In December 1980, I was one of the schoolboys serving as a chess steward at the Valletta Chess (Team) Olympiad. Our mission: make sure the spectators keep a proper distance. During a tense moment featuring the star-studded Soviet team, I stretched my arm out across the round belly of an elderly man and instructed him to move back.
The bald man stopped puffing on his cigar and looked down at me with cold eyes piercing his gold-rimmed glasses. He breathed heavily. I stared right back. I was 13, mission-conscious and ignorant. I was pushing back Viktor Baturinsky, Soviet chess boss, KGB colonel and former military prosecutor under Stalin.
Fifty years ago today, Baturinsky would have been getting down to work in Moscow, deciding on who to blame for the loss of the individual world chess championship.
On September 1, 1972, the reigning champion, Boris Spassky, resigned the 21st and final game of his match with the American challenger, Bobby Fischer. For the first time since 1948, the chess crown belonged to a non-Soviet citizen.
A few months before glaring at me, Baturinsky gave an interview to the Christian Science Monitor in which he acknowledged Fischer’s genius and lamented his mysterious exit from chess after winning the crown. But, in 1971-72, Baturinsky’s energy was dedicated to stopping Fischer and glaring at anyone who dared say Fischer was unbeatable.
All the leading Soviet players were pressed into service – for advice, research or as part of the training team. The resources were an alibi: if Spassky failed, the blame would fall on the grandmasters not the bureaucrats.
In 1971-72, Fischer was not just the best player in the world. He was the best by the largest stretch since 1857-59, when Paul Morphy grasped the game in a way that escaped the rest.
Edmar Mednis, the first man to beat Fischer in a US championship (1962), once told me what Fischer was like at his peak. He studied chess for 18 hours a day. When he played over games, he absorbed the details even though his long fingers slid pieces across the board in a flash. He could walk past a game in a tournament hall, give it a glance and then, months later, ask one of the players why he had missed the best move.
Fischer arrived in Iceland for the 1972 match having mowed his opponents down with a scythe. Still, Baturinsky made it clear in pre-match meetings that Fischer’s superiority was not an acceptable excuse for Soviet defeat.
Fischer didn’t have the same resources from the US but he did get two supportive letters from President Richard Nixon. He was invited to the Dick Cavett Show. When it seemed that the temperamental Fischer might not play the match, a phone call came from Henry Kissinger.
The match became a symbol of Cold War rivalry. It attracted unprecedented prize money – Spassky’s loser’s prize was larger than the combined winner’s purse of all preceding Soviet world champions. It sparked a chess fever more contagious than that spread by the Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit, two years ago.
Fischer (left) and Spassky concentrate during a match on November 5, 1992. Fischer won the game and the tournament with a score of 10 games to five.Frankly, even if books about it are still being published, the match did not live up to expectations. Spassky was unrecognisable in the first 10 games, and then it was too late.
Fischer played some good games, especially the sixth and the 10th; his victory in the 13th was called, by the dour Mikhail Botvinnik, Fischer’s “greatest creative achievement”. But his iconic move of the match – the one everyone remembers – is of a blunder in a dead-drawn position in the first game.
The match became a symbol of Cold War rivalry. It attracted unprecedented prize money- Ranier Fsadni
You’ll get over 400,000 results if you simply google “Fischer’s blunder” with no other indication. There’s argument going on to this day if it really was a blunder. There’s more to a legendary encounter than expectations.
The film Pawn Sacrifice (2014) is no help. It can’t get a single fact straight. It grossly misrepresents the bohemian Spassky, who had always refused to join the Communist Party, in spite of what it cost him.
It portrays Fischer as almost driven insane by chess, whereas it’s almost certain that it’s chess that kept him sane for so long. Fischer specialised in positions where a clear, calculable plan could be found. He was weakest in irrational positions, complicated and open-ended, subject to intuitive judgement, not calculation.
I’m tempted to speculate that he went off the rails after he gave up chess – an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist – not only because of the deep insecurities of his upbringing. It’s because politics and international affairs, about which he read widely, are not a closed system, like chess, but an open one. They resist mastery and pure technique. They resemble most the chess positions he was weakest at.
Fifty years ago, Fischer and Spassky were projected as representatives of two opposing political systems. They each ended up being spat out by their respective system.
Both soon squandered their prize money. Fischer fell into the clutches of a religious cult, then survived on his mother’s welfare cheques and friends’ couches until another great pay-day came in 1992, the supposed return match with Spassky – a complete disappointment. By the time he died in Iceland, aged 64, he was a fugitive from the US.
Spassky is still alive, aged 85. In 1972, Baturinsky’s punishment for losing was nine months with no chess invitations. Spassky emigrated to France in 1976 and became a French citizen. When Fischer died in 2008, Spassky visited the grave. He returned to Moscow in 2012.
He had lost his health and good looks but not black humour. He told an audience of fans there: “If I had known what they were going to do to this country, I’d have become a Communist.” Baturinsky wasn’t alive to hear that. He’d died, almost blind, 10 years earlier.