Chess to Enjoy / Entertainment


Fischeriana


Fischer’s long shadow is still upon us By GM ANDY SOLTIS


FOR SOMEONE WHO HASN’T PLAYED chess in 24 years—and has been dead for eight —Bobby Fischer is making quite a comeback. There is “Fischeriana” all around us: Click on eBay on a typical day and you’ll find


more than 700 Fischer-related items, some with four-figure price tags. On a recent day several bidders fought over items, like a Fischer-auto - graphed 1960 photo of him, before someone won it for $203.50. There’s also been a huge amount of post-


morteming of the movie Pawn Sacrifice. In particular, I was struck by a new account of the Piatigorsky Cup of 1966, which Boris Spassky narrowly won ahead of Bobby. In the movie, Fischer is outraged when he


learns that he is stuck in a dingy hotel while Spassky is put up at a four-star palace. Bobby has to confront the Russian on a Santa Monica beach to make him aware of Fischer’s presence. But Spassky told fellow Grandmaster Jan Timman that the invited players stayed at the same hotel. Bobby wouldn’t fraternize with them—he just wanted to listen to his transistor radio, Timman told Gennady Sosonko on chess- news.ru. Finally, Spassky convinced Bobby to join


him in the hotel pool. Fischer took that as a competitive challenge. After they were done, Fischer told him, “I swim faster than you.” There are bound to be new Bobby revelations


in 2016, when a book by a Fischer friend about his final years in Iceland, is published in English. I enjoyed some other new details in a recent best-seller, Patti Smith’s memoir, M Train. It turns out that the punk rock icon saw


Fischer in 2007 in Reykjavik. They found they had something in common—a love for 1950s and ’60s music. They ended up singing duets of Buddy Holly songs after midnight. At one point Bobby’s friend, GM Helgi


Olafsson, burst into their room when he heard “something strange.” It was Fischer singing the falsetto backup to the Four Seasons’ hit “Big


16 April 2016 | Chess Life


Girls Don’t Cry.” “And he was a terrible singer,” Smith said


on PBS. “God bless him.” One newspaper story had a new twist on


how Spassky’s 1972 match seconds believed he was losing to Fischer because of Spassky’s Michigan-made chair. Team Spassky suspected there was metal


inside it that was influencing Spassky’s thinking with invisible rays. When the foreman who made the wood-and-leather chair was asked about it he replied, “You can just tell them that we use real wood from real trees, and (the metal) was probably a hunter’s bullet that was fired into the tree.” But the most intriguing new Fischer detail


didn’t get the attention it deserves. It’s about how his medical advice could have killed Spassky: It happened in 1977 when a new round of


Candidates matches was starting, to choose the 1978 world championship challenger. Even though Fischer was boycotting organized chess, the rules reserved one of the eight invitations to the Candidates for him. When he failed to meet a January 1, 1977


deadline to say whether he was willing to play, he had to be replaced. Almost any chess player would have killed to fill that vacancy. The irony was that Bobby’s spot was given to a semi- finalist in the previous Candidate matches— Spassky. The Russian’s career seemed to be winding


down. He finished a miserable 10th in a 1976 Interzonal. But thanks to the indirect help of his old rival, Spassky had a first-class ticket back to world-class chess. To add to the irony, Spassky’s first Candidates


match of 1977 was scheduled for Reykjavik, the scene of his most famous defeat, at the hands of Fischer five years before. He was the prohibitive favorite in this match,


against the Czech-born Vlastimil Hort. But Hort didn’t get that memo.


AFTER 40. Ng2 The best-of-12-game match was tied when


this, the 12th game, was played. Spassky agreed to a draw here. Under the rules they had to play additional games until a winner emerged. But late that night, March 27, Spassky felt a


pain near his stomach. He needed to get over the ache so he could get a good night’s sleep in his hotel room. His new wife, Marina, went to the nearby


room of his second, former World Champion Vasily Smyslov, who was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda. “Boris has a bad stomach ache. Please give


me a hot water bottle,” Marina said, according to Nadezhda. “I won’t give you a hot water bottle,”


Nadezhda replied. “Under no circumstances will I do this!” She feared there was something much more seriously wrong with Spassky. “And going to breakfast the next morning


we saw Boris on a stretcher, being taken to the hospital. Appendicitis!” she recalled in a 2008 interview.


This is where Fischer steps into the story. “He called me and said I shouldn’t be in a hospital,” Spassky told that splendid chess


HURT AGAINST HORT GM Vlastimil Hort GM Boris Spassky


Candidates match (12), 1977


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