Endgame (15 page)

On top all of the prizes he was winning, he defeated grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky at an exhibition at the Manhattan Chess Club, although Bobby later recalled that it was not much of an accomplishment: Reshevsky was blindfolded (and Bobby was not) and they played at ten seconds a move. It was, however, his first grandmaster scalp.

After winning the United States Junior in San Francisco, instead of going back home to Brooklyn and then journeying out again to Cleveland to play in the United States Open, Bobby stayed on the West Coast. That gave him three weeks to relax, play chess, and travel around California. Several other boys from the tournament traveled with him and he visited Los Angeles and Long Beach, where he stayed in the home of chess player/entrepreneur Lina Grumette and swam in her pool. An elegant public relations agent, Grumette conducted a regular chess salon in her home, which players paid to attend. During the 1940s she’d been one of the strongest female players in the United States. When she met Bobby, she took a maternal interest in him, and she became one of his few lifelong friends, ultimately playing an important part in his career.

After their three-week hiatus, the young players borrowed an old automobile from the editor of the
California Chess Reporter
, Guthrie McClain. Since most were too young to have a driver’s license, William G. Addison, a twenty-four-year-old who also was going to play in Cleveland, got behind the steering wheel and they headed east to the tournament. The car kept breaking down,
and everyone chipped in to have it repaired so that they could keep going. Riding through the hot desert with no air-conditioning led to petty arguments, and a fistfight broke out between Bobby and Gilbert Ramirez (who’d taken second place in the United States Junior). Bobby bit Ramirez on the arm, leaving scars that remain fifty years later. (Ramirez proudly displays them, as if to say, “This is the arm that was bitten by Bobby Fischer.”) Eventually, the car broke down entirely and had to be abandoned. The boys arrived in Cleveland by bus on the evening before play began at the U.S. Open.

Before he was to play his first game, Bobby was rated at 2298, making him among the top ten active players in the country. There were 176 players in the two-week, twelve-round tournament. For his first round, Bobby was paired to play white against a Canadian player who’d registered in advance and paid his entry fee but was nowhere in sight. When the tournament began, Bobby made his first move and pressed his clock, which then started counting down against his invisible opponent. After an hour of waiting, the game was declared a forfeit, and Bobby received a gratis point. Curiously, later in the tournament that “free” point almost led to his downfall. In his next five games, Bobby won three and drew two; one of the draws was with twenty-seven-year-old Arthur Bisguier, the defending United States Open Champion and one of the strongest players in the nation.

In the second half of the tournament Bobby won five games straight, and it was certain that he’d be among the prizewinners. But could he win the title? Several players in the tournament had come down with the flu—including Bobby’s teacher, Jack Collins—and had to forfeit games. Bobby tried to keep himself fit by getting enough sleep, eating healthfully, and staying in his room as much as possible, away from the other players. As it developed, the flu forfeits didn’t affect Bobby’s pairings or score.

In the final round Bobby had to face Walter Shipman, the man who’d first welcomed him at the Manhattan Chess Club. Shipman had a reputation as a fearsome and stubborn player. The game didn’t evolve to Bobby’s liking, so he offered Shipman a draw on the eighteenth move. It was quickly accepted. Bobby had a score of 10–2 and hadn’t lost a game. Arthur Bisguier, the highest rated player in the tournament, also finished with a score of 10–2. Who then was to be the United States Open Champion?

Bobby, Bisguier, and about twenty other players and spectators stood
around the tournament director’s desk as he applied the tie-breaking system to determine the winner. The ideal way to break a tie is to have a play-off between the two players. However, in American tournaments, where hotel ballrooms are rented and contracted for a specified period and players have made arrangements for flights home, it’s necessary to apply a tie-breaking system to determine the winner. There are many such systems used in tournaments, and they’re as complicated as abstract mathematical theorems. Few are applied without controversy.

While they were waiting for the results, Bisguier asked Bobby why he’d offered the draw to Shipman when he had a slight advantage and the outcome wasn’t certain. If Bobby had
won
that game, he would have been the tournament’s clear winner, a half point ahead of Bisguier. Bobby replied that he had more to gain than lose by the decision. He’d assumed that Bisguier would either win or draw his own game, and if so, Bobby would have at least a tie for first place. That meant a payday of $750 for each player, a virtual gold mine for Fischer. Recognizing Bobby’s greater need for money than the capture of a title, however prestigious, Bisguier noted: “Evidently, his mature judgment is not solely confined to the chessboard.”

The tournament director continued to make calculations, finally looking up and declaring that Bisguier had won. Bobby, crestfallen, recalled: “
I went to the phone booth and called my mother to tell her the bad news. In the booth next to me was Bisguier, phoning his good news to his family.” After that, both players returned to the tournament hall to watch the conclusions of the other games.

