Endgame: Chapters 3–4

A preponderance of the members were Jewish, a group that had pursued the game for centuries and was highly proficient at it.

The strongest was the rarefied “A” group where the masters and experts resided; then there was the “A-Reserve,” consisting of potentially strong players, followed by the “B” group and finally the “C” category, which incorporated the lowest-rated or weakest players, many of whom were hoping to work their way up the ladder.

His chess prowess and velvet tongue may have blinded some people to his despicable past, proving the adage that sometimes chess players make strange team fellows.

The disparate team crammed into Laucks’s unreliable 1950 Chrysler station wagon, which contained everyone’s luggage, chess sets and boards, food, and sleeping bags—some of it precariously strapped on top—and like the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, gunwales straining, shock absorbers depressed to their limits, they were ready.

Many factors could have contributed to his meteoric rise at the time: meeting Jack Collins and playing countless games with him and with Jack’s acolytes, almost all masters who came to the Collins salon throughout the summer...

...the knowledge he’d accumulated from steadily studying chess books and periodicals for almost five years; and a gestalt of understanding regarding the game that, through a combination of study, experience, and intrinsic gifts, coalesced in his mind.

As usual, Bobby was the youngest of the New York City contingent, which included Larry Evans, William Lombardy, and James T. Sherwin (who played ten straight speed games with Bobby in between rounds, and lost every one: “It was then that I decided that he was really too strong for me,” Sherwin remembered).

The only untoward incident he had was that someone once stepped on his newly polished shoes—on purpose, he said.

Bobby’s habitual mufti of T-shirt, wrinkled pants, and sneakers was considered an outrage by Caroline Marshall, Frank Marshall’s widow and the long-standing manager of the club, and on several occasions she informed him of his sartorial indiscretion, once even threatening to bar him from the premises if he didn’t dress more appropriately.

Normally, playing without a queen is crippling, almost tantamount to an automatic loss.

His chess innocence gone, he could now see the denouement perhaps twenty or more moves ahead.

Lawson saw a connection between Fischer and Morphy in their precocious rise, although Bobby had yet to prove himself the world’s—let alone America’s—greatest player.

Bobby’s remuneration from the American Chess Foundation for his sparkling brilliancy? Fifty dollars.

Bobby, in contrast, was nervous and volatile, the chess arriviste of Brooklyn, a colt of a player, and as it was beginning to develop, the spearhead of the coming generation of American players.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the time of Bobby’s initial and then most intense ascent, an expenditure of just $5 was considered burdensome by both mother and son. It could be that this penury was the catalyst for Bobby’s often-criticized “greediness” later in his career.

In 1956, Dr. Reuben Fine, an American who was one of the world’s best chess players from the 1930s through the 1940s, wrote a monograph entitled Psychoanalytic Observations on Chess and Chess Masters, which was published as Volume 3 of Psychoanalysis, a journal of psychoanalytic psychology.

Perhaps Fine’s monograph gave impetus to the press; whenever they did chess stories, reporters would look for a certain amount of aberration among the players.

Some players at the Manhattan Chess Club began huffing that he was a meshuggener—a Yiddish term of disparagement suggesting he was “a little crazy.”

The peach-faced Lombardy, who wasn’t in the running for the title, was playing the venerated Reshevsky, and the Old Fox stood at 9½ points.

A classic of contemporary chess literature, it had been issued as a propagandistic treatise to highlight the “rise of the Soviet school to the summit of world chess [as] a logical result of socialistic cultural development.”

After spending perhaps an hour in the Four Continents in pursuit of the best in current chess literature, Bobby would cross the street to the Dickensian shop of the phlegmatic Dr. Albrecht Buschke, where he sought an entrée into the past.

It smelled of mold, was redolent of antique paper and bindings, and was permeated with a perennial gray cloud of an unknown origin.

That Regina was apt to put Bobby’s interests above her own and, out of love, signed on to Bobby’s dream of chess dominance is hinted in a letter she wrote back when her son had been vacillating between attending the Hastings Christmas Tournament and playing for the U.S. Championship.

In the audition, everything went well at first, Bobby and his fellow players answering most of the questions with aplomb.

Regina demurred: ”I don’t want to answer anything unless I have my lawyer present.”

Regina’s political activities—any or all of which could be considered “subversive,” taking into account the near hysterical anti-Communist climate of the day—were fodder for the FBI: her six years in Moscow, her mercurial ex-husband in Chile, her work at defense plants, her association with rabble-rousers, her affiliation with left-wing political organizations, and her active participation in protests...

In view of the foregoing and in light of her recent contact of an official of the Soviet Embassy, it is desired that this case be re-opened and that investigation be instituted in an effort to determine if subject has in the past or may presently be engaged in activities inimical to the interest of the United States.

It would have been a suitable career for her, considering her penchant for intrigue, politics, and travel.

So ebullient was he over finally being able to get to the country of his dreams, he tripped with youthful awkwardness on the microphone wire while making his exit from the stage, but managed to keep his balance.

After a few days of fun and education in Brussels, the Fischers were ready to leave, but not before a minor fracas occurred.

For years he’d been studying the nuances of their games: their styles, opening preferences, strengths and weaknesses.

Some pundits, not just from the Soviet Union, were forecasting Tal to be the winner.

But there was no evidence that Lombardy, known for his acerbic tongue, was antagonistic toward Bobby.

But despite his mien of seriousness and inapproachability, Bronstein was friendly, animated, and liked by virtually all the other players, owing to his cordiality, immense knowledge of the game, and a certain intellectual eccentricity.

It wasn’t the tactical possibilities that made him consume time, but the long, drawn-out endgame position, rife with complications.

Because of his high score, Gligoric was already assured a berth in the Candidates, so he could easily offer Fischer an early “grandmaster draw” and coast to a successful denouement.

The president of the club, Dr. Edward Lasker, welcomed everyone, thanked them for coming, and then began a litany of Bobby’s many accomplishments.

Despite the fact that Collins could occasionally beat Bobby in speed games and even in clocked training games (they never met over the board in a formal tournament), Bobby’s opinion of his mentor’s prowess—as indeed happened with him and other players—became inexorably linked to what his official rating was.

If the separation in rating points had been minimal, Bobby’s opinion of Collins might not have been so deprecatory. Raymond Weinstein, a strong international master and a student of Collins, wrote that he’d been in awe of his teacher until he heard Fischer’s unkind remarks about him.

Bobby, perhaps because of the indigence of his childhood, hated the idea of people making money off his name.