The U.S. Chess Federation then had only three thousand members, no national program to promote chess or train children, and only boasted one grandmaster, Samuel Reshevsky. His status netted him a grand total of $200 a month, a stipend meted out by a few admiring patrons. In addition, he made approximately $7,500 a year giving exhibitions and lectures. It was falsely rumored that he didn’t even own a chess set.
In many ways the looming match was analogous to a team of National Basketball Association all-stars playing a college team. There was always the possibility that the collegians would win, but statistically their chances would be much lower than a thousand to one.
On Wednesday, June 16, Bobby, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt, arrived at the Roosevelt Hotel escorted by Nigro, to witness the first round of the historic match. It was the first time the boy had ever been in a hotel, and he looked up at the large clock at the head of the stairs, then noticed some familiar faces entering the Grand Ballroom. He recognized various members of the Brooklyn Chess Club and also a few regulars from Washington Square Park. He dutifully took his seat in the auditorium, as though he were at the Academy Awards of chess, scanning the stage “wide-eyed with amazement,” as Nigro noted.
On the stage, in front of a velvet curtain, were two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the unmistakable and portentous crimson Soviet banner with its hammer and sickle. Beneath them, spanning the breadth of the stage, were eight demonstration boards, where the moves of the games were to be displayed. The eight tables, with chess sets and boards, were at the ready for the players. There were eleven hundred spectators, more than for any previous chess event in U.S. history.
And then there were the players, gathering onstage, waiting for the signal from the referee to take their places and commence their games. Soviet player David Bronstein asked for a glass of lemon juice—no, not lemonade, but real lemon juice, he insisted—which he downed in what looked like one gulp. Someone remarked that the Americans looked nervous, as indeed they should have: Aside from their previous two defeats to remind them of the odds against victory, there was the Soviets’ recent routing of the Argentine team in Buenos Aires and the French team in Paris. Donald Byrne, the United States Open champion, said he was so on edge that he spent the entire day before the match trying not to think of chess, reading the romantic prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Eventually, after some speech making about the contribution of chess toward a possible détente between the Soviet Union and the United States, play got under way. Nigro noted with proud amusement that his protégé was watching carefully and absorbing everything he could.
Did Bobby fully comprehend the political implications of the match? Did feelings of patriotism surge within him and was he rooting hard for his country to win? Did he wish—dream—that one day he’d be up on a similar stage playing against the world’s finest players? He never made a statement about the match, but it’s likely that the answer to at least the latter question was yes.
Aside from the games themselves, which he followed assiduously, Bobby noticed other things: chess players congregating in all the corridors and public rooms of the hotel discussing and analyzing the games, chess books and portable sets at the ready, and many people leaving observation posts only briefly to buy tuna fish and ham-and-cheese sandwiches at a small newsstand in the lobby. When Bobby spotted Reuben Fine—perhaps America’s second strongest player—in the audience, he became especially excited, since Fine’s books had become almost chess bibles for Bobby. Dr. Fine wasn’t playing for the United States because he had retired from play in 1948. But there was Dr. Max Pavey up on the stage—the man Bobby had played in a simultaneous exhibition three years previously—ready to play for his country.
When Nigro introduced Bobby to writer Murray Shumach of The New York Times, the boy shied away and just looked down at his shoes. Allen Kaufman, a master player, also met Bobby for the first time that day and more than a half century later reminisced: “He seemed to be a nice kid, somewhat shy, and I had no idea that I was talking to a future World Champion.” The next day, Shumach wrote humorously of the assembled onlookers at the match: “Chess spectators are like Dodger fans with laryngitis—men with rampant emotions but muted voices.”
Not totally voiceless, as it developed. As the games became more complex, the spectators, many of whom followed each game with their tiny pocket sets or leather chess wallets, discussed the vagaries of the positions in whispers. The cumulative effect of the sound was that of a mild winter wind or the roll of a summer surf. At times, when a dubious or complex combination was played, or when the diminutive American Reshevsky took one hour and ten minutes on one move, twenty-two hundred eyebrows seemed to rise in unison. If the noise in the hall became too intrusive, Hans Kmoch, the ultraformal bow-tied referee, would stare angrily out at the audience and issue a stern, Dutch-accented “Quiet, please!” Stung by the rebuke, the spectators would look momentarily embarrassed and quiet down for a few minutes.
Bobby enjoyed being in the hall, and kept a scorecard as if he were at Ebbets Field. The eleven-year-old carefully penciled in the results for each game: zeroes for losses, ones for wins, and halves for draws. He attended all four rounds, unaware that in just a few short years he’d be facing, in separate tournaments and matches on different continents, fourteen of these same sixteen players from the United States and the USSR, a conglomeration of the finest players in the world.
Aside from following the action in the ballroom, Bobby liked the analysis room. There, out of earshot of the contestants, top players were discussing and analyzing in depth every game, move by move, as it was played. Bobby wasn’t confident enough to offer an opinion as to what move a player should or shouldn’t make, but he was delighted that he could predict some of the moves before they were made and could understand after the fact why others were played.
Finally, after four days of play, the United States team had taken a humiliating beating, falling to the Soviets 20–12. At the final round, the applause from the American audience appeared to be sincere and respectful, but privately, a plaintive cry went up among many of the chess players: “What’s wrong with American chess?” An editorial in Chess Life lamented the loss of the vanquished team and tried to explain it: “Once again in the USA vs. USSR Team Match we behold reiterated proof that the gifted amateur is rarely, if ever, the equal of the professional. No matter how talented by natural heritage, the amateur lacks that sometimes brutal precision that marks the top professional as master of his trade, that almost instinctive pre-vision which comes only from constant practice of the art under all conditions and against all sorts of opposition.” With heavy hearts, Nigro and Bobby rode the subway home to Brooklyn. If Bobby took anything away from that match, it was the knowledge that the Soviet players were the best in the world. It was a realization that made him fairly seethe with purpose.
The following year, in July 1955, a return match in Moscow was even more distorted in favor of the Soviets: The Americans lost again, this time 25–7. Banner headlines in newspapers across the globe ballyhooed the match, however, and the American players had their picture splashed across the front page of The New York Times, as well as other newspapers throughout the world. The amount of ink was attributable to the fact that Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin paid a surprise visit to a garden party held in Moscow for the American chess team. There Khrushchev issued a policy statement to the effect that the Soviet Union was solid as never before, and he was willing to pursue détente between both countries as long as the United States agreed to talk “honestly.”