Endgame (33 page)

By the time the Icelander left Grossinger’s the next morning, he felt that Bobby was on the verge of agreeing to play exclusively in Reykjavik.

As the date of the championship match grew closer, Bobby quit Grossinger’s and, assisted by one of his lawyers, Andrew Davis, a Yale University alumnus, checked into the Yale Club in midtown Manhattan, where he stayed for a few weeks.

As summer approached, the reality of the match caused such heightened curiosity that it seemed like Fischer’s every remark, his every action, was recorded around the globe. Even at Grossinger’s, far removed from the business of Manhattan, he’d been besieged by calls, cables, and visits suggesting schemes to make him—and their originators—rich. A “Bobby Fischer Chess Set” was suggested. Endorsements were sought. One Wall Street broker even tried convincing Bobby to become a “corporation,” like the Beatles, so that shares of “Bobby Fischer” could be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Fischer went his own way, agreeing to little and signing nothing.

Chess players were beginning to regard the forthcoming Fischer-Spassky duel as the most important match ever played by an American.
Time
magazine was just one of many media outlets beating the geopolitical drum. It dubbed the contest “
The Russian Bear vs. the Brooklyn Wolf.” Spassky’s defense of his title became, symbolically, a defense of the Soviet Union, and the Russian’s millstone was a heavy weight to bear. Fischer, completely aware of the encounter’s political and cultural implications, accepted the extra layer of significance as his own responsibility. “I now feel a sense of mission to win the championship,” he declared.
Asked if the bout would be a grudge match, he replied: “In a sense. But not personally between me and Spassky … it’s against the Russians.”

The challenger in any contest often has a special advantage in that he’s forced to play “up” in order to win; he’s motivated to compete harder because he must prove that he’s better than the champion. The title holder, secure in the knowledge of his superiority, frequently plays on his own “normal” level, falsely assuming that because he
is
the champion, the proven quality of his past play is sufficient for current victory. One advantage Spassky enjoyed, though, was a rule stipulation called “draw odds.” If he could draw every game, giving him 12 points, Spassky would retain his title without winning a game. Fischer needed 12 ½ points to dethrone Spassky.

Iceland, the westernmost and one of the smallest countries in Europe, sitting remotely in the North Atlantic just below the Arctic Circle, may have seemed a curious venue for a World Chess Championship. Largely uninhabited except around the coast, the island is a physical contradiction, partly covered with vast ice fields yet home to several active volcanoes that rise in flames from both the land and the sea around it. Virtually treeless, it features frosted picture-book mountains that are interspersed with rugged, lava-strewn terrain, giving the landscape an unnatural, almost lunar appearance: American astronauts trained there before their voyages to the moon. In 1972 the average income for an Icelander was barely $2,000 a year. But it is a spirited country, is pollution-free, and has no urban slums and virtually no crime.

So what made Iceland the ideal country to stage the Fischer-Spassky match? Undoubtedly it was the resoluteness, pride, and enthusiasm of its people, and their love of the game as an intellectual and cultural pursuit. Icelanders are among the most literate in the world and the Icelandic sagas rate among the greatest in literature. Icelanders read more books per capita than any other people on the globe, and—like the Russians—they almost all play chess. In the winter months when there is almost twenty-four hours of darkness, what better way to spend an evening or a weekend than to stay at home or visit a comfortably heated club, play chess for hours, and avoid the chill of the Atlantic winter with its gales, thunderstorms, and biting rain.

Over the years, Icelanders have sponsored many international tournaments and matches, and the possibility of holding what was being billed as the Match of the Century was more than exhilarating to chess players throughout the country. As it developed, the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match was one of the most expertly organized World Championship matches ever conducted, intoxicating for Icelanders as well as the tourists and members of the international press who descended on the capital city of Reykjavik.
Photographic blowups of Fischer and Spassky adorned the windows of almost every shop, with black-and-white checkered displays serving as backdrops for huge papier-mâché chess pieces.

Most of the residents started out wishing for Fischer’s victory, but after the numerous false starts, threats, and general difficulties Bobby caused, sympathy began to swing to the gentlemanly Spassky. Fischer wasn’t satisfied with the financial arrangements. The winner was to receive $78,125 and the loser
$46,875. Beyond that, each was to be given 30 percent of all television and film rights. Fischer, though, demanded 30 percent of the gate receipts
in addition
, arguing that paid admissions might amount to $250,000 and that he and Spassky should receive a share.

The Icelandic chess officials—who weren’t at all sure how they were going to fill the three-thousand-seat Laugardalshöll, the site of the match, game after game for as many as twenty-four sessions, not counting adjournments—argued that gate-receipt income should go entirely to them to cover their outlay for the stakes and the arrangements.

Fischer canceled his flight to Iceland at the last minute, on the evening of June 25. The airline had reserved a full row of seats just for him and had stocked the plane’s refrigerator with oranges so that Fischer could have fresh juice “squeezed in front of him,” as he’d requested, during the four-hour trip across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, talks continued between Bobby’s lawyers, Paul Marshall and Andrew Davis, and the Icelandic Chess Federation concerning the matter of the gate receipts. Both sides stood firm. During the ensuing week, additional flights were booked and then canceled by Fischer as headlines began to question whether he’d appear at all. Icelandic papers were asking
HVENAER KEMUR HINN DULARFULLI FISCHER? (“WHEN COMETH THE MYSTERIOUS FISCHER?”)
A few days after Fischer’s first flight was changed, Bobby and Davis drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport, apparently to board a Pan American flight. But, strangely,
Fischer paused to buy an alarm clock and was seen by reporters and photographers (there were more than a hundred members of the press waiting to interview and photograph him). He fled the airline terminal and missed the flight. Later, he was observed at a nearby Howard Johnson’s restaurant, having dinner. When, indeed, would Bobby goeth to Iceland?

