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Bobby Fischer Goes To War How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time Reviewed by David Surratt
The title, of course, raises the issue of this match as metaphor for the Cold War, at least according to the Western Press: To Western commentators, the meaning of the confrontation was clear. A lone American star was challenging the long Soviet grip on the world title. His success would dispose of the Soviet's claim that their chess hegemony reflected the superiority of their political system. The board was a cold war arena where the champion of the free world fought for democracy against the apparatchiks of the Soviet socialist machine. Here was the High Noon of chess, coming to you from a concrete auditorium in Iceland. But was it really "the High Noon of chess"? Did the authors really care? Did they even know the difference between a knight and a rook? I forced myself to read on... The title of Chapter Three, Mimophant, further consolidated my dark appraisal of the book. Mimophant? What the heck is a mimophant? "The mimophant, says Arthur Koestler, is a phenomenon most of us have met in life: "a hybrid who combines the delicate frailness of the mimosa, crumbling at a touch when his own feelings are hurt, with the thick-skinned robustness of the elephant trampling over the feelings of others." Hmm, that does sound familiar. But frail? Bobby? The evidence suggested by the authors served only to deepen my distrust of their understanding of the chess world: Thus even the occasional defeat tended to have a shattering impact on his self-esteem. Certainly there is empirical evidence to back up such a claim. The records show that on those rare occasions on which he lost in tournaments, he would perform below par in the following game, too, with his percentage of victories not as high as normal. So too with virtually all GMs, or so I've read. This is less evidence of Fischer's frailty than of the author's ignorance I thought. Further evidence in support of my preconceived opinion was not long in coming... Comments like Fischer's "lifelong awkwardness with the opposite sex", as though his life was already over. Or their description of a Fischer with "little sense of humor in any of it's forms." This struck me immediately as at odds with the recollections of Yasser Seirawan, who had spend considerable time in Fischer's company. Yaz, in No Regrets, his excellent account of Fischer-Spassky II (Yugoslavia, 1992) comments that Fischer was "A fine wit, he is a very funny man. Throughout our hours together, we laughed a great deal. He smiles a big friendly smile and he cracks a lot of jokes." He (Yaz) further recounts Fischer at dinner when "[Phillipine GM Eugenio] Torre makes Fischer laugh a few times, a short, merry, friendly laugh out of his tummy." On recounting Fischer's performance at a press conference, he notes that "One thing that doesn't come through in the transcripts of the press conference is the humor. There was a lot of friendly banter and laughter." Yaz says Fischer "smiles and laughs easily." GM Gligoric writes in The World Chess Championship that "If he senses sincerity in others, Fischer becomes disarmed." and quotes GM Mecking as saying "Pressmen have been doing Fischer wrong all his life. He loves chess and is a wonderful friend." Whom did the authors talk to? Is the rest of their research likely to seem as shoddy? In defense of the authors, there is an impressive looking bibliography, some seven pages worth, in fact. Yet even here I can't help but feel that we are reading an outsider's rehash of old material, rewritten from the outside, and with no insights or appreciation or any feel for the game. My disdain for this book was really starting to get it's groove on, especially after this passage, discussing Mikhail Botvinnik: "He was really primus inter pares in a generation of unprecedented talent drawn from the length and breadth of the enlarged postwar Union of Soviet Socialist republics." Holy cow! Wasn't that Botvinnik's own line about himself? Did they really steal that line from him without even a hint of attribution? Another missed homework assignment: in chapter Four (Child of Destruction, don't you just love these catchy titles?) the authors assert that Tigran Petrosian was "the only world champion since 1934 to have defended his title successfully." Ahem, will someone please tell that to David Bronstein (1951), and Vasily Smyslov (1954). Botvinnik defended his title on both occasions. And please, that is World Champion, not "world champion". Lower case trivializes the title, and yes - I understand that by now I am nitpicking. Nevertheless, Edward Winter should have a field day cataloguing the errors in this book. I pushed on, knowing my Editor would insist... The book does spend considerable time recounting the monumental efforts to keep this match on track, to get both players, and most especially Bobby, to the board. The arduousness of the task is underscored by the remark of Paul Marshall, Fischer's attorney, who described his task as "feeling like a cop trying to talk a jump case off a ledge." In chapter 14, Eyeball to Eyeball, the authors make an analogy between Fischer's behavior and the deadly game of chicken made infamous by film idol James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. They leave no doubt that Bobby was prepared to win this game: Fischer could no doubt have won the world championship "chicken" contest - he always appeared ready to crash his career. When he stated his all-or-nothing terms for his participation in a match or tournament, it was transparent to those who met him both that he imbued each of his conditions with immense significance, and that his threats were credible. He had a record of inflicting financial and career damage on himself on failing to win concessions: when organizers turned down his demands, he had refused to play in tournaments, even withdrawing midtournament. With his all-or-nothing threats, he was not taking up a negotiating position. The threat was not a tactic; he meant what he said. Much is written also of how the organizers, pushed into a corner, understood the sincerity of Fischer's threats. Ultimately however, they (and others) paid the price, and the match took place. Given the authors history in the first parts of this book, I marveled at the following account of game five of the match: Pawn to queen four, knight to king's bishop three, pawn to queen's bishop four, pawn to king three, knight to queen's bishop three, bishop to knight five - the Nimzo-Indian, an opening in which black develops his pieces quickly and often exchanges bishop for knight. It frequently results in highly unbalanced positions. Spassky proceeded slowly - taking an hour and three-quarters for the