Fischer arrived twenty minutes late for the drawing of colors, and he and Spassky met backstage. After shaking hands, Spassky humorously tested Fischer’s biceps, as though they were two boxers “weighing in.” They then sequestered themselves for a few minutes to discuss the schedule. Spassky wanted a short postponement before the start of the match. Fischer agreed if Spassky would drop the demand for a forfeit. They came to terms, and a moment later they walked to the stage, applauded by the journalists and well-wishers who’d been waiting patiently. Fischer, spying the chess table, galumphed to the center of the stage and immediately lifted the white queen, testing its weight. Then, one hand in his pocket, he tested all the other white pieces and sat down, stretching his legs under the Scandinavian-designed mahogany table. Spassky also sat.
After introducing both challenger and champion, and their respective seconds and aides, FIDE representative Harry Golombek, an international master from the UK, announced that Geller wanted to make a statement before the drawing of the lots took place. Speaking in Russian, Geller said:
The challenger apologized in writing and the President of FIDE has declared that the match rules of FIDE will be strictly observed in the future. Taking into consideration the efforts made by the Icelandic organizers of the match, and the desire of millions of chess admirers all over the world to see the match, the world champion has decided to play with Robert Fischer.
Though the statement was mild enough, there was growing irritation in Fischer as he listened to the translation, and by the time it was completed, he was pale with indignation at the phrase “the world champion has decided to play with Robert Fischer,” as if Spassky were doing him a favor. Bobby was mortified. For one very brief second, he considered walking off the stage and out of the match forever. He felt he’d complied with the wishes of the Soviets by making the apology to Spassky, writing it by hand and personally delivering it, and he’d just agreed to go along with Spassky’s postponement. For Bobby, the Geller statement had soiled the first official ceremony of the match. The Russians were censuring his behavior in front of his friends and the world press. Somehow, Bobby maintained his composure. Fortunately, the drawing of colors quickly followed, leaving no opportunity to reflect further on the incident.
Lothar Schmid, the elegant German referee, handed each man a blank envelope, and Spassky chose the one that indicated he’d hold the pieces. Spassky concealed a black pawn and a white pawn behind his back in the time-honored fashion and then brought his closed hands forward across the board. Fischer, without hesitation, tapped Spassky’s right hand—and Spassky opened it to reveal the black pawn. Fischer didn’t change his expression.
Several hours later, coming home from bowling in the early hours of the morning, before returning to the hotel, Bobby sneaked into the playing hall to check out the conditions. After an eighty-minute inspection, he had a number of complaints: He thought the lighting should be brighter; the pieces of the chess set were too small for the squares of the custom-built board; the board itself was not quite right—it was made of stone, and he thought wood would be preferable. Finally, he thought that the two cameras hidden in burlap-covered towers might be distracting when he began to play, and the towers themselves, looming over the stage like medieval battering rams, were disconcerting.
The organizers started working on the problems immediately. They wanted everything perfect before the first pawn was moved on opening day.
When Fischer finally awoke on the afternoon of July 11, 1972, and it slowly began to permeate his consciousness that he was actually in Iceland about to play his first game for the championship of the world, he was nervous. After years and years of tribulation and controversy, and the brouhaha about the match, Fischer had arrived at the threshold of his lifelong goal. Laugardalshöll was to be his universe for the next two months.
All details had been checked and double-checked in the playing hall to ensure maximum comfort for the players. Laugardalshöll was a cavernous, dome-shaped stadium (someone described it as a large Icelandic mushroom), with white-covered sound baffles on the ceiling that resembled mammoth albino bats. The entire first floor was covered with carpeting to muffle the noise made by spectators, and the folding seats had been replaced with upholstered and consequently “soundless” chairs. The two film towers had been pushed back, at Fischer’s request, and the lighting intensity on stage increased. A handsome Eames-designed executive swivel chair, an exact duplicate of the one Fischer had sat in while playing Petrosian in Buenos Aires, was flown in from the United States.
Fischer rushed through the backstage corridor onto the subtly flower-bedecked stage and was greeted by the polite applause of an audience of twenty-three hundred. Spassky had made his first move precisely at five, and Schmid had started Fischer’s clock. Fischer, dressed in a white shirt and blue business suit, sped to the table; the two opponents shook hands while Fischer kept his eyes on the board. Then he sat down in his black leather chair, considered his move for ninety-five seconds, and played his knight to his king bishop’s third square.
It was a unique moment in the life of a charismatic prodigy in that, to arrive where he was, he’d somehow overcome his objections to how he’d been treated by the Soviets over the years. Everyone knew it, not only in Laugardalshöll but all over the world. As grandmaster Isaac Kashdan said: “It was the single most important chess event [ever].” A lone American from Brooklyn, equipped with just a single stone—his brilliance—was about to fling it against the hegemony of the Soviet Union.
Fischer left the stage twice during the game (pre-adjournment), once complaining that the orange juice left in his dressing room backstage wasn’t cold enough. Ice cubes were provided. He also asked for a bottle of cold water and a dish of skyr, an Icelandic yogurt-type dessert. This last request caused confusion in the stadium’s cafeteria, as they were unable to supply the skyr. Fortunately, a local restaurant could, and did.
As moves were made on the board, they were simultaneously shown on forty closed-circuit television monitors, in all points of the stadium. In the cafeteria, where spectators wolfed down the local variety of lamb-based hot dogs and gurgled bottles of 2 percent Icelandic beer, the action on the stage was discussed vociferously. In the basement, Icelandic masters more quietly explained and analyzed the moves on a demonstration board, while in the press rooms, lordly grandmasters surveyed the television screens and analyzed in their heads, to the confusion and awe of most of the journalists. In the playing hall itself, decorum and quiet reigned. When it didn’t, Lothar Schmid would activate a white electrical sign that commanded, in both English and Icelandic:
THÖGN!
SILENCE!
As the first game progressed, most experts began predicting a draw. And then, on the twenty-ninth move, with the position equal, Fischer engaged in one of the most dangerous gambles of his career. Without consuming much time on his clock (he’d equalized on the seventeenth move and was now ahead of Spassky on time), Fischer sacrificed his bishop for two pawns in a move that thoroughly electrified the audience and sent Spassky’s eyebrows arching. The trade of pieces looked like a schoolboy’s blunder. Grandmaster Edmar Mednis said in retrospect: “I couldn’t believe that Fischer was capable of such an error. How is such an error possible from a top master, or from any master?”