The officers of the American Chess Foundation maintained that Reshevsky was the better player, and they arranged to have him prove it. During the summer of 1961 a sixteen-game match between the two players was negotiated and a prize fund of $8,000 was promised, with $1,000 awarded to each player in advance. Of the balance, 65 percent would go to the winner and 35 percent to the loser. Such a match evoked the drama of some of history’s great rivalries—clashes such as Mozart vs. Salieri, Napoleon vs. Wellington, and Dempsey vs. Tunney. When four world-class chess players—Svetozar Gligoric, Bent Larsen, Paul Keres, and Tigran Petrosian—were asked their opinion of who would prevail, all predicted that Reshevsky would be the winner, and by a substantial margin.
Reshevsky, a small, bald man who dressed conservatively, had a solemn and resolute personality. He was an ice king who was courteous but curt. Bobby couldn’t have been more different. He was a tall, gangly, intense, quarrelsome teenager, a quixotic chess prince who exhibited occasional flashes of charm and grace. And their styles on the board were just as divergent. Reshevsky’s games were rarely poetic—they displayed no passion. The longtime champion often lapsed into time pressure, barely making the control. Fischer’s games, though, were crystalline—transparent but ingenious. Bobby had taught himself, after years of practice, to budget his time and he hardly ever drifted into time pressure. (The regimen Jack Collins had imposed when he imported a German clock for Bobby had proved its worth.)
The other differences? Fischer was thoroughly prepared—“booked up,” as it was called—with opening innovations. Reshevsky, though, tended to be underprepared and often had to determine the most effective moves during play, wasting valuable time. Fischer was more of a tactical player, with flames of brilliance, while Reshevsky was a positional player. He maneuvered for tiny advantages and exhibited an obdurate patience. He was methodically capable of eking out a win from a seemingly hopeless and delicate position.
Ultimately, though, the match wouldn’t be rendering a judgment on which player’s style was the best. Its agenda was more basic—that is, to determine who was the best American player period.
Hardly a pas de deux, there was a seesaw of results: wins for Bobby … draws … wins for Reshevsky. One day Bobby was King Kong; the next, Fay Wray. By the eleventh game, which was played in Los Angeles, the score was tied at 5½–5½. There was difficulty scheduling the twelfth round, which fell on a Saturday. Reshevsky, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t play on Saturday until after sundown. (Early in his career he did play before sundown, but he came to believe that this was a transgression that had caused the death of his father, and thereafter he refused to compete on the Sabbath.) The starting time was therefore changed to 8:30 p.m. When someone pointed out that the game could easily last until two in the morning, it was rescheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. the next day, Sunday afternoon.
Complications set in. Jacqueline Piatigorsky (née Rothchild, a member of one of the richest families in Europe) was one of the sponsors of the match and was paying for all of the players’ expenses. She was married to the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, who happened to be giving a concert in Los Angeles that Sunday afternoon. So that she could attend her husband’s concert, Jacqueline asked that the game begin at 11:00 a.m. When Bobby, a classically late sleeper, heard of yet another change of schedule, he protested immediately. He simply couldn’t play at that time, he said. “It’s ridiculous.” Bobby also didn’t see why he had to cater to Mrs. Piatigorsky. She could always come to the game after the concert, he argued. They’d probably still be playing.
At the tournament site—the Beverly Hilton Hotel—Bobby’s chess clock was started promptly at eleven a.m. Reshevsky paced up and down, a few spectators waited patiently, and when the little red flag fell precisely at noon, the tournament director declared the game a forfeit. The thirteenth game had been scheduled to be played back in New York at the Empire Hotel.
Bobby said he was willing to continue the match, but the next game had to be a replay of the twelfth game. He didn’t want to play burdened by such a massive disadvantage; the forfeited game could possibly decide the match’s outcome.
Reshevsky nervously paced the stage, once again waiting for the absent Bobby to arrive, this time to play the disputed thirteenth game. About twenty spectators and as many journalists and photographers also waited, staring at the empty, lonely board, and at Reshevsky, who never stopped his pacing.
When an hour had elapsed on the clock, I. A. Horowitz, the referee, declared the game forfeited. Then Walter Fried, the president of the American Chess Foundation, who’d just burst into the room, noticed that Fischer was in absentia and declared Reshevsky the winner of the series. “Fischer had a gun to our heads,” he later said, explaining the abrupt termination of one of the most important American chess matches ever played.
Bobby ultimately sued Reshevsky and the American Chess Foundation, seeking a court order to resume the match and asking to have Reshevsky banned from tournament play until the matter was settled. The case lingered in the courts for years and was finally dropped. Although the two men would subsequently meet over the board in other tournaments, the “Match of the Century,” as it had been billed, was the unfortunate casualty of Bobby’s ingrained sleep habits and the long shadow of patronage in chess.
Bobby took the elevator to the thirtieth floor of the skyscraper at 110 West Fortieth Street, on the edge of the garment district, and when he disembarked, the elevator operator pointed to a doorway. “It’s up those metal stairs.” Bobby started climbing the spiral staircase, up and up, four flights. “Is that you, Bobby?” came a disembodied voice from above. It was Ralph Ginzburg, the journalist who’d scheduled an interview with Bobby for Harper’s magazine.
Bobby was guided into a strange round office, about the size of a small living room and positioned in the tower of the building, with windows on all sides. Everything was battleship gray: the floor, walls, filing cabinets, a desk, and two chairs. The tower room swayed ever so slightly as the wind whistled through the spires outside.
Ginzburg, thirty-two, wore horn-rimmed glasses and was going prematurely bald. A risk-taking journalist, he’d previously worked for Look magazine and Esquire, and was the author of two books, including a history of lynching in America. Clever, extremely industrious, he talked loudly and rapidly with a Bronx accent and was proud of his bent for sensationalism. Later he went to prison on an obscenity conviction for publishing a magazine called Eros.
It’s important to know this background about Ginzburg, not just because his article about Bobby has been used for more than forty years as a source for other writers and biographers, but also because of the negative effect it had on Bobby’s life and the consequent role it had in making him forever suspicious of journalists.
In preparation for the interview, Ginzburg had read Elias Canetti’s classic work Auto-da-Fé, written eight years before Bobby was born. The story, which helped Canetti earn the Nobel Prize in literature, includes a character named Fischerele who aspires to become chess champion of the world. When he wins the title, he plans to change his name to Fischer, and after becoming rich and famous, he will own “new suits made at the best possible tailor” and live in a “gigantic palace with real castles, knights, pawns.”