After the appendicitis scare, the British Broadcasting Corporation invited him to London to appear on a show called Chess Treasury of the Air, and he spent about ten days in England. Christmas in London was a charming experience for Bobby. It seemed to be what he imagined New York City might have been like around 1890 or 1900. He admired the gentility of the city’s citizens and the cleanliness of its streets. Pal Benko was there for a while with him and noticed that though he himself had a thick Hungarian accent, he could be more easily understood by the Londoners than Bobby with his pronounced Brooklyn dialect. Bobby spent a British Christmas with his mother and her new husband, Cyril Pustan, who’d heard him on the BBC show.
As he continued to prepare for upcoming tournaments, Bobby was also being drawn closer to the Worldwide Church of God, and he began to face a time conflict between his two commitments: religion and chess. “I split my life into two pieces,” he told an interviewer later. “One was where my chess career lies. There I kept my sanity, so to speak. And the other was my religious life. I tried to apply what I learned in the church to my chess career, too. But I was still studying chess. I wasn’t just ‘trusting in God’ to give me the moves.” Bobby’s pragmatic philosophy was similar to the old Arabic saying “Trust in Allah but tie up your camel.”
In addition to his Bible correspondence course, listening to Reverend Armstrong’s sermons, and his in-depth study of the Old and New Testaments, Bobby was reading the Plain Truth, the Church’s bimonthly magazine, which claimed to have a circulation of more than 2,500,000. Articles in the magazine were, as the title implies, written plainly and seemed as much political as religious. Bobby read every issue cover to cover, though, and much of what he ingested made sense to him. Forty years later he’d still be espousing ideas put forth by Armstrong and the Plain Truth.
One issue outlined horrific prophecies, graphically illustrated, of what Armstrong predicted would be World War III, when the United States and Great Britain would be destroyed by a United States of Europe. Armstrong said that before the war began, he’d lead his church members to Jordan, where they’d be saved because they were “God’s People.” Bobby, too.
Bobby wrote a preachy letter to his mother, enthusiastically discussing Armstrong’s teachings and his intense biblical studies, which had “changed my whole outlook on life.” He’d become convinced that only by following Armstrong’s interpretation of the Bible could he find health and happiness, become successful, and gain eternal life, and he urged her to read the Bible and Armstrong’s writings. Regina wasn’t buying his sales pitch and wrote back that Armstrong and his church were feeding Bobby a line of mumbo jumbo and engaging in fear mongering. A good and tolerant life was the best life, she said; call it a religion if you like. After that, they both agreed not to discuss his religious views or hers. Neither mother nor son was willing to try to make a convert of the other.
Bobby tried to live and practice his beliefs; he felt truly born again, and he was applying the same sense of discipline and reverence to the Bible that he had all his life to chess. He began making donations to worthy causes; he wouldn’t have sex, because he wasn’t married; he scorned profanity and pornography; and he attempted to follow the Ten Commandments in every detail. “If anyone tried to live by the letter of the law, it was me,” he said later, in an interview published by the Ambassador Report.
But eventually his religious commitments began tearing him apart. He couldn’t spend ten or twelve hours a day studying chess and another six to eight hours on Bible studies; and the constant surfacing of impure thoughts and other minor sins was plaguing him. “The more I tried [to be obedient] the more crazy I became,” he noted. “I was half out of my head—almost stoned.” Without giving up on Armstrong, he realized that Caissa (the patron goddess of chess) had more meaning for him than the Worldwide Church of God. Focus, focus, focus! Chess had to become paramount again; it had to be his first priority, or his dream of achieving the World Championship would be just that: a dream.
January 1962
Spending two months in Sweden in the middle of winter, Bobby found the weather less cold than he’d thought it would be: Temperatures remained close to fifty degrees Fahrenheit. He wasn’t in Stockholm, though, to stalk the cobblestoned streets of Old Town, or walk through the underground tunnels, or ready himself for a cruise on the Baltic Sea. Rather, he was there to, once again, try to become the player the whole chess world should pay homage to. Aside from the accolades that would flow to the winner of the Stockholm tournament, the real prize for Bobby was to qualify for the Candidates tournament, which, in turn, could give him a chance at the World Championship.
Chess Life, on its front page, wrapped up the eventual Stockholm results this way:
Stockholm, 1962, may come to be recognized as the event which marked the beginning of a decisive shift of power in world chess. For the first time since the Interzonal and Candidates’ tournaments began as eliminating contests for the World’s Championship in 1948, the Soviet grandmasters failed to capture first prize. Bobby Fischer’s margin of 2 ½ points reflects his complete domination of the event. It owed nothing to luck: he never had a clearly lost position.
What Bobby achieved in going undefeated in both Bled and Stockholm was the chess equivalent of pitching two successive no-hitters in baseball’s World Series. Most would have thought the feat impossible. Less than a week shy of his nineteenth birthday, Bobby Fischer had just established himself as one of the most extraordinary chess players in the world. But this wasn’t the time to gloat or preen, or even to relax. Bobby’s goal was the World Championship, and the next step toward that objective was almost upon him.
The economics of chess enforced a certain humility anyway. Before Bobby left Sweden, he was given a small white envelope containing his earnings from the tour-de-force playing he’d just demonstrated. The envelope contained the cash equivalent of $750 in Swedish krona. Bobby could only shake his head ruefully.
He now had barely six weeks to prepare for the Candidates tournament to be held on the island of Curaçao, thirty-eight miles off the coast of Venezuela. The winner of the Curaçao tournament would earn the right to play the current World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, in the next world title match.