Endgame: Chapters 10–12

Whenever he returned to Brooklyn to prepare for the next tournament or match, he tended to sequester himself in his apartment.

Eventually, internecine warfare erupted between the United States and Soviet Chess federations and FIDE.

Walking back to his cottage or off to the swimming pool, he often swung the racket at an invisible tennis ball, just as he did as a boy when he’d swing an imaginary baseball bat while gamboling along Flatbush Avenue.

Jackie was no sycophant or whipping boy, as he’s been described by other writers.

While Bobby knew of Jackie’s reputation for truculence and tolerated him nevertheless, he was careful not to include him in all areas of his life, knowing instinctively when Beers wouldn’t be welcomed by others.

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 12½ points to dethrone Spassky.

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 Russians were censuring his behavior in front of his friends and the world press.

Is it too much to hope that even at this late state he will regain his balance and fulfill his obligation to the chess world by trying to play Spassky without histrionics?

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.

Fischer built a crushing attack and enveloped Spassky in a mating net, forcing his capitulation.

He was becoming convivial and even made attempts at dry, almost British humor.

Bobby’s retinue included his bodyguard Saemi Palsson and Palsson’s wife, as well as Quinteros.

The mayor had offered Bobby a ticker-tape parade down the “Canyon of Heroes” on Broadway in lower Manhattan, a rare honor given in the past to such luminaries as Charles Lindbergh, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Apollo astronauts, but Bobby wasn’t much excited by the idea.

Ignorant of the practices of his own tribe, he (the apostate) gravitates toward those he considers Other...thinking, as does the adolescent, that they possess some special merit.

The real proof for me were those [false] prophecies...that show to me that he [Armstrong] is an outright huckster.

The Collinses didn’t know what to say to Bobby about his newfound convictions, which on their face seemed contradictory: If everyone has the right to be here, why was Bobby inveighing against Jews?

Following the gift of the Klassen book, Fischer sent the Collinses another hate-filled screed, Secret World Government, by Major General Count Cherep-Spiridovich.

Although much of his reading was confined to hate literature, he also embraced other works, such as Dag Hammarskjöld’s piquant book of aphorisms and poetry, Markings...

Although much of his reading was confined to hate literature, he also embraced other works, such as Dag Hammarskjöld’s piquant book of aphorisms and poetry, Markings...

Through telephone conversations and correspondence, Regina began to sense Bobby’s drift toward racial and religious prejudice, and she was driven to write him when he refused to offer financial help to his titular father, Gerhardt Fischer, and Gerhardt’s wife and children who had been briefly imprisoned in South America for their political protests and had just been released.

Marshall investigated a possible injunction to stop publication of the work since according to Bobby, Darrach had allegedly violated his contract: Supposedly, he’d agreed to write only articles about Bobby, not a book.

The story of the machinations employed to enable the Fischer–Karpov World Championship match to take place are enough to fill a separate book—and have!—but the details are hardly dramatic in retrospect.

He was also bereft of the millions of dollars he would have received had the two men played.

Just to get away from it all—the World Championship imbroglio and the constant stalking of him by reporters and photographers—Bobby took a two-month cruise by himself around the world.

At one point, he was spotted in a parking lot with an armful of anti-Semitic flyers that promulgated the superiority of the Aryan race.

Either the quote was spurious or misremembered, or Bobby was joshing the reporter who recorded it, because the truth is that he had the fillings removed for what he believed was a legitimate health reason.

During the walk, Bobby kept up a continuous spiel about the Jewish World Conspiracy and made various anti-Semitic remarks, but when they returned to the house and sat down for dinner with Browne’s family he ceased his outré comments.

Of course, Bobby’s fears were thought by some to be incipient paranoia, and although it was highly unlikely that the KGB was plotting against him, even paranoids can have real enemies.

Although not reaching the virtuosic literary heights of incarceration essays penned by writers such as Thoreau or Martin Luther King Jr., the document was an oddly compelling account of the execrable details of his experience.

At one point, Fischer and Kok joined the Spasskys in a doubles tennis match; there were elegant, candlelit dinners and postprandial conversations, and a few outings into Brussels itself.

Staying at a friendly Bavarian inn in the countryside is usually a pleasant affair and can be a chance for renewal, offering long walks in the pastoral countryside, succulent German cooking, decadent desserts, and steins of Rauchbier, the smoked malt and hops from Bamberg that is famous throughout the Free State of Bavaria.

Bobby, who had an almost anarchistic disdain for the U.S. government and had refused to pay taxes since 1977, was totally blasé about the receipt of the letter and the threat of a $250,000 fine and ten-year imprisonment for violating the sanctions.

Bobby was supremely obstinate, and although he could not really justify his decision to play, under the circumstances his tenacity, heart, and pocketbook prevailed.

Vasiljevic, also applauding, looked at him approvingly and smiled; Bobby leaned back in his chair, swiveled back and forth, and smugly basked, Mussolini-like, in his courtiers’ adulation.

His anti-Americanism was lambasted on the editorial pages of the Daily News (“Fischer Pawns His Honor”) and The New York Times (“Bosnia’s Tragedy and Bobby’s”) and reported in newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts on almost every continent.

A scintilla of doubt had begun to insinuate itself.

He’d made what Charles Krauthammer described in Time magazine, somewhat facetiously, as the greatest comeback since Napoleon Bonaparte sailed a single-masted fleet from the island of Elba in 1815.

After receiving the entire payment due him (within forty-eight hours of the conclusion of the match, disproving rumors that Vasiljevic would renege on the amount) Bobby by prearrangement met up with his sister, Joan, at the Belgrade Intercontinental Hotel.

His proposal of marriage was categorically refused.