Searching for Bobby Fischer (29 page)

According to Gross, Bobby doesn’t study as much chess as he used to and has declined in strength slightly from his 2780 rating in 1972, but he is certain that Fischer is still strong enough to beat Karpov, and perhaps Kasparov. “His anti-Semitism gets in the way of his chess,” Gross said. “Whatever we talked about, chess or physical fitness or history, he would eventually guide the conversation back to the Jews. He believes that the Russian Revolution was engineered by some old rabbis, and that the Bolsheviks were Jews. He won’t read
Chess Life
because he believes that it’s run by Jews. He’s certain that the U.S. Chess Federation and FIDE are controlled by Jews. This way he can believe that the Jews have cut him off from playing or from making money at chess.”

While we talked, Gross’s pretty daughter, who sometimes participates in scholastic tournaments around Los Angeles, came into his study to speak to her father. I asked her about the top young players in the area and learned that she has competed against Yvonne Krawiec and her brother Daniel, kids Joshua has also run across in national events. Somehow this indirect connection seemed intimate, as if I had happened upon a California friend of Joshua’s. In the chess world it seems that talented players know about one another regardless of where they live or how young they may be. Nine-year-olds in California stay abreast of the careers of
their contemporaries in New York; there are pockets of children all around the country studying and competing, kids whose parents were turned on by Fischer and want their children to be great players. I began to describe a game Josh had played against Yvonne at the nationals in 1985, when he blundered an exchange but still managed to win in the endgame. In the telling I was at least as wrapped up in this contest between two eight-year-olds as Gross had been while demonstrating a brilliant Fischer game.

I described the children’s chess world in New York to Gross and mentioned my theory that many of these kids, including my own, might not be playing today if it were not for Fischer. “I don’t think Bobby had much awareness of his role in chess and the impact he had on other people,” Gross responded. “It didn’t seem to matter to him. People are always telling me how great it would be for American chess if Fischer played again. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean anything to him. What he did for the game doesn’t interest him at all, and he doesn’t like anyone who helped him along the way. He fired all his lawyers; he fired his mother. No one could do enough to please him. All he cares about is his place in chess history. Once I realized that, I knew he’d never risk playing again.”

Gross asked his daughter if she had done her chess homework. She answered in a way that made it perfectly clear that on a beautiful sunny afternoon chess was the last thing she would choose to do. Gross desperately wants her to be a player, but she resists him. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head fetchingly; who wants to study openings? Apparently this has been going on for some time, and by now Gross’s ambition for her chess is tinged with realism. “She’s into other things,” he said with a sigh.

Maybe I will be like Gross in three or four years, when Josh has drifted out of the children’s chess wars, thinking nostalgically of all the talent he had, of all the great games he wasn’t playing, of how far he might have gone if only he had kept at it.

I NEVER DID
meet Bobby, of course. No one knows of anyone who has run into him for more than a year, and he is referred to as “the ghost of Pasadena.” More and more, rumors have replaced verifiable fact. There are stories about him handing out political pamphlets
on street corners, attending chess tournaments in disguise, traveling to New York to make a quick visit to the Manhattan Chess Club, living in a swanky hotel in Mexico for six months, flying to India to arrange a match with a grandmaster, spending an hour discussing chess with a truck driver and playing a private match with Spassky, but nothing is known for certain.

In 1987 the woman in New York who claimed to speak to Bobby regularly on the phone flew to California to meet him for the first time. “He’s so fast,” she said, referring to the games they played against one another in her hotel room. “He’s better than ever. No one could beat him.” But she is so intoxicated with her relationship with Fischer, her face rapturous as she talks about him, that one can’t help wondering if it is all a fantasy. “He’s so pure, like Jesus,” she said to me.

IT IS SAID
that Bobby has Nazi friends in San Francisco. But one of his old acquaintances assured me that Fischer’s anti-Semitism is nothing serious. Some say his chess is phenomenal and others claim he rarely plays anymore. He has become shifting sand. He is whatever people want him to be. Apparently Fischer has created his disappearance with as much care and depth as his most complicated chess positions. For a time after the Spassky match, he wasn’t hiding so much as living a private life. His circle of friends was large, and people could contact him quite easily. Important players like Karpov, for example, traveling to California, would meet with Bobby and discuss the possibility of a match with him. But over time he narrowed his circle and became more difficult to track down. Old acquaintances who had bragged publicly or had agreed to be interviewed about their relationship with him received one last phone call with the curt message that their friendship was over. During the last several years, his life seems to have become devoted to hiding. He has put passion and cunning into living invisibly, and private investigators hired by magazines have been unable to track him down.

CLAUDIA MACAROW
,
WHO
many believe now takes care of Fischer, is reputed to work two full-time jobs in order to support him. Lina
Grumette was a friend of Macarow’s for several years, and I asked her why Claudia worked so hard to finance Bobby’s invisible life. “No reason,” said Lina. “She has nothing to gain except that she likes the idea of being around him.” In many ways Macarow has replaced Lina. “I found out that she looks through all of his mail before showing it to him,” Lina complained. “She used to take his messages, and I’ve always suspected that she never gave him the ones she didn’t want him to see. She manipulated him.” Despite her soft speaking voice, Lina was upset and perhaps a little jealous. These days Claudia’s phone is disconnected, and it is rumored that she has moved out of state. If so, who is taking care of Bobby?

