Fischer’s mother and sister have died. His mother took to the grave an astonishing secret: Her son’s biological father was not her ex-husband, Gerhardt, but a Hungarian-born physicist, Paul Nemenyi, which whom she began an affair in 1942. Against Nemenyi’s wishes, Bobby was never told what the U.S. government must have known. For a quarter of a century, as Bobby was growing up, the FBI tracked Regina closely, suspecting her of being a communist agent. They documented every detail of her life: her political affiliations, her contacts, her movements. They investigated her telephone records and bank account details; they interviewed her neighbors and work colleagues. Dozens of special agents were involved, and scores of informers serviced them with information. Many of the FBI memos are from or to the then director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Given Bobby’s anti-Semitic and anticommunist obsessions, there is a poignant irony to the fact that his parents were communist sympathizers and that he is ethnically Jewish on both sides of his true parentage.[1]
Does he still play? With the advent of Internet chess, Fischer gossip began to circulate with ever-increasing velocity within the international chess community. On the Internet, many players—especially grandmasters—adopt a pseudonym as their “handle,” their Internet name. One reason for this practice is to prevent potential opponents from studying their games and detecting within them certain structures and patterns. There have been insistent tales of Fischer himself dabbling in cyberspace. An astoundingly successful “handle” is observed smashing opponents with consummate ease and the cyberwhispering begins: “Fischer is back.” The remarkable readiness with which these stories are embraced is akin to the eager anticipation of religious cult members awaiting a second coming. With his disappearance, the Fischer mystique has become part of chess lore, captured, for example, in the Hollywood film Searching for Bobby Fischer, about a father’s relationship with his talented son and the pressures of being compared to the former champion.
He invented a clock, the Fischer clock, the principal idea of which has rapidly gained currency in the chess community. Like many of Fischer’s proposals, its aim is to strip chess of risk as far as possible so that it is the better player who ultimately wins. With the conventional clock, a situation can occur in which a player has only one minute on the clock to make, say, ten moves—in such circumstances silly slip-ups are quite common. On the Fischer clock, each time a player makes a move, he or she is given more time. For instance, the clock may be set to give the mover an extra two minutes after every move. A mad time scramble is thus avoided.
To reenergize chess and to free it from the oppressive body of theoretical knowledge built up over decades, Fischer now advocates random chess, in which the pieces on the back row are shuffled at the beginning of each game. Random chess would force players to clear their minds of preparatory work and think about each game afresh. Fischer dreams of another Spassky rematch—this time at random chess. Spassky told the authors of this book that he would agree to one, “just for fun.”
Reykjavik changed chess itself. In the immediate aftermath of the 1972 match, a sudden fascination for the game brought salad days for the chess masters. Publishers sought them out to satisfy the appetite for information: A huge array of books appeared, from those targeted at the complete beginner to those aimed at the already accomplished. There were books on openings, books on the middle game, books on endings. There were books on tactics and books on strategy, books on how to beat the patzer and a book on how to beat Fischer. A number of instant books were released on the match. The first, by David Levy and Svetozar Gligoric, was on its way to the printing presses before the result had been officially declared, and went on sale in New York stores within twenty-four hours of the declaration. Gligoric had penned his final sentence immediately after his good friend Lothar Schmid let slip that Spassky had resigned by telephone. The one-hundred-thousand print run sold out rapidly.
The chess phenomenon was such that grandmasters, and even international masters, could now make a decent living. The prize money shot up for competitions; cash was to be earned from giving simultaneous matches, from writing, from coaching. Edmar Mednis turned professional along with several other top players. “During the first year subsequent to the match, it was as though money were falling from heaven.”
Soon after Reykjavik, San Francisco promoter Cyrus Weiss floated the idea of a professional chess major league, in which five teams across the United States would compete against one another in a series of televised matches. At the time, this seemed far from quixotic. Chess was entering the nation’s sporting bloodstream. A decade earlier, the U.S. Chess Federation had fewer than 10,000 members. Now there were over 60,000 and the rate of growth appeared to be carrying the numbers into orbit.
A generation of youngsters was stimulated to take up the game. The rise of Britain as a chess powerhouse can be traced back to Reykjavik. Nigel Short, who one day would challenge Garry Kasparov for the title, decided then, at age seven, that he would become a professional.
The match itself inspired the (then) most expensive musical ever staged, Chess, written by Tim Rice and the ABBA partnership of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. The idea for the musical had occurred to Rice shortly after Fischer’s victory: “The good guy was the Russian, who was meant to be the bad guy, and the bad guy was the American, who was meant to be the good guy. It was all very confusing and a perfect illustration of how politics creeps into everything.” His lyrics reflected this:
Again, this cold war aspect was singled out by a 1980s British pop group, the critically acclaimed Prefab Sprout, in their song “Cue Fanfare”:
However, in America, at least, the explosion of interest did not endure as long as the cold war. Although grandmasters have never quite returned to their earlier levels of impoverishment, within a few years the enthusiasm of promoters had begun to subside, and sponsorship money for tournaments to dry up. And just as Fischer had been primarily responsible for the boom, so, by disappearing from the scene, he was principally responsible for the bust.
Apart from Fischer, none of the Western participants benefited materially. Palsson was left financially worse off than before, though his house is rich in bulging scrapbooks. Paul Marshall never received a dime: “I guess being involved in such an intimate way in what turned out to be a world-shatteringly silly event, and the fact that it was good for dinner party conversations for the rest of my life, was probably enough of a fee.” Gudmundur Thorarinsson went on to serve as a member of Parliament for two terms—but failed to scale the political heights to which he had hoped the match would take him. Nevertheless, more than three decades on, he is still starry-eyed over the event he brought to Reykjavik: “People say this was the chess match of the century. It was not the chess match of the century. It was the chess match of all time.”