Endgame (45 page)

One of the most surprising criticisms of Bobby’s statements came from Bobby’s close friend and former teacher Jack Collins, the Yoda of American chess. “
I am bored and disgusted with him,” said Collins. And then, mentioning the adulation that Bobby was receiving in Yugoslavia, Collins added, “They make so much out of a goof like him.” Another close friend, William Lombardy, disagreed, however: “Yes,
Fischer betrayed chess and everybody. But he’s still magic, and can do a lot for the game. Bobby and Boris are finally cashing in. I don’t begrudge them that.”

Bobby continued making outrageous—or at least controversial—statements as he answered more of the reporters’ questions. When asked about his views on Communism, he said, “Soviet Communism is basically a mask for Bolshevism which is a mask for Judaism.”
Denying that he was an anti-Semite, Fischer pointed out with a smirk that Arabs were Semites, too: “And I am definitely not anti-Arab, okay?” Calling Kasparov and Karpov “crooks” for what he considered their unethical collaboration, he also included Korchnoi on his hate list: “
They have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical pre-arranged games. These guys are the lowest dogs around.”

Although she sat in the audience at the press conference, Zita didn’t answer any questions, at least publicly. Later, in a semi-off-the-record interview she gave to a Yugoslavian journalist, she claimed that she was not planning to marry Bobby, but that she was attracted to his honesty. She added,
“I like geniuses or crazy people,” not saying which category, if either, Bobby fit into.

Bobby walked rapidly to the board, sat in his chair at precisely 3:30 p.m. on September 2, 1992, stretched his right arm across, and shook Spassky’s hand.
He was dressed in a blue suit and wore a red-and-white tie, giving him a certain patriotic look. And if there was any doubt about his nationality, a small American flag could be seen on his side of the table, facing the audience; Spassky, who’d become a French citizen, had the tricolors of France next to him. Lothar Schmid, the arbiter who’d directed the 1972 match between the two grandmasters, was once again present, and he started the clock. And as Schmid depressed the button, a wave of nostalgia rolled over everyone watching. Twenty years had passed since the last Fischer-Spassky showdown, but each of the three main players seemed approximately the same—excepting some gray hairs, additional furrows, and extra girth around the middle. Laugardalshöll had morphed into the Hotel Maestral. Iceland had become Yugoslavia. Bobby was still Fischer. Boris was still Spassky. The game was still chess.

Within a few minutes, Bobby donned a wide-brimmed brown leather visor, the rationale for which was so that his opponent couldn’t see what he was looking at. When it was his move, he pulled the visor way down and often rested his chin on his chest, almost as if he were a poker player secreting his cards.

Twenty years of rust aside, Bobby played as masterfully as he had in 1972: aggressive, relentless, brilliant, attacking on one side of the board and then the other. There were sacrifices of pieces on both players’ parts.

Chess players the world over were following the game through faxes and telephone contact, and their collective question was answered at Fischer’s fiftieth move. Spassky resigned.
Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan wrote: “Yes, indeed, Bobby is back! A flawlessly handled game. Precise to the last moment.” News outlets that, just the day prior, had criticized Fischer for his political incorrectness now had to admit that he was more than correct on the board: “
Playing forcefully, the American chess genius seems to be in top form.” But to paraphrase Aristotle, one chess game does not a champion make.

During the second game, Bobby seemed as if he was feeling his strength … until he again made his fiftieth move and this time made an atrocious error, converting the game, which he might have won, into a drawn position. In some respects he repeated the error of his ways in the third game as well: letting
a potential—or at least a
possible
—win slip through his grasp and drift into a draw. Bobby’s comment at the end of the game was revealing in its honesty. “
This was maybe an off-day for me. I
hope
it was an off-day for me. I was in trouble.” A scintilla of doubt had begun to insinuate itself. If the third game proved not to be just an “off-day” for him, it might be an indication that his long time away from the board was punishing him and hampering his ability to emerge as the old Bobby Fischer. The fourth and fifth games almost proved to him that he
was
experiencing some decline, or an accumulation of rust: He lost both.

One of the spectators at the match was the venerable Andrei Lilienthal, the eighty-one-year-old Russian grandmaster who’d lived most of his life in Hungary. He and his wife drove from Budapest to Sveti Stefan to follow the games.
Lilienthal had never met Fischer, and at the conclusion of the fourth game, they were introduced at the hotel’s restaurant. “Grandmaster Lilienthal, this is Bobby Fischer,” said the person handling the introductions. The two chess giants shook hands, and Bobby boomed out, “Hastings, 1934/35: the queen sacrifice against Capablanca. Brilliant!”

The comment was so like Bobby in that he tended to remember and categorize people through their chess games, not necessarily anything else. Years later, Lilienthal was still shaking his head over Bobby’s recollection of his famous win over Capablanca more than a half century before.

After the match, Spassky wrote:

Over the next two months, the match’s momentum ebbed and flowed, but from the ninth game on, Bobby, scraping his way back, took the lead and held on to it. The stakes were huge: Whoever won ten games first would capture the lion’s share of the prize money and secure the “championship.” There were few Fischer tirades while playing, but Bobby continued to lose friends and make enemies as a result of his press conferences. He gave nine before the match ended, not counting brief comments that were made jointly with Spassky after each game. Some of Bobby’s controversial statements to the press:

• “
  I think I am doing quite well, considering that I’ve been blacklisted for the last twenty years by world Jewry.”
  
