Collins was one of the finest players in the United States, and for a number of years was rated in the top fifty; Nigro never reached anywhere near that achievement. Bobby said that he always felt Nigro was more of a friend than a teacher, but that he was a very good teacher. Nigro was a professional teacher and was quite formal in his instructional technique, while Collins, as talented and caring as he was, employed a Socratic approach. With pupils, he’d often just set up a position and say, “Let’s look at this,” as he did that first day with Bobby, and then ask the player to come up with a plan or series of alternatives, making the student think. He did this with Bobby hundreds of times. Nigro and Collins both acted fatherly toward the boy, but Collins’s relationship lasted more than fifteen years. Nigro’s, though admittedly occurring at a formative time in Bobby’s life, lasted just five.
When Bobby returned from a tournament, he’d often rush to see Collins and go over his games with him. Collins, a shrewd analyst, would comment on the moves that Bobby did and didn’t play. Learning was taking place, but not in the traditional way. Collins’s approach wasn’t “You must remember this variation of the King’s-Indian Defense, which is much stronger than what you played”—rather, he relied on a kind of osmosis. International master James T. Sherwin, a New Yorker who knew both Fischer and Collins well, had this to say when he heard of Bobby’s later dismissal of Collins’s influence on him: “Well, I think that’s a little hubristic; it must have been said in a moment of pridefulness. Bobby must have learned from Collins. For example, Jack always played the Sicilian Defense, and then Bobby started playing it. I think the remark was a young man’s way of saying, ‘I’m the greatest. No one ever taught me anything and I received my gifts from God.’ I think Jack helped Bobby psychologically, with chess fightingness, just being tough and wanting always to win.”
Collins also noticed what Nigro had observed the year before: Bobby’s habit of procrastinating during a game, loitering over the board, taking just a little too long to make an obvious move. To help the boy overcome these self-defeating tendencies, Collins ordered a clock from Germany with a special ten-second timer, and he insisted that Bobby play with it to practice thinking and moving more rapidly.
Collins, for his part, said that he never “taught” Bobby in the strictest sense. Rather, he pointed out that “geniuses like Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare and Fischer come out of the head of Zeus, seem to be generally programmed, know before instructed.” Essentially, Collins was saying that Bobby Fischer’s talent was God-given, innate, and all Collins could do was serve as a guide or bystander, offering encouragement and nurturing the boy’s prodigious gifts. He was also a loyal friend.
Fischer, who much later in life would gain notoriety for his anti-Jewish rhetoric, always said that although his mother was Jewish, he had no religious training. It is not known whether Bobby, on or near his thirteenth birthday of March 9, 1956, participated in the formal Jewish ritual of Bar Mitzvah, reading Hebrew from the Torah at a synagogue. However, his chess friend Karl Burger said that when he played twelve-year-old Bobby in the park on Rochester Avenue in Brooklyn, the boy “was studying for his Bar Mitzvah.” Also supporting the belief that Bobby had experienced the ritual was the fact that, many years later, he gave an old chess clock and chess set to his Hungarian friend Pal Benko, a grandmaster. Bobby had been keeping them among his belongings and told Benko that they were gifts he’d “received for his Bar Mitzvah.”
It’s possible that Bobby was simply given the gifts on his thirteenth birthday, even though there was no actual coming-of-age Bar Mitzvah ceremony. (Regina’s strained circumstances may even have played a role: There are usually year-long fees for catenation, the instruction given to a twelve-year-old to ready him for the ritual.)
When he reached the age of thirteen, Bobby may have truly felt that he was an adult who had to take charge of himself, and that his destiny was no longer in anyone’s hands but his own. Certainly, he did seem to exhibit a newfound maturity, and when it came to playing chess, his skills seasoned to some extent as he began playing more resolutely.
A significant improvement occurred in his learning curve in 1956, when he was thirteen. Bobby’s intense study of the game and incessant playing came to remarkable fruition. During the annual amateur Memorial Day tournament that May, he placed twenty-first. Only five weeks later, during the July 4 weekend, he captured the United States Junior Championship at a tournament held at the Franklin Mercantile Chess Club in Philadelphia. Only four months had passed since his thirteenth birthday and Bobby had become the youngest chess master in history and one of the strongest young players in the country.
Many factors could have contributed to his meteoric rise at the time: meeting Jack Collins and playing countless games with him and with Jack’s acolytes, almost all masters who came to the Collins salon throughout the summer; his year of facing competition at the Manhattan Chess Club; the knowledge he’d accumulated from steadily studying chess books and periodicals for almost five years; and a gestalt of understanding regarding the game that, through a combination of study, experience, and intrinsic gifts, coalesced in his mind.
But there were personal elements as well. Losses that he’d experienced in tournaments created a fierce determination to win. (“I just can’t bear thinking of defeat.”) And somewhere along the way, he became more reconciled to the need to take chances. In the end it may have boiled down to what the poet Robert Frost once said about a successful education: “Just hanging around until you have caught on.”
Just two weeks after that July 4 weekend tournament, the 1956 United States Open Championship was going to be held in Oklahoma City. It would have many more contestants, including some of the best players in the United States and Canada.
While Bobby had no hope of placing among the top contenders, he was eager to continue his winning streak, aware that the opportunity to compete against stronger players would sharpen his game. Regina balked. She was concerned that he’d exhaust himself playing in a third tournament within two months. It was also impossible for her to take time off to accompany her son on the long trip to Oklahoma, and she worried about his going alone.
Bobby was adamant. If he could go to Nebraska by himself, he argued, why couldn’t he go to Oklahoma City? Regina reluctantly agreed, but raising enough money for his expenses was, as always, a problem. She persuaded Maurice Kasper of the Manhattan Chess Club to give her $125 toward Bobby’s expenses (the travel fare was $93.50), and she contacted the tournament organizing committee to arrange to have Bobby stay at someone’s home to save on the cost of a hotel. A player’s wife agreed to keep an eye on the boy and provide most of his meals. Before leaving, to help raise money for his trip, Bobby played a twenty-one-game simultaneous exhibition in the lobby of the Jersey City YMCA, winning nineteen, drawing one, and losing one, with some one hundred spectators following his games. Each player paid a dollar, with two free entries allowed. Bobby’s profit: $19. Scrimping to make up the balance, Regina sent him off to Oklahoma.
By far the strongest tournament Bobby had ever played in, the U.S. Open was held in the Oklahoma Biltmore Hotel, a somewhat palatial facility that seemed out of context in a Great Plains town, although the décor of American Indian and buffalo paintings reminded the competitors that they were in cowboy country.