Searching for Bobby Fischer (28 page)

“Of course the difference is that as a chess player Bobby was a genius and that as a political thinker he’s a schmuck. But anti-Semitism is perfect for him because it is built on opposition. Nazis are the bad boys of the world. Fischer identifies with that; he was a bad boy who never did what he was told.”

*    *    *

ONE CHILLY AFTERNOON
Victor Frias and I went to McArthur Park, within walking distance of Bobby’s downtown L.A. neighborhood. It is big, with winding paths and a nice lake where kids fish and a few brown ducks swim around. There used to be a larger population of ducks, but five or six years ago they began to disappear. Hungry Vietnamese who lived nearby were fishing for them at night with hook and line.

McArthur Park sits between two worlds. One side is the western perimeter of L.A.’s thriving industry and affluence—expensive condominiums, art galleries and tall, modern office buildings in the distance. But to the east and south the park is bordered by a poor, predominantly Latin neighborhood with delis, bars blaring Rancheras music and cheap Mexican restaurants. Sandwiched between the bars and restaurants are what seem like dozens of health clinics, enough for an entire city, each with a big sign advertising the end to your physical woes.

In the southwest corner of the park fifteen or twenty down-and-out men played chess. As we approached them, I whispered to Victor that since no one here knew him it might be fun to get into a money game. Victor didn’t reply but within a few seconds I realized how preposterous my suggestion was. The first player who looked up broke into a broad smile. Victor Frias, international master from Chile, was a celebrity in McArthur Park, and he was quickly surrounded by a dozen men slapping him on the back, asking about where and whom he had been playing and about the successes of other Latin American masters.

Twenty feet away, a stout man hunched over one of the tables. He didn’t seem to notice us, and for a time Victor ignored his game, which was the only one still going on. But as Frias joked with old friends and the man moved his pieces and hit his clock, you could feel that the lack of contact between them was filled with tension. After a time they nodded at each other. Without saying a word, they had agreed to play.

The heavyset man was the star of McArthur Park. He commanded respect among the players there in the same way that Israel Zilber is the acknowledged “Sheriff” of Washington Square
and Valentin Arbakov is known throughout the Soviet Union as the king of Sokolniki Park in Moscow, where he spends much of the day drinking vodka and taking on all comers for kopecks. The chess world is remarkably tight, and though these men often sit and sleep in the cold waiting for a game and work their craft for nickels and dimes, they have reputations that cross oceans. Susan Polgar of Hungary had known about Zilber in Washington Square and made it a point to go there to play blitz with him when she came to New York. Arbakov has beaten many top grandmasters who come to Sokolniki Park to test themselves against him. The stout man in McArthur Park has also beaten many grandmasters, but what makes his success more surprising is that until recently he was merely an expert and now his rating is only that of a weak master; as a tournament player he is not in the same class as Zilber and Arbakov, who both play at the grandmaster level.

Without asking, Victor Frias knew the rules of the game they would be playing, and he looked a little unhappy. Normally in blitz each player gets five minutes on his clock, and for a player unfamiliar with speed chess, the action is too fast to follow. But the stout man in McArthur Park had made his reputation as a one-minute player; each man began with sixty seconds on his clock, and unless someone was checkmated, the one who first used up his minute lost, regardless of his position.

Frias is tough-looking, with a thick black beard and the build of Roberto Duran when he fought as a middleweight. Sitting at a chessboard, he smolders with intensity. He is a great five-minute player, one of the best in the United States, but from the beginning it was clear that against the fat man he was at a decided disadvantage. His opponent had an incredibly fast and powerful right hand built up from years of practice; it moved like Ali’s jab, and in one flowing cobra stroke he grabbed a piece and smacked the clock. He played only a few openings, but he had practiced the sequences of moves for rhythm and speed. In only three or four seconds he moved through the opening fifteen or twenty moves of each game, hand flashing from piece to clock, and invariably by the time they were in the middle game, Frias was eleven or twelve seconds behind.

