Off-the-board pressures were undoubtedly placing Spassky (who was less inured than Bobby to being at the center of a storm) under great stress. And that might, in turn, have affected the sharpness of his thinking, because in the fifth game, after committing perhaps the worst blunder of his career on the twenty-seventh move, he resigned, ending one of the shortest decisive encounters in World Championship history.
Grandmaster Miguel Najdorf, seated on the sidelines, likened the next game, the sixth, to a Mozart symphony. Fischer built a crushing attack and enveloped Spassky in a mating net, forcing his capitulation. Fischer later implied that this was his favorite game of the match, and many grandmasters, such as Larry Evans, have indicated that the game was so beautifully executed that it became the match’s turning point.
Fischer began telling friends that he thought the match would be over in his favor in two weeks. He was becoming convivial and even made attempts at dry, almost British humor. At the beginning of August, while gazing out the picture window of his hotel room at the northern void during a gray, raw day, he quipped: “Iceland is a nice place. I must come back here in the summertime.”
Although it’s never been revealed before, Regina Fischer, disguised in a blond wig and stylish clothing, flew in from England and visited Bobby at the Loftleidir to wish him good cheer and congratulate him on what appeared to be the certainty of his winning the championship. She didn’t want to be recognized. Journalists’ curiosity about her would simply take away, she felt, from her son’s shining moment. She slept in Bobby’s suite overnight but didn’t go to the Laugardalshöll to see him play. Instead, she flew back to the UK the next day.
In many ways, “unlucky thirteen” was the pivotal game of the Fischer-Spassky championship encounter. It was a nine-and-a-half-hour marathon in which Fischer, even though a pawn ahead, had a difficult position right up to adjournment. He could find no improvement with overnight analysis, and upon resumption he was forced to continue seeking what looked like a draw. On the sixty-ninth move, obviously exhausted, Spassky blundered. When he realized his mistake, he could barely look at the board, turning his head away several times in humiliation and frustration. Fischer, after moving to collect Spassky’s gift, sat back in his chair, grimly, staring at the Russian—studying him. For a long, long moment, he didn’t take his eyes off Spassky. There was just a bit of compassion in Fischer’s eyes, which turned the episode into a true Aristotelian tragedy: Spassky’s terror combined with Fischer’s pity. Spassky finally moved, but resigned on the seventy-fourth move.
At that point in the match, Fischer stopped taking the chances that are often necessary to win a game. Because of his unusual caution, the following seven games, numbers fourteen to twenty, were all draws. After the match, Fischer explained that he hadn’t been playing for draws but realized that his three-point lead was enough to win the title, as long as he could prevent Spassky from winning a game.
After twenty games, the score stood at 11½–8½ in favor of Fischer. He needed just two draws or one win out of the remaining four games to wrest the title from the Russian, and from Russia. Fischer’s future was manifest.
Shortly before the concluding week of the match, the Soviet delegation, by way of a long and preposterous statement, made an accusation that Fischer might be “influencing” the World Champion’s behavior by “chemical substances if not by electronic means.” Incredibly, an investigation was launched by the Reykjavik Police Department and Icelandic scientists. They field-stripped Spassky’s chair, x-rayed it, took scrapings of all the surroundings, and even examined the air on the stage. The image of a burly policeman traipsing across the stage with an empty plastic bag, attempting to “capture” the air, was the stuff of Chaplinesque comedy. One object was found in Spassky’s chair that was not in Fischer’s otherwise identical chair! But the secret weapon turned out to be a blob of wood filler, placed there by the manufacturer. Fischer guffawed when he heard of it and said that he’d been expecting rougher tactics from the Russians.
Donald Schultz, part of Fischer’s team, was there when the wood from the chair was x-rayed, and he saw the X-ray itself. He also saw a second X-ray and noticed that the blob was no longer there. He couldn’t help wondering if one of the Russians had planted something in the chair to embarrass Bobby but on second thought had somehow removed it so that the Soviets themselves wouldn’t be embarrassed if it could be proven they’d put it there in the first place.
The Russians insisted that a lighting fixture above the stage be taken apart to see if there was an electronic device hidden there that might be affecting Spassky’s play. As a policeman began to unscrew the globe, he yelled down from the ladder that there was something in there. The Russians and the Americans ran to the base of the ladder as the policeman descended with his discovery: “Two dead flies!”
The case was embarrassingly closed, it having become clear that the Soviets, stunned at the probable loss of “their” title, were searching for an alibi, one that would sully Bobby’s achievement. The London Times summed up the chess circus in humorous, though pointed, fashion: “It started out as a farce by Beckett—Waiting for Godot. Then it turned into a Kafka tragedy. Now it’s beyond Kafka. Perhaps Strindberg could do it justice.”
The twenty-first game commenced on August 31, and Fischer, playing black, conducted the endgame in stellar fashion; at adjournment it looked as though he could win. If that were to occur, the twenty-first game would be Bobby’s last. To conquer Spassky and become World Champion, he’d always needed to collect 12½ points, and a win would get him to that magic number.
The next day, Harry Benson, a Scotsman who was a key photographer for Time Life, met Spassky at the Saga Hotel. “There’s a new champion,” Spassky said. “I’m not sad. It’s a sporting event and I lost. Bobby’s the new champion. Now I must take a walk and get some fresh air.”
Benson immediately drove to the Hotel Loftleidir and called Bobby on the house phone. “Are you sure it’s official?” Fischer asked. Told that it was, he said: “Well, thanks.”
At 2:47 p.m., Fischer appeared on stage at Laugardalshöll to sign his score sheet. Schmid made the official announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Spassky has resigned by telephone at 12:50. This is a traditional and legal way of resignation. Mr. Fischer has won this game, number twenty-one, and he is the winner of the match.”
The spectators went wild. Fischer smiled when Schmid shook his hand, then he nodded awkwardly at the audience, appeared uncomfortable, and started to go. Just before leaving, he paused ever so briefly and looked out into the crowd, as though he might be about to say something or perhaps wave. Then he quickly disappeared backstage and left the building. A mob swarmed around his car, which was driven by Saemi Palsson, his bodyguard. Television and radio reporters poked microphones and cameras at the closed windows. Lombardy sat in the backseat, and the three men drove off. Only after they were under way did Fischer allow himself to break into a big, boyish grin. He was the World Chess Champion.
Two days after Fischer won the championship, a lavish banquet was held in his honor at Laugardalshöll. Boris Spassky attended, as did the arbiter Lothar Schmid and FIDE’s president Dr. Max Euwe, who officiated. The event had been planned for weeks and was sold out long before the match was over. More than one thousand people attended (scalpers obtained $75 to $100 for a $22 ticket), and everyone feasted on lamb and suckling pig grilled over charcoal braziers, served by waiters in Viking helmets. The “Vikings” kept goblets filled with something called “Viking’s Blood,” a powerful concoction of red wine and cognac. On the same stage where Fischer and Spassky had fought it out for two months, an orchestra now played, but the music was a pleasant potpourri from The Tales of Hoffmann and La Traviata. The whole evening radiated an Old World ambience, as though the event were taking place in 1872, in a huge European beer garden, rather than 1972, in a covered Icelandic arena.