After two hours had passed during which people congratulated Bisguier as the champion, the tournament director announced that he’d made a mistake in the calculations. Under the Median System of tie-breaking, which was to be used in all tournaments conducted by the United States Chess Federation, all of the scores of all of the opponents of the players who are tied are totaled, the top two and the lower two are deleted, and whoever played the highest rated (and therefore more difficult) opponents would be declared the winner. Under this system, Fischer emerged a half point higher than Bisguier. But wait a minute, argued Bisguier: Fischer’s first game was won by a forfeit; his opponent didn’t show up, so he didn’t even play the game! If that game was discounted, he claimed, then
he
would be the winner. The counterargument was that the
forfeited player in the first round was of such a low rating that it would have been almost statistically impossible for Bobby to have lost the game, and the result would have been discounted anyway. Back to the telephone booths.

This time, Bobby told Regina the good news, admitting that even though he was splitting the prize money with Bisguier, “
it was the title that really mattered.” One wonders, then, why he didn’t fight for the win against Shipman and win the title outright.

No one as young as Bobby had won the United States Open before, and no one had ever held the United States Junior and Open titles concurrently.

When Bobby returned to New York, both the Marshall and Manhattan chess clubs conducted victory celebrations, and he was lauded as America’s new chess hero. Even Bisguier, not prolonging any resentment, proclaimed Bobby Fischer as the strongest fourteen-year-old chess player who had ever lived.

After a summer of chess, Regina insisted that Bobby devote more attention to his sporting interests. So he swam at the YMCA and began to take tennis lessons, while also playing on the free city-owned courts. He hated going to the free courts, since it took two buses to get to the closest one, and then he’d have to wait sometimes for more than an hour to get a game. Nevertheless, he continued to play into late fall, until the weather became too cold and damp. Mother and son looked into his joining an indoor tennis club for the winter months, but when they discovered there was an initiation fee and a $10-per-hour charge, “
it was, of course, ridiculous for us to consider,” Bobby lamented.

Returning home from school one afternoon in September, Bobby sorted through his mail. He’d started to receive fan letters and requests for photos, autographs, even some selected game scores to autograph and inscribe—not just from the United States but from different corners of the globe. The letters didn’t pour in at the level experienced by Hollywood stars, but hardly a day would go by that several pieces of request mail did not arrive at 560 Lincoln Place. Additionally, Bobby regularly received unsolicited advice from fellow chess players, as well as offers from companies that wanted him to sponsor products. Sporadically, Bobby would select a letter at random and reply with a personal note. To speed up the “fan relations” process, Regina had Bobby’s photograph placed in an inexpensive greeting card on which
was printed his signature, and she’d mail that out to the various requesters. She also responded to the commercial offers, but for reasons of his own, Bobby showed almost no interest in them, whatever the price offered.

One letter he almost skipped over came in an envelope on which was imprinted the Manhattan Chess Club logo. When he opened it, all he could do was smile:

As the newly reigning United States Open Champion, and a participant in the Rosenwald the previous year, Bobby had anticipated getting this invitation for the 1957 tournament. What particularly intrigued him, though, was that this tournament would be the qualifying tournament for the Interzonal, which was the beginning of the path to the World Championship. Interzonal tournaments were only held every four years, and this coming year happened to be
the
year. He should have been thrilled with the invitation, but he faced a conflict, and thus was forced to puzzle out what to do.

The problem was that the Rosenwald overlapped with the great Hastings Christmas Congress in England, the annual international tournament that, over the years, had seen some of the greatest chess legends capture first prize. Bobby had been invited to that tournament and wanted to enter its elite winner’s circle. It would be his first real trip abroad, and his first international event, and it would be against some of the world’s finest players.

He couldn’t decide what to do.

After he had talked the situation over with his mother and his friends at the club, his mind was finally set. Youth believes it has no limits, and shows little patience. In the end Bobby could not tolerate a denial of his destiny. He notified the Rosenwald Committee that he’d accept their invitation to compete for the United States Championship—the prelude, he hoped, to eventually capturing the World Championship as well.

In December, just before play began in the United States Championship, Bisguier predicted that “
Bobby Fischer should finish slightly over the center mark in this tournament. He is quite possibly the most gifted of all players in the tournament; still he has had no experience in tournaments of such consistently even strength.” Bisguier’s crystal-ball divination seemed logical, but of course Bobby
had
had experience from the previous year’s Rosenwald. And although many other tournaments in which he’d played may not have included the very top players in the country, there were enough that skirted the summit. Throughout 1956 (when Bobby traveled some nine thousand miles to compete in tournaments) and through 1957, he never stopped playing, studying, and analyzing.

It seemed that his strength grew not just from tournament to tournament and match to match, but from day to day. Each game that he played, or analyzed, whether his or others’, established a processional of insight. He was
always working on the game,
his
game, refining it, seeking answers, asking questions, pulling out his threadbare pocket set while in the subway, walking in the street, watching television, or eating in a restaurant, his fingers moving as if they had a mind of their own.