In one-minute chess there is no time to pause and consider; it is absolutely instantaneous and instinctive, and watching the action is like seeing the film of a prizefight that has been put on fast forward. There is no following its logic. It is hard to discern whose hand is moving what piece; chessmen fly in the air and fall to the ground. The fat man had memorized thousands of one- and two-move traps, the kinds of moves good players scorn as cheap shots and that don’t work in slower games. But this man had no time for depth or art; he had devoted much of his life to learning the best shortcuts in a game that doesn’t allow its participants time to think. He was a grandmaster of cheap shots.

As the two of them played they breathed heavily, as if they were running; sweat dripped from their faces. The fat man would never agree to begin the next game until he had fully caught his breath. He knew precisely the energy he needed for the next sprint. His clock had dents and gouges from the force with which he pounded it with his thick fingers. Even more remarkable than his hand speed were his eyes. While Victor occasionally cost himself a second to glance at the clock, his opponent smacked it without looking. He knew the precise angle from rook to clock, from queen to clock, and uncannily, at the exact instant when Frias ran out of time, without looking away from the position, the man would announce, “You lose.”

Again and again Victor had won positions, a few moves away from mating his overweight but speedy opponent, but would lose on time, and after an hour, when they decided to quit, he was several games behind. Before leaving the table, he slyly offered to triple the stakes if the fat man would agree to play with seventy-five seconds on each clock instead of sixty, but he knew that his opponent would refuse. The fat man had worked at his game for years, was brilliant within its crazy dynamic and had gained a reputation that gave his life meaning. He knew that even the great Fischer, rumored to eat sometimes in the Mexican restaurants nearby, might lack the hand speed and coordination to beat him in one-minute chess. If he gave Frias another fifteen seconds there would be moments in which he could think, the game would inch a little closer to real chess, and he wouldn’t have a chance in hell.

*    *    *

RON GROSS WAS
Fischer’s best friend in California from 1972 until their friendship ended in 1984, when he talked about Bobby in an interview with a reporter. They had been friends since Fischer was twelve years old. When they first met in New York, they spent their time playing, searching for chess books and studying the game together.

Gross recalls an afternoon with his fourteen-year-old friend at the Manhattan Chess Club. “We were playing and I noticed the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky standing nearby watching. He had made an appointment with Bobby; he wanted to see the ‘game of the century’ that Fischer had played recently against Donald Byrne. I said, ‘There’s Piatigorsky, you ought to talk to him,’ but Bobby refused; he didn’t want to stop playing. He had me in an off-balanced position, down the exchange but up a pawn. With Piatigorsky waiting, Bobby got nervous and made a mistake, and suddenly he had the worst of it. This made him even more stubborn. We weren’t playing with a clock, and with Piatigorsky standing there Fischer thought about his position for almost an hour. I finally won the game, and afterwards Bobby got up from the table and started screaming at Piatigorsky, ‘Who are you that I have to show you my game?’ He blamed this world-famous artist because he’d lost a game to me, and after making Piatigorsky wait all that time, Bobby wouldn’t play out the game for him. By anyone’s standards he’d been outrageously rude, but that’s the way he was.”

In recent years, according to Gross, Fischer was still studying as much as when he first met him, but the books had changed. A couple of years after the Spassky match he began to distrust Ted Armstrong and broke with the Church of God. Now, instead of hunting down religious tracts or collections of chess games, he coveted books like
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and
The Myth of Six Million Dead
. He was convinced that the Jews were controlling the country and that the Holocaust was a self-serving fantasy created by Zionists. He’d call up Gross at one or two in the morning to ask if his friend had read a new article about world control by the Jews. Usually Gross would lie and say he’d read it or would promise to do so soon. He didn’t want to upset Fischer
and hoped he would forget this crazy preoccupation and return to chess.

Perhaps if he met a girl it would help. Bobby had always been attracted to women but had little to do with them because he felt that they took his mind off work. It was rumored that his poor performance in Buenos Aires in 1960, when he was seventeen years old, was due to his passionate involvement with a prostitute during the tournament, and he had vowed never to let this happen again. After his retirement, friends often tried to get him dates. In his late thirties and early forties he was eager to meet girls, but these associations were like his recurrent fantasy of making a chess comeback; his pattern was to encourage friends to set up dates and then to reject the women—his relationships rarely got past the talking stage. Once Gross fixed him up with a buxom blonde. “They got on very well,” recalled Gross. “They spent the evening talking about blacks. Neither of them liked blacks much.