Although money was the focal point of the controversy, it wasn’t just about dollars (or kroners); rather, it was about Bobby getting his way. In this case, he was pretty confident he could receive what he demanded. As an editorial in
The New York Times
suggested: “If he plays in Reykjavik and wins—as he has an excellent chance of doing—his prospective earnings would make the amount he is arguing about now seem infinitesimal.” Fischer knew that. He also knew that the world was clamoring for the match and that if he held out a little longer, more money might be forthcoming.

The world press was, to say the least, not amused. Foreign papers reflected the outrage of their readership.
RUSSIANS DISDAIN FISCHER FOR CONCERN WITH MONEY
, blared a headline in
The New York Times
, and Tass, the Soviet press agency, editorialized: “Whenever the matter concerns Fischer, money comes first while sports motives are relegated to the background. Characteristically, his confidants are not chessplayers, but lawyers to whom he [entrusts] all his chess affairs.” The leading German Sunday newspaper,
Bild am Sonntag
, reported: “Fischer has dragged chess down to the level of a wrestling match. We’ve never known of such arrogance and snobbism.” The London
Daily Mail
stated: “Bobby Fischer is quite certainly the most ill-mannered, temperamental and neurotic brat ever to be reared in Brooklyn. As far as the international prestige battle goes, the Soviet Union has won the opening round 10 to 0.” What the press—and seemingly everyone else—failed to understand was that it was Bobby’s shrewdness in protecting his financial interests, rather than temper tantrums or neuroses, that was making him hesitate. He knew instinctively that the longer he waited, the more swollen the prize fund would become.

Bobby felt that journalists weren’t really interested in how or why he moved the chess pieces, but rather in the scandal, tragedy, and comedy of his life. To him, the press was a puzzle that he could never quite solve. He felt that he couldn’t lie if asked a direct question, and yet if he simply refused to answer, the assumption was that he was hiding something crucial.

Whispers had been bandied about as far back as 1958, when he played at Portorož, that he was an anti-Semite, but privately, he categorically denied it when playing at Netanya, Israel, in 1968. One of Bobby’s closest friends, Anthony Saidy, said that he never heard Fischer make an anti-Semitic remark until at some point after the 1972 championship.

During the match, Bobby didn’t issue any statements that were either anti-Semitic or anti-American—on the contrary, he appeared deeply patriotic and included many Jews among his friends, lawyers, and colleagues. But Wilfrid Sheed, an American novelist and essayist, penned a comment just before the match ended that many would later regard as prescient. In his
The New York Times Book Review
of a work by Ezra Pound, Sheed likened Bobby to Pound, the infamous anti-Semite and anti-American who was indicted for treason by the United States for his fascist broadcasts.
Sheed wrote: “Of Ezra
Pound, as of Bobby Fischer, all that can be decently said is that his colleagues admire him. There is no reason for anyone else to.”

By the time the opening ceremonies took place at Iceland’s National Theatre on Saturday evening, July 1, less than twenty-four hours before the beginning of the scheduled first game, reporters and spectators were making reservations to return home, in the belief that Fischer wouldn’t appear. Bobby had moved from the Yale Club to the home of Anthony Saidy, who lived with his parents in a large Tudor house in Douglaston, Queens.
As Saidy later related, the house was subjected to an unending media barrage. Fischer was besieged with calls and cables, and photographers and journalists staked out the grounds in hopes of just a glimpse of him. Fischer headlines dominated the front pages of newspapers all over the world, crowding off such “secondary” news items as the 1972 United States presidential nominations.

Saidy suggested that there was an actual plot to keep Fischer from becoming World Champion, and this involved the wiretapping of his parents’ phone. “At one point, when Bobby was talking to Davis, who was in Iceland,” Saidy said, “Bobby made a reference to one of the Icelandic Chess Federation officials as being ‘stupid.’ Suddenly, he heard a woman’s voice cutting through the line saying: ‘He said: “He’s stupid.” ’ The line was obviously tapped.” Saidy added that Fischer also believed that the line was tapped.

Anything is possible, of course. There was a theory prevalent among a number of Americans, such as Fred Cramer, who was on Bobby’s team, that the Icelanders were underhandedly working with the Russians to repel Fischer’s assault on Soviet chess hegemony. Aside from the personal dislike for Fischer that a number of the Icelandic chess officials, such as Thorarinsson, openly felt, though, not one instance emerged suggesting that they did anything to hinder Fischer’s World Championship bid. Indeed, some of the Icelandic officials were convinced that Spassky was the better player and that he was going to defeat Fischer rather easily anyway. At the commencement of the match, they were privately expecting to see Fischer humiliated
on the board
.

The drawing for colors for the first game didn’t take place during the opening ceremonies, which failed to develop strictly according to schedule. Spassky was seated in the first row, elegantly attired in a gray-checked vested suit. Meanwhile, an empty seat, also in the front row, which Fischer was to have occupied, remained conspicuously vacant. While speeches were made in
English, Russian, and Icelandic, the audience fidgeted, craning their necks to the side entrance, half expecting—hoping—that at any moment Fischer would make a grand entrance. It didn’t happen.