• “No,
  I have no regrets about spitting at that letter.”
  
• “
  That man [Kasparov] is a pathological liar, so I wouldn’t pay much attention to whatever he says.”
  
• “I sued a company called Time Incorporated.… I sued them for many tens of millions of dollars, or maybe even many hundreds of millions of dollars on many different causes of action—defamation of character, breach of contract, etc. I spent two years in court, a lot of money, a lot of my time. This was in Federal Court, by the way. Then the judge just said: ‘You have no case. I’m throwing it out without going to trial.’ [The case was not only against Time, Inc., but also Brad Darrach, the author of
  Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World;
  the contract that Bobby signed was to give Darrach access to write articles, not a book. The U.S. Chess Federation was also sued because they advertised the book.]
     “
  So I consider that the United States government and Time Incorporated went into a criminal conspiracy to cheat me out of hundreds of millions of dollars, which is the reason I have not filed and paid my Federal and California State income tax since about 1976 … since 1977, rather.”
  

By the time they reached the thirtieth game, Bobby had won nine games and Spassky four. Games 26, 27, 28, and 29 were all draws; it was very hard
for either man to defeat the other by that time. Both men were tired. In the final game, Spassky played his twenty-seventh move—it was hopeless at that point—and then resigned. Fischer had played resolutely and won what might be described as a comfortable game.

By his own standards, Bobby was Champion of the World once again, and $3.5 million richer. 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. Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan said of Fischer’s performance that it put him “
somewhere in the top ten in the world.” And a few months later, on the occasion of Bobby’s fiftieth birthday, grandmaster Arnold Denker said, concerning his old friend and competitor: “
True, the match with Spassky was not all that great, but after such a long lay-off, wasn’t that to be expected? Yet, he did win convincingly. A match between him and the present world champion [Kasparov] would outdraw anything yet seen, and create a publicity explosion for world chess.”

Bobby revealed that he’d be willing to play a match for the championship with Kasparov, but that he’d like to play a few training matches with younger players as a warm-up and then face Kasparov in 1994. But before Bobby could consider his next chess opponent, he had to, first, face a formidable
non-chess
opponent: the U.S. government. At issue were his violation of the sanctions, the fifteen years of back taxes he owed, and the taxes he potentially owed on the millions he’d just won.

At the closing banquet, Bobby was coaxed onto the dance floor for a few spins with some young Serbian women and then said some gracious words of thanks in Serbo-Croatian to his host and to the people of Yugoslavia.

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. There
was
still a question concerning money due Bobby from the company that had purchased the television rights to the match—some $1 million. (Ultimately, Bobby never received any of it.) Joan took most of the match money, however, and traveled via train to Zurich, where she opened an account in Bobby’s name at the Union Bank of Switzerland. This was done because it wasn’t clear whether Bobby would be stopped
at the Yugoslav border due to his violation of the sanctions and, if that were to occur, whether U.S. government officials might try to impound some, if not all, of the money.

At this time Vasiljevic was making an arrangement for another match for Bobby, this one to be played both in Belgrade and in Spain with Ljubomir Ljubojevic, the leading Yugoslavian player and one of the world’s strongest tacticians.
Bobby had met Ljubojevic. They liked each other, and both were eager to play.

Vasiljevic’s plans concerning Bobby always contained ulterior motives. Certainly, he never made anywhere near a profit from the Fischer-Spassky match, despite the revenue from admissions fees, the sale of souvenirs, posters, television rights, etc. He promoted the match to bring global publicity to the Yugoslavian embargo and to make it appear as though the United States and other nations were attempting to suppress an important artistic endeavor. Within a few months after the match ended, Vasiljevic’s financial house of cards began to collapse.
Five hundred thousand depositors had funneled $2 billion into his sixteen banks and had been promised 15 percent interest on their money. Eventually, he found himself unable to meet the interest payments. He fled to Hungary and then to Israel, supposedly with bags of money—to avoid prosecution and with hope of setting up a government-in-exile.
Years later he was extradited to Serbia and put into Belgrade Central Prison to face charges of embezzlement. Bobby grew to hate Vasiljevic, claiming that he was a Zionist agent. Further, he felt that the $3.5 million he had won in his match against Spassky was money garnered illegally by Vasiljevic. He made no move to return the money, however.

There were press reports that Bobby might be indicted and extradited back to the United States. Although he wanted to return to California, he didn’t want to take the chance of entering the United States just yet. In mid-December, he received a telephone call from his attorney that a federal grand jury was about to meet and consider his case, and there was an almost certain chance that they’d vote for an indictment. The spitting incident, symbolically equivalent to burning the American flag, had apparently earned the government’s wrath. Bobby immediately left Belgrade—taking with him his second, Eugene Torre, and two bodyguards provided by Vasiljevic—and secretly traveled to the small town of Magyarkanizsa, in the northernmost reaches of
Serbia, on the border with Hungary. Vasiljevic had selected this location for Bobby for a few reasons: Its population consisted of about 90 percent Hungarian nationals, so people from Budapest and its environs could cross the border with impunity, meaning that Zita could visit him easily. Also, should Bobby have to quickly cross from Serbia into Hungary, it was probable that he could do so without being stopped, since the checkpoint was undermanned and the guards wouldn’t likely be on the lookout for him. The fact that Magyarkanizsa was known as “The City of Silence” also made it attractive to Bobby … at least at first.