Bobby Fischer took on Russia’s communist empire – and won

The controversial child prodigy emerged in the 1950s and became world chess champion in one of the most memorable confrontations of the Cold War.

Bobby Fischer (right) plays Soviet world chess champion Boris Spassky during their first encounter at Reykjavík in Iceland in July 1972. (Picture: Alamy.)

The year 1972 was peak Cold War. The battle was at full throttle and manifesting itself in conflicts, terrorism and, just as often, sport. Even a chess match that year had profound undercurrents of meaning as communism and liberal democracy clashed.

In the decades since 1945, communism’s deep flaws – its savagery, deceptions, dishonesty and cruelty – had been steadily laid bare.

The Cold War team captains – America and Russia – traded blows throughout 1972 as liberal democracy showed its inevitable strengths. Communism was reeling. The US put four men on the moon in 1972. The Soviet Union could only boast its unmanned probe, Luna 20.

The Soviet Union won 50 gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics, America just 33. But the Soviet, state-sponsored drug regime that secured those medals would soon be revealed.

The Soviets even defeated the US for the basketball gold. The US had won not just every gold medal since the sport was introduced, but every game. Of course, the Soviets cheated their way to that as well.

The game was played five days after the Munich Olympic massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes – an operation in which Russian-­directed East Germany helped with logistics and weapons.

In early moves to detente, the US, USSR and others signed the Biological Weapons Treaty that year, banning their production. The Russians continued regardless. By 1972, the US had suffered a bloody nose in Vietnam, the North assisted by Russian generals and troops and firepower, but was negotiating a way out.

This was the background for the most extraordinary of Cold War contests, the world chess championship match that started on July 11, 1972, between America’s dazzling upstart Bobby Fischer, 29, and Russia’s dour world grand master titleholder Boris Spassky, 35. It was billed as the match of the century, and remains so.

Fischer’s background was unusual and chaotic. He was born in Chicago in 1943 to a Swiss-born mother, Regina, who had given birth to a girl, Joan, six years earlier while living in Moscow. They fled Russia as the locals’ mood turned against Jews. Regina spoke seven languages and studied at nights as she went from schoolteacher to nurse to physician, moving homes and cities often. By the time Fischer was six, he’d lived in seven cities. His father was recorded as Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, but it was revealed in 2002 that his biological father was Hungarian mathematician Paul Nemenyi, who had died in 1952. Nemenyi was a brilliant professor of fluid dynamics, the branch of maths that studies the flow of fluids and gases. One of its theorems is named after him. It was said he saw maths in shapes.

As a boy, Fischer had been taught chess by Joan, took to it easily, started competing and winning and then became at first engrossed and then obsessed by it, the strategies, the rules and possibilities. He found it deep and sublime. Towards the end of the 1950s, as he began to progress through the ranks of junior tournaments, he was measured with an IQ of about 187. Perhaps he saw the chessboard and its pieces, with their irregular powers, in three-dimensional shapes. He could certainly read chess scoresheets and immediately comprehend the games. He sometimes played 12 opponents simultaneously and later could recall every move he – and they – had made.

Of course, this rendered him a boring oddball at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School, but a contemporary, singer Neil Diamond, remembers one female student being besotted with the gangly loner – Barbra Streisand.

He dropped out of Erasmus, and his lack of education haunted him over the years as he encountered worldly, highly educated Europeans – particularly Russians – whom he was unable, or unwilling, to engage in conversation. Early in 1958, and still 14, he became the youngest US chess champion. That qualified him for the world championships in Moscow, but Regina couldn’t afford the airfares. A fortnight after turning 15, he appeared on the popular television show I’ve Got A Secret, hosted by Garry Moore who, in keeping with the era, smoked throughout the show sponsored by Winston cigarettes (he died of throat cancer). Dressed in a flannelette shirt and ill-fitting jeans, Fischer was cross-examined by Dick Clark, then the young host of American Bandstand. Asking Fischer what he did, Clark inquired did he do it by himself. “Yes.” Clark then asks if it made people happy. “It made me happy.” Moore then reveals Fischer’s identity and gives him two return tickets to Moscow. His results there were strong – and Russian grand masters were impressed – but mixed. He won the US title the next seven years and travelled the world playing chess, and observing the Russian champions and came to a conclusion: they cheated. Since 1948, only Soviet Union players had won the triennial world championships and Fischer knew why. On August 20, 1962, Sports Illustrated carried a controversial column by the teenager: “The international Candidates’ Chess Tournament … left me with one conviction: Russian control of chess has reached a point where there can be no honest competition for the world championship … there was open collusion between the Russian players … they agreed ahead of time to draw the games they played against each other.”

It was a depth charge beneath international chess. Sometimes draws were declared between Soviet players after eight moves. They shared the points. These brief encounters left them with the mental energy to be more competitive as they took on the likes of Fischer over games of six hours. The rules were changed so that such tactics were less effective.

But Fischer would not play the qualifying matches needed to make the world finals. He began to lose interest, but towards the end of the 1960s came back to improbable form that put chess on the front page. A winning streak like it had not been seen in a century. He surprised the world when he decided to qualify in 1972 and to take on the Russian machine, headed by Spassky, who’d wanted to become a priest before chess intervened in his life.

Fischer remained mercurial and obstinate. He argued about the location and the prizemoney, and demanded the board be remodelled and that only chess pieces made in London be used. The 24 games to decide the world champion would be played in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik.

Then Fischer said he wouldn’t show. Then US secretary of state, chess fan Henry Kissinger, called Fischer to tell him his country wanted him to beat the Russians. But when Spassky sat down in a curtained-off area of the vast 5500-seat Laugersdalholl stadium on July 11, he was alone.

He moved his queen pawn forward two spaces. Nine minutes passed before Fischer swept in, warmly shook Spassky’s hand, sat down, and replied.

As the game headed towards a draw, Fischer appeared to sabotage it. He hated draws. He forfeited the next as a no-show, complaining about the television cameras and the location in the hall. Spassky agreed to move and Fischer returned for the third game, which he won. They drew the fourth and Fischer won the fifth and then the sixth with a risky game that took Spassky by surprise. The Russian stood with the audience to applaud Fischer at its end. Spassky won one more game when Fischer blundered. Game 13 went to Fischer in spectacular style, former champ Mikhail Botvinnik stating: “Nothing similar had been seen before in chess.” The final game went over two days, but, in trouble, Spassky called organisers to resign from it. Fischer had won 12½ – 8½.

In New York, he was greeted by the mayor; it was Bobby Fischer Day, awarded a gold medal and appeared on the Bob Hope and Johnny Carson shows. But he wouldn’t play again – forfeiting the world title – until a controversial rematch with Spassky 21 years later in Yugoslavia. He easily defeated Spassky but then lost the battle with his mind that he’d waged for years.

Deranged and deluded, he praised Hitler and railed against America and Jews, who he believed should be randomly killed. After September 11, 2001, he was unable to disguise his delight. It was time for a coup d’etat. “The white people should go back to ­Europe, and the country should be returned to the American Indians – death to the US!”

In 2004, he was jailed in Japan for using a cancelled passport. Iceland gave him qualified citizenship, the only country that would, and he moved to Reykjavik in 2005. He died of kidney failure at Landspitali hospital, 2km from the scene of his 1972 triumph, on January 17, 2008. Three people attended his funeral.

Fischer became famously eloquent in the most cerebral language, but remained stubbornly inarticulate in the everyday.