first twenty moves, leaving him barely two minutes a move for the rest of the session. On move eleven, Fischer found an ingenious and unorthodox knight maneuver that most players would have rejected without a second glance, for on its new square the knight can be captured, leading to the kind of unsightly, disjointed pawn configuration beginners are warned to avoid. Pawns tend to be at their most robust, most difficult to pick off, and most useful as a defensive shield, when they are adjacent and can reinforce one another. In the Napoleonic wars, the British infantry usually fought in line abreast, the French in deep columns; in pawn terms, the British strategy is far superior. But Fischer had seen deep into the position and suddenly went on the offensive, his "weak pawns" transmogrifying into a potent force. I thought that a pretty good description for non-chessplayers of what was going on in the game, perhaps one of the better efforts at doing so that I've seen. It made me wonder - have I misjudged these two, or did they have some help with that description? Well, if they did have some help - it was not acknowledged. The authors also note the effects of the match on society in general: Chess moved out of dilapidated back rooms to become part of consumer and commercial society. Advertisers and marketing managers called on it as a brand image to add allure to their products. To anyone wanting to identify the match as one between two political systems, the gleeful speed with which capitalist America responded to the business possibilities of the game should have been proof enough. ...also making note of the boom in the chess community. Sets, boards, books, and so on almost flew off the shelves. "Booksellers reported with astonishment that chess books, once the slowest-selling items in their stores, were now leaving their shelves faster than romantic fiction." An interesting serendipity of Spassky's defeat, recounted by Nikolai Krogius and quoted by the authors, was the long-term benefit to chess in the Soviet Union: The authorities sought to assist young chess players and to develop chess in the country as a whole. Many children's chess schools were opened, the publication of chess literature was increased, the system for staging USSR championships was reorganized, greater attention was paid to the leading young chess players headed by Karpov. It sounds paradoxical, but Fischer's victory in reality had a markedly positive influence in raising the status of chess in the USSR. To the authors credit, they do at last place the match in it's historical context: Vietnam, Watergate, US-fueled anarchy in Chile, riots in Northern Ireland, and Uganda's horrific Idi Amin. And at last, in chapter 21 (Adversary Partners) they begin to answer the question, "was it really "the High Noon of chess"? Their first observation on the issue is perhaps the most compelling, at least for me: One flaw with a cold war interpretation of the match is immediately apparent. Fischer and Spassky had in common their sheer unsuitability to represent their countries' political systems. Spassky was not a Soviet patriot - and he made no secret of it. Fischer's idiosyncratic and asocial behavior marked him as un-American for many of his compatriots. Aside from this reality, there were the political considerations: Significantly, there were neither political allegations nor recriminations against the West [in the Soviet press]. There were no attempts to couch the match in strategic terms. While the loss of the title was a blow, it was to be presented as an internal chess issue, not a matter of direct international or ideological importance. But then this was not a time for unnecessary dissention toward the United States. Indeed, far from epitomizing East-West conflict, the championship took place in the high blossoming of détente. In Europe, the cockpit of the cold war, a postwar settlement had finally emerged, in effect the long-deferred World War II peace treaty. Though almost all Western accounts of Fischer-Spassky couch the match in geopolitical terms, they are, in this respect, curiously misleading. The encounter might have been seen by the public and written up in the press as a cold war showdown, but in the Kremlin and the White House, East-West showdowns were not on the agenda. In the end, Fischer-Spassky was just a chess match. A match of incredible significance to the chess world, but hardly a "High Noon of chess". Still, the book did grow on me as I read deeper into it. Despite the errors and misgivings, I did enjoy the read. The spectacle of the match still carries, for me, a deep fascination, which it is hard to turn from. There are innumerable anecdotes the reader will find of interest, and things about the match or the wider group of participants which I was unaware of. If you did not live through the match yourself, this book provides an excellent picture of the machinations and behind-the-scenes drama that occurred one summer, more than 30 years ago now. Perhaps the most potentially interesting speculations in the book lie in the authors attempts to understand Bobby Fischer, what motivated him then, and what motivates him now. Sadly, the authors have documented Bobby's current state of mind as best we can determine it today: Fischer has descended into an abyss of unreality, the world of Holocaust denial, persecution complexes, and conspiracy theories. In the 1980s he became fixated on the study of anti-Semitic tracts, such as the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf. In the late 1990s, he broadcast occasional interviews, though he performed only on condition that they went out live. This was a risky proposition for station chiefs: Fischer railed about the Jews...He told those with whom he retained any kind of contact that he had a mission to tell the truth. "It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.. Huh!" As for the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, "Well, America got what it deserved." A view best put, perhaps, by Shane Green in his article Checkmate for Grandmaster: It was the same
old Fischer, the same old vitriol. "I think the US is not going to exist
much longer," he says. "I think everybody's going to be surprised at just
how soon the US collapses and the US becomes history." This book evokes waves of nostalgia within me, for the
innocence of my youth, for Bobby's promise - both accomplished and
unfulfilled, and for the heady days when Bobby wrested the crown, almost
single-handedly, from the Soviet chess machine. As for Boris Spassky, he was
and is, always the gentleman. True champions never lose their crown,
only their title, and Spassky still wears his. Read An Excerpt at the Publisher's Site Read a Brief Interview With the Authors
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