Fischer screamed at Edmundson that he had been seeing too many people, and for the next ten days as he and Petrosian battled, Bobby agreed to see only the young Argentine player Miguel Quinteros.
Now supremely confident of his chances of winning both the eighth and the ninth games, which would give him the match, Bobby rather formally declared that he would dethrone Spassky. When the eighth round finally began, the lights went out again, but this time only for eight minutes. It had no effect on the results. Both players used attacking moves, but Petrosian resigned, giving Fischer his fourth victory of the match. Gone was the speculation that Bobby Fischer had played his best chess too soon. Rather, it seemed obvious that he couldn’t be stopped.
At the start of the ninth game, more than ten thousand fans packed the playing hall, the lobby, and the surrounding streets. Even in Russia, chess crowds this enormous had never been seen. Petrosian resigned on the forty-sixth move, and Bobby Fischer was the new challenger for the World Championship. Against a former World Champion who was known to be one of the most difficult to defeat, Bobby had won five games, drawn three, and lost one, for a total score of 6½–2½.
Fischer would now be the first non-Soviet or non-Russian in more than three decades to play for the title against the reigning World Champion. For years Soviet grandmasters had competed only against one another, ensuring that the championship would remain in the hands of the Soviet Union. For his labors, Bobby was awarded a $7,500 prize plus an honorarium of $3,000 from the U.S. Chess Federation. More significant, he ignited a phenomenon in the United States not seen before: Almost overnight, a chess boom arose. Sales of chess sets shot up over 20 percent. Virtually every major magazine and newspaper in the country ran a story about Fischer, often with pictures of him and a diagram of his final position against Petrosian. The New York Daily News reprinted the score of every game, and The New York Times ran an article on the cover of its Sunday Magazine section, and then a news story on its front page the following day. The last time chess had made the Times front page was in 1954, when the Soviet team visited the United States and Carmine Nigro had brought the eleven-year-old Bobby to witness the international match.
Bobby Fischer had become a national hero. After returning home, he appeared on television constantly and his face became so familiar that people on the streets of New York City asked him for his autograph. But he became more than a household name, more than the equivalent of a pop star. He was the American who had a fighting chance of defeating a Soviet champion. The Cold War—or at least a version of it—was about to be decided not on a battlefield or in a diplomatic meeting, but in a contest of intellect and will involving thirty-two enigmatic pieces.
10
The Champion
TO KEEP BOBBY FISCHER HAPPY, the American Chess Foundation provided him with a room at the Henry Hudson Hotel in early 1972. As Fischer goes, so goes the chess nation, organizers believed. Also, since he was preparing to play Boris Spassky for the World Championship, his lawyers and U.S. Chess Federation officials needed to know where he was at all times. Questions arose almost daily about such details as the prize money, the schedule, and the venue. Decisions had to be made.
Up to that point, much of Bobby’s life had been nomadic because he spent so much time traveling from one competition to another. Whenever he returned to Brooklyn to prepare for the next tournament or match, he tended to sequester himself in his apartment. He’d often disconnect the telephone and render himself incommunicado—sometimes for weeks. This modus operandi wouldn’t have been workable as officials scurried to arrange a host of details for the World Championship match. So the Henry Hudson Hotel made sense, and it had the right atmospherics. It was where Bobby had won several United States Championships, and should he grow lonely in his room or want to play or talk chess, all he need do was take the elevator down a few floors and enter the Manhattan Chess Club. As its most eminent member, he was always given the red carpet treatment whenever he entered.
So it was that one night, shortly after taking up residence at the hotel, Bobby found himself stretched out on his bed, his heels locked over the edge, unself-consciously talking with two of his closest friends. The 1970s were the years of Nixon’s visit to China, the advent of Transcendental Meditation, cigarette advertising being banned from the airwaves, and fast-food chains multiplying. But none of those topics interested the three men in the room that evening. They were there to talk about chess and the anxiety Bobby was feeling.
Sam Sloan was a reed-thin stockbroker, with a slight Virginian drawl. A year younger than Bobby, his notable accomplishment wasn’t in chess—he was a tournament player but not of championship caliber—but in law. Aided by an eidetic memory, he was the last non-lawyer to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court—a case he won. Bobby trusted him.
The other man in the room that night was Bernard Zuckerman, only twenty-two days younger than Bobby, a fellow Brooklynite, and an international master. He was called “Zuck the Book” because he was considered by many—including Fischer—to have studied the literature on chess so thoroughly (“booked up,” as it is known in chess circles) that he was the most up-to-date opening theoretician in the country. However, he claimed that Fischer knew more. Zuckerman had soulful eyes, immensely long lashes, and shoulder-length hair, a residue of the ’60s. At tournaments he often arrived a half hour late for games, played rapidly, and usually offered a draw, which was invariably accepted. Bobby respected him. Both Sloan and Zuckerman were intensely interested in chess, Bobby, and women—interests that Bobby resoundingly shared in the first two cases and peripherally in the third.
That night the two men were being true friends and trying to calm down Bobby about his impending match. Although he’d just accomplished one of the greatest feats in the annals of chess by defeating Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian with a combined score of 18 ½–2½, Fischer was concerned about the strength of Spassky, who, he believed, had a “dynamic, individual style.” Bobby had never beaten him, and he revealed to his friends that he thought he might have trouble. “Why don’t you think you can beat him easily?” asked Zuckerman gently, pointing out that Spassky was no better than Petrosian, for example. “Spassky is better,” said Bobby somewhat woefully. “Not much better, but better.” Little did he know that Spassky, comparing his own performance to Bobby’s in 1971, judged Bobby the stronger player.
So much was at stake in the upcoming match that conflict was almost bound to result. Eventually, internecine warfare erupted between the United States and Soviet Chess federations and FIDE. The Soviets spared no energy in maneuvering for every advantage they could. They’d held the World Championship title for thirty-four years and had no intention of handing it to an American, especially an “uneducated” American. There were financial considerations as well. The six-figure purse that was being discussed would be the richest prize ever for a head-to-head confrontation in any sport other than boxing.
When Iceland submitted a bid to host the match, Bobby flew to its capital city, Reykjavik, to inspect the site. He was encouraged to play there by Freysteinn Thorbergsson, an Icelandic player in his early forties who’d drawn with Bobby in a tournament in Reykjavik in 1960. But the president of the Icelandic Chess Federation, thirty-two-year-old Gudmundur Thorarinsson, a soft-spoken engineer and Shakespearean scholar, was wary of Bobby. A man who carried a big stick and had political ambitions (eventually, he became a member of parliament), Thorarinsson wanted the match in his country but had a low tolerance for Fischer’s shenanigans.