Upon arriving at Lincoln Place, Bobby charged up the three flights of stairs, unpacked his satchel, gave his mother a scarf that he’d bought in Brussels (“That looks Continental,” he said in a courtly manner, when she tried it on), and, within twenty minutes, was out the door. Monath had him dropped off at the Collins house, and in a matter of seconds, Bobby and Jack were analyzing his games from the tournament. Bobby stayed for hours, and the Collins regulars began to drift in to offer their congratulations, have something to eat, and discuss the losses to Benko and Olafsson. The evening was capped off with Bobby playing dozens of five-minute games with almost all assembled, one by one.
Bobby entered his junior year at Erasmus several days late, and since his five courses were especially demanding, owing to his having to study for a Regents exam associated with each, he quickly fell behind in his work. The officials at the school were accommodating, however, and instead of chastising him for his sometimes shoddy work, they awarded him a gold medal for becoming the youngest grandmaster in history. Additionally, Bobby was profiled in the school newspaper, the Dutchman, adding to his student-as-celebrity status.
Six days after Bobby’s arrival back in the United States, the Marshall Chess Club followed through on its intentions and held a reception for him with more than one hundred members in attendance. The president of the club, Dr. Edward Lasker, welcomed everyone, thanked them for coming, and then began a litany of Bobby’s many accomplishments. Bobby, however, was hardly paying attention. Rather, he was playing speed chess at a side table with several of the young masters, who congregated around him.
To watch Bobby play speed chess was an entertainment in itself, aside from his depth of play. To him, speed games were like playground basketball or street stickbalclass="underline" trash-talking was definitely allowed. At the board, playing a speed game, Bobby was truly in his element, like Michael Jordan soaring for the hoop. Typically, he would crack his knuckles and pursue a humorous strategy of intimidation:
“Me?! You play that against Me?!”
“Crunch!” “Zap!”
“With that I will crush you, crush you!”
[In a feigned Russian accent] “You are cockroach. I am elephant. Elephant steps on cockroach.”
He would pick up a piece and practically throw it at a square, almost as if he were tossing a dart at a bull’s-eye; invariably, it would land in the center of the square. His fingers were long and nimble, and as he moved, his hand quitting the piece with a flourish, he looked like a classical pianist playing a concerto. When he made a weak move, which was rare, he’d sit bolt upright and inhale, emitting a sound like a snake’s hiss. On the few occasions when he lost a speed game, he’d just push the pieces to the center of the board in disgust, his nostrils flaring as if he smelled a bad odor. He maintained that he could tell the strength of a player by the way he handled the pieces. Weak players were clumsy and unsure; strong players were confident and graceful. Sometimes, during a five-minute game, Bobby would get up from the board while his clock was running, go to the soda machine, buy a soft drink, and stroll back to the table, having “wasted” two or three minutes. He’d still win.
A week later Bobby was back at the Marshall to play in the weekly speed tournament—christened the “Tuesday Night Rapid Transit” in homage to the New York City rapid transit subway system. Bobby tied for first with Edmar Mednis, both players scoring 13–2. Not so ironically, the one game Bobby lost was to his mentor Jack Collins.
Bobby’s relationship with Collins was complex. To Collins, Bobby represented a second existence—the boy’s career was a vicarious entry to a level of chess mastery he himself would never achieve. But Collins also showed Bobby a father’s love, taking pride in all of his accomplishments. He claimed to view Bobby as a surrogate son.
Bobby viewed their relationship differently. He didn’t regard Collins as a father substitute, but as a friend, despite their thirty-year difference in ages. He considered Jack Collins’s sister Ethel a friend as well, and he could be even more affectionate toward her at times. Bobby always felt comfortable with both, and at one point when Regina was about to embark on one of her perennial long-term journeys, she suggested that Bobby live with the Collinses. Their apartment was small by American standards, however—even for two people. Adding a third would have been impossible, so the idea never went beyond Regina’s wish.
What Collins didn’t know was that Bobby would occasionally snipe at him behind his back. The criticisms were purely chess-related. Despite the fact that Collins could occasionally beat Bobby in speed games and even in clocked training games (they never met over the board in a formal tournament), Bobby’s opinion of his mentor’s prowess—as indeed happened with him and other players—became inexorably linked to what his official rating was.
“What’s your rating?” is one of the first things players ask each other on meeting for the first time, and whichever player has the lower rating is likely to get a snobbish reaction from the other and even be shunned, as if belonging to another caste. Fischer’s rating reached an average high of 2780. Collins’s rating never rose higher than 2400, light-years apart in winning predictability. If the separation in rating points had been minimal, Bobby’s opinion of Collins might not have been so deprecatory. Raymond Weinstein, a strong international master and a student of Collins, wrote that he’d been in awe of his teacher until he heard Fischer’s unkind remarks about him.
In addition to the rating disparity between mentor and student, Bobby didn’t like that Collins was getting publicity from being his teacher, and that other young players were flocking to him for lessons, eager to become the next Bobby Fischer. Bobby, perhaps because of the indigence of his childhood, hated the idea of people making money off his name. As New York master Asa Hoffmann once put it: “If someone was willing to pay $50 for a Bobby Fischer autograph, and you were going to make $5 for introducing the autograph seeker to him, Fischer would want that $5 too, or else he was willing to forfeit the $50.”
5
The Cold War Gladiator
MIKHAIL TAL’S STARE was infamous, and to some ominous. With his deep brown, almost black eyes, he’d glare so intently at his opponents that some said he was attempting to hypnotize them into making a vapid move. The Hungarian-American player Pal Benko actually donned sunglasses once when he played Tal, just to avoid the penetrating stare.
Not that Tal needed an edge. The twenty-three-year-old Latvian native was a brilliant player. Twice champion of the USSR, he’d won the 1958 Portorož Interzonal, becoming a front runner to play the incumbent title-holder, Mikhail Botvinnik, for the World Championship in 1960. Tal’s style was filled with wild, inspired combinations, intuitive sacrifices, and pyrotechnics. Handsome, erudite, and a packet of energy, the Latvian was a crowd-pleaser and the darling of the chess world. His right hand was deformed, but it didn’t seem to diminish his self-assurance.
Fischer was growing more self-assured, but his style was strikingly different: lucid, crystal-clear, economical, concrete, rational. J. H. Donner, the gigantic Dutch grandmaster, noted the contrast: “Fischer is the pragmatic, technical one. He makes almost no mistakes. His positional judgment is dispassionate; nearly pessimistic. Tal is more imaginative. For him, overconfidence is a danger that he must constantly guard against.”
The European crowds who were watching preparations begin for the Candidates tournament liked Bobby too, but for different reasons: Americans weren’t supposed to play as well as he did. And at sixteen! He was a curiosity in Yugoslavia, a chess-obsessed country, and was continually pestered for autographs and interviews. Lanky, with a loping gait, and dressed in what some Europeans thought was Western or Texan clothing, he was described as being “laconic as the hero of an old cowboy movie.”