“There’s an anti-Semitic bookstore near Inglewood,” Gross said. “We’d go in there to find an article or book he wanted to read, and it reminded me of going to chess bookstores in New York when we were kids. Once we drove to this Inglewood bookstore, but Bobby didn’t want to go inside because he didn’t want the owner to see him, so I had to go in and buy the books for him. He had a special discount at this store, and before I went in he reminded me to ask for his discount. Then when I brought out the books he got all excited. Bobby has great enthusiasm for whatever interests him. It was just like the old days, except that the subject was different. I’d talk to him about his ideas, but I had to be tactful because I didn’t want to tell him that he was out of his mind.”

Despite a shared passion for chess, the two men couldn’t be less alike. Gross is a gentle, well-mannered, neatly dressed real-estate salesman who taught junior high school until recently and lives in a pleasant middle-class home in Cerritos. He is an affectionate, doting father to his adolescent daughter and an affable man who watches pro football on Sunday afternoons. It’s hard to imagine Bobby coming over on weekends, sitting on the sofa in his filthy clothes, shoes falling apart, spewing his newest ideas about Hitler and the Jewish global conspiracy or chortling about an anti-Semitic
Spanish comic book he’d found in Tijuana. It was embarrassing to be around him, Gross recalls, “because when he got started on the Jews, whether he was in the house or at a restaurant, he’d bang the table and curse.”

Bobby made Gross’s wife and daughter uncomfortable, and Gross seems to be relieved that the relationship is over. Nevertheless, he genuinely liked Fischer and enjoyed his boyish enthusiasm for the outdoors and for physical fitness. Mostly, however, he was captivated by Fischer’s chess. For hours after he had tired of describing Bobby’s quirks, he and Frias analyzed games that Gross had played against Fischer. For each of them it was a special time, and they behaved like two writers looking through a cache of unpublished manuscripts by Tolstoy. Gross seemed to remember every game he had ever played against Fischer, even positions from speed games played more than thirty years before. “I’d have prepared a line to play against him, something he couldn’t have seen,” Gross said, “because I always knew what chess periodicals he was reading, but he’d find moves you’d never see in a book.”

Chess players around the world, from Kasparov to rank beginners, are curious to know how the present-day Fischer compares in playing strength to the one who defeated Spassky in 1972, and how he would stack up against Karpov or Kasparov now. Grandmaster Peter Biyiasas claims that Fischer is a much stronger player today. Over the course of several weeks in 1981 Fischer lived with Biyiasas and his wife, Ruth Haring, in their home in San Francisco, and the two grandmasters played well over a hundred speed games. “If anything, Bobby’s gotten better,” said Biyiasas. “He’s like a machine. There was a feeling of inevitability about those games. Fischer saw too much and was too fast. While he played, he made comments and joked, as if he were playing against an amateur. I didn’t win a single game.”

Even more impressive to Biyiasas was Fischer’s ability to analyze chess positions. “We looked at Karpov-Kasparov games and he’d say, ‘But look at these blunders. Karpov could have drawn this game, but he lost it.’ They didn’t look like blunders to me, but when Bobby took the time to explain, I saw that he was right every time. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s still the best in the world.”

Listening to Biyiasas, one has the impression that Fischer has been incubating for years, growing stronger and stronger, spiraling off into his own chess universe. According to several Fischer friends, former world champion Boris Spassky arrived at the same conclusion after losing the vast majority of speed games he played against Fischer in a secret meeting in 1987.

Ron Gross, who is a strong master, has a more measured opinion. He played forty or fifty speed games against Fischer in 1984 and lost them all save for one win and two draws. He described the games with loving detail. “One day Bobby won seventeen in a row, and then I drew a game in which he allowed a perpetual check. I had played the Hennig-Schara and I was killing him on the queen-side. I had a check over there, and he allowed it, and I couldn’t figure out why. Afterwards he said, ‘Why didn’t you win the piece? You had a won game.’ I’d been so overjoyed to get a draw that I hadn’t looked for a win.”