Ginzburg quoted Fischer as saying that he bought his suits, shirts, and shoes from the best tailors all over the world and was “going to hire the best architect and have him build it [my house] in the shape of a rook … spiral staircases, parapets, everything. I want to live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.”
The article, which also included provocative material, caused a sensation, coloring many of the interview questions that would be fired at Bobby for years after. When, on the heels of Harper’s, widely read British magazine Chess published the article in full, Bobby turned livid and screamed: “Those bastards!”
Bobby insisted that most of the article had twisted what he said and used his quotes out of context. For example, he never told Ginzburg that he had to “get rid of his mother.” It’s true that Regina Fischer left the apartment to go on a long peace march, met a man, got married, and settled in England. She did say that Bobby, a highly independent adolescent, was probably better off without her living with him; like many mothers, she was doting and continually trying to help her son, sometimes to the point of exasperating him. She and Bobby both realized that living alone gave him more time to study according to his own time and pace, but Ginzburg’s negative interpretation of their relationship was totally incorrect. Bobby and his mother loved each other.
Listening to the tapes or reading the transcripts of Ginzburg’s interview with Bobby would have proven what the teenager did or didn’t say, but Ginzburg said he destroyed all of the research materials that backed up the article. If so, this was unusuaclass="underline" Most professional journalists retain interview transcripts lest what they’ve written generate a charge of libel or invasion of privacy. One can never know the full truth, of course, but even if Ginzburg merely reported verbatim what Bobby had said, it was a cruel piece of journalism, a penned mugging, in that it made a vulnerable teenager appear uneducated, homophobic, and misogynistic, none of which was a true portrait.
Previous to this, Bobby had already been wary of journalists. The Ginzburg article, though, sent him into a permanent fury and created a distrust of reporters that lasted the rest of his life. When anyone asked about the article, he would scream: “I don’t want to talk about it! Don’t ever mention Ginzburg’s name to me!”
To exorcise the disgruntled feeling he still had from l’affaire Reshevsky, and to shake off the Harper’s article affront, Bobby wanted to get away from New York and just get back to doing what made him happy: He wanted to play chess—without lawyers, without publicity, without threats and counter-threats. He accepted an invitation to play in Yugoslavia in a month-long, twenty-player event in Bled that promised to be one of the strongest international tournaments conducted in years. But first he had to prepare, and he had only three weeks to do so.
Normally, Bobby’s schedule consisted of five hours per day of study: games, openings, variations, endings. And then, of course, he’d play speed games for an additional five or more hours with the Collins cluster or at one of the clubs. He loved to play fast chess, since it gave him the opportunity to try out dubious or experimental lines through an instant gaze of the board. It honed his instinct and forced him to trust himself.
But to play in an international tournament of the caliber announced, he had to spend much more time at careful, precise study, analysis, and memorization. He stopped answering his phone, because he didn’t want to be interrupted or tempted to socialize—even for a chess party—and at one point, to be alone with the chessboard, he just threw some clothes in a suitcase, didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and checked into the Brooklyn YMCA. During his stay there, he sometimes studied more than sixteen hours per day.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes how people in all fields reach success. He quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chessplayers, criminals and what have you, the number comes up again and again [the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours of practice].” Gladwell then refers to Bobby: “To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” A fair estimate is that Bobby played one thousand games a year between the ages of nine and eleven, and twelve thousand a year from the ages of eleven to thirteen, most of them speed games. Although all of these games could be considered “practice,” not all were particularly instructive. Specific moves or positions reached, however, could be highly enlightening and might even remain locked in his unconscious mind—in the same way, for example, that one remembered chord or even a single note can be of value to a musician. Bobby’s study of the nuances of others’ games had the same effect: He paid careful attention to the accumulation of fine detail.
Bobby loved Yugoslavia because of the superstar status accorded him by its chess adherents, and, on a delightful autumnal day, he entered the tournament hall at Lake Bled primed to play. Now eighteen and dressed in an impeccably tailored suit with a white handkerchief deftly positioned in his breast pocket, he looked somewhat older and carried himself with an athletic swagger. He looked a little like a budding movie star. Many of the Yugoslavs didn’t recognize him at first.
Walking in the streets, he’d be besieged by autograph seekers. From his experience at the Interzonal and the Candidates tournament in 1958–59, both held in Yugoslavia, he’d grasped enough of the language to at least autograph his name in Serbo-Croat. Fans went wild when he inscribed their scorecards in their own language. When a spectator from Moscow asked for an autograph, Bobby signed it using the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, needing to change only a few letters.
For Bobby, the highlight of the tournament was his game against Tal in the second round. Tal, who was much better behaved than the last time he played Bobby—doing less staring and snickering—seemed to suffer a lapse of chess logic on the sixth move, and he blundered again on the ninth move, becoming enmeshed in the opening that Bobby had prepared against him. Tal’s spotty play was blamed on the fact that he wasn’t feeling well. Bobby’s own play was not at its sharpest, but he exploited the weak moves of his opponent and pressed home the advantage until Tal lapsed into a hopeless endgame and resigned. The applause was tumultuous. “A charmer,” piped Chess Review. Bobby was almost giddy with delight at notching his first win against one of the strongest players in the world, a former World Champion, the man he’d fantasized about murdering during the 1959 Candidates.
As Tal and Fischer left the stage, journalists rushed to them begging for a comment. The two combatants, both a little playful, performed for the crowd:
Tal [Sighing]: It is difficult to play against Einstein’s theory.
Fischer [Exulting]: Finally, he has not escaped from me!
Bobby was not happy with his eventual second-place showing in the tournament, and like Tal, he blamed some of his draws on illness. By the end of the competition, he was feeling mild discomfort in the lower right part of his abdomen, and he was also having difficulty keeping food down. When the pain worsened, and he mentioned it to some of the players, they insisted he see a physician.
Suspicious as always of doctors, Bobby was also concerned about communicating in Serbo-Croat. Would he be able to understand what was being said to him? A doctor was summoned to the Hotel Toplice, and one of the Yugoslavian players served as translator. As soon as the doctor touched his abdomen, Bobby flinched in pain. “It seems like appendicitis,” the doctor warned. “You’ll have to go to a hospital. If the appendix ruptures, you may get peritonitis, and the infection will spread.” Bobby asked if there was anything that could be done without going to a hospital. “No,” the doctor answered emphatically. Bobby reluctantly agreed, and he was driven from Bled in Slovenia to Banja Luka in Bosnia for treatment at a large university hospital. He begged the doctors not to operate, even though they told him that it was a relatively simple procedure and cautioned him of the dangers involved in not operating. They assured him he’d be up and walking around in a few days, but he was still resistant. Not only was he philosophically opposed to surgery, he was frightened of anesthesia. He didn’t even want to take medicine to stop the pain. The doctors prevailed on that point and also insisted that he take a regimen of antibiotics. Eventually, the pain lessened and within two or three days he was feeling himself again. He was effusively thankful to the doctors for not insisting he be put under the knife.