, according to Alcorn, ‘all creativity . . . ceased’. Alcorn grew disenchanted when the ‘East Coast, effete intellectual people’ took over. Fear of failure stifled imagination. ‘They weren’t Silicon Valley, they weren’t start-up guys, they were not risk takers – so nothing came out!’ Bushnell instinctively understood that imagination and a sense of adventure were essential in the computer business – be it in games, software or hardware. Since Time Warner lacked those qualities, before long Atari withered. Bushnell felt that the problem was a lack of vision:
. . . no product looks like it’s going to be a billion-dollar seller when you first enter the market. If you say, we’re only going to market products that will sell $20 million or above, a lot of products don’t look like that . . . So, [Time Warner] essentially wouldn’t let anything out of the lab that didn’t match an unrealistic hurdle rate. And so, as a result . . . if you’re not introducing new stuff, you die. You wither. And it was really sad to see it.
Long before the demise, he jumped ship, a very rich man. He went on to found Chuck E. Cheese, one of the pioneers in the new field of entertainment restaurants designed for families.96
Meanwhile, the computer game industry took off, with fifty-three separate games released by fifteen companies in 1976. The growth was fuelled by Japanese manufacturers, who benefited from a huge demand in their home market. Japan’s obsession with video games came close to an epidemic. The release of Space Invaders by Taito in 1978 virtually caused riots across Japan and saddled the Japanese Treasury with a brief shortage of coins. Distributed under licence by Midway, Space Invaders had only slightly less impact in America. It broke the mould, expanding the venue for games from pool halls, taverns and arcades to restaurants, department stores, airports and train stations. Wider availability brought new legitimacy and an entirely new constituency of players.
Close on the heels of the video game revolution came critics worried about social decay. There was indeed cause for worry, given the time and money that customers (mainly young men) spent at the machines. Content was also a problem – before long the seamier side of human imagination filtered into games. Ads promised that Watergate Caper would ‘stimulate the larceny in all of us’. The leader in the bad taste stakes was Death Race 2000, a game inspired by the B-movie mogul Roger Corman. Players manoeuvred a vehicle which would chase down and run over tiny stick men, who, once hit, would be replaced by a little cross, which in turn became a new obstacle for the player. Sounds of screams added realism. The game appears tame by today’s standards, but once seemed a giant step on the road to hell.97
‘Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,’ Rolling Stone proclaimed in 1972. ‘That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.’ The magazine attempted to calm the fears of those who dreaded a modern version of Modern Times – man falling victim to manipulative electronic machines. A new lexicon was unveiled: words like network, interface, hardware, software and hacker took on unaccustomed meaning. Rolling Stone liked computers because they were revolutionary at a time when the old revolutionaries of communes and college campuses had gone quiet. ‘A young science travels where the young take it,’ the magazine argued. This new science belonged to hackers. ‘They are the ones who translate human demands into code that the machines can understand and act on. They are legion . . . A mobile new-found elite, with its own apparel, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting . . . what’s possible.’98
And what was possible? Hackers fantasized that someday all music could be stored on computer disk and accessed at will with ‘essentially perfect fidelity’. They were already communicating electronically through the ARPAnet. Some were developing a program for ‘processing’ words, which could ‘justify margins, incorporate corrections, handle illustrations, paging, footnotes, headings, indexing’. One young engineer fantasized about a ‘hand-held’ computer, which he called Dyna-Book. ‘It’s mostly high-resolution display screen, with a keyboard on the lower third and various cassette-loading slots, optional hook-up plugs, etc.’ Hackers loved that word ‘etc’ – a large container holding their dreams.99
‘Until computers come to the people’, the magazine concluded, ‘we will have no real idea of their most natural functions.’ Thanks to Nolan Bushnell, that process had already begun. The world would eventually credit Bill Gates with bringing PCs into people’s homes. But the fuse in this revolution was lit by Bushnell, who provided the first tiny hint of what a computer might do.100