TOWARD THE END
of their friendship, Gross and Fischer traveled together to Mexico. “He looked terrible,” Gross recalls, “clothes all baggy, wearing old beat-up shoes. We went down to Ensenada to go fishing. I remember that out on the boat one afternoon Bobby was green with seasickness. I tried to get him to take a pill but he wouldn’t consider it. But though he was sick, he was in good spirits. Everyone was catching rock cod, dolphins were swimming under the boat and we saw whales and flying fish. He was as excited as a little kid at seeing these things. He was fun to be around sometimes, because he had such enthusiasm. Then I noticed that he was favoring his mouth, and he told me that he’d had some work done on his teeth; he’d had a dentist take all the fillings out of his mouth.

“I said, ‘Bobby, that’s going to ruin your teeth. Did you have him put plastic in the holes?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t have anything put in. I don’t want anything artificial in my head.’ He’d read about a guy wounded in World War II who had a metal plate in his head that was always picking up vibrations, maybe even radio transmissions. He said the same thing could happen from metal in your teeth.

“I thought about what he’d done for a while, and a month or so later when we were at a spa, I asked him, ‘What are you gonna do when you lose your teeth?’ And Bobby said, ‘I’ll gum it. If I have to, I’ll gum it.’”

*
George Steiner,
Fields of Force
(New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 28.

*
Brad Darrach,
Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World
(New York: Stein and Day, 1974), pp. 13–15.

*
Frank Brady,
Profile of a Prodigy
(New York: David McKay, 1974), pp. 180–81.

22

THE NATIONALS

I
n the opinion of many experts, the United States today has the strongest group of preteen players of any country in the world, including the Soviet Union. Among them are approximately a dozen children between the ages of seven and twelve who have the potential to be world-class grandmasters. These kids have approximately the same playing strength as did such world champions as Anatoly Karpov, Gary Kasparov and Bobby Fischer when they were the same ages. Another dozen children play only slightly below this lofty standard.

Social and cultural realities dictate that in the future most of these young players will devote their energies to pursuits other than chess, but if one of them were someday to become a world champion, this period of competing prodigies may be remembered as the most curious remnant of the Fischer legacy. While American chess professionals suffer from lack of respect and an inability to make a living, the children’s chess world thrives, and each year more and more parents who once rooted for Bobby Fischer as fervently as they cheered the Beatles are captivated by the idea of their kids’ becoming chess champions, or at least
young
chess champions.

Each spring, the emotional odyssey of the chess parent comes to a head at the time of the National Scholastic Chess Championship. If a child is one of the highest-rated players, with a realistic chance of winning his division, the pressure on him and his parents during the weeks prior to the event can be horrible. Parents keep
trying to reassure themselves and their kids that winning doesn’t matter, that chess must be kept in perspective, that life will quickly return to normal; the summer is coming up, after all, with camp, baseball and lots of other distractions. But an inner voice blasts these arguments apart with the crazy but unshakable moral conviction of Vince Lombardi, who proclaimed, “Winning is the only thing.” Despite love for the artistry of chess and the hundreds of little pleasures and pains during the preceding year of study and play, in the weeks before the nationals all the effort that has been expended over the previous year is weighed against the child’s performance during this single two-day event.

IN JOSHUA
’
S CASE
, the upcoming 1986 primary championship was shadowed by the memory of losing in the seventh round the previous year. One poorly played chess game had changed him; he would never again be the same cocky little boy who was convinced that no child on earth could beat him. By his ninth year, he had studied the game more intensely than most people ever study a subject before attending college, but ironically, in becoming so accomplished so young he had been forced to scrutinize the limits of his potential. Already he had seemed to learn what many of us artfully avoid realizing for another twenty or thirty years: that wanting to be Tolstoy or Einstein or Sandy Koufax doesn’t make it so. During the past year, even when he was loving the game and was playing his best chess, he would sometimes refer to himself derisively as a patzer, and whenever he played in Washington Square and ogling bystanders made a fatuous comparison to Bobby Fischer he would wince visibly. Early success had made it more difficult for him to be a dreamer, and his rigorous, caustic self-assessments made me feel terrible. What’s wrong with imagining yourself a world champion when you’re only eight years old? I had. I was going to be an NBA All-Star, bringing the ball up the court like Bob Cousy. I was going to catch a bigger marlin than the one in
The Old Man and the Sea
.

That spring I was afraid for Josh. At least once a day I would say to him nervously, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t win. You’re improving all the time. You’ll win another year in another division.”
For a while he nodded patiently when I went through this ritual, but one afternoon he said to me pointedly, “If I finish second I’ll feel like a failure. Only first place means anything.” It was a lonely time for him. He took his chess lessons with a grim, pursed mouth, memorized openings dutifully on the floor in his bedroom with the door closed, and at night lay in bed worrying about losing. Maybe we were putting him in a position that he couldn’t handle. He had the highest national rating of any primary player, and as the number-one seed he would be burdened by the sense that everyone was gunning for him. He would play his games on board one, in front of a television camera, and according to the rules of the Swiss system, as long as he kept winning, his pairings for the tournament would theoretically be more difficult than those of any other player.

Bonnie, Bruce and I tried to adopt an easygoing attitude. In the weeks preceding the tournament, most other kids practiced by playing in scholastic or adult tournaments; instead we decided that Josh should play in Washington Square. During the past year he had learned a lot about positional chess and had developed sophisticated technique and feel for the endgame; lately, however, his games had become flat and he had stopped attacking, instead waiting for his opponent to make an error. Perhaps too much theory and technique were getting in the way of creative play.

In the warm weather of April, Josh was back in Washington Square playing seven-minute speed games against hustlers who broke away from book openings after five or six moves. The games were all improvisation, sacrifices and flashy tactics—intuitive, gut-level chess, just what he needed.

Josh’s friend Poe, who often reeked of cheap cigars, played the white pieces against Josh’s Dragon Sicilian and showed him that if he didn’t get his pawns rolling on the queenside he was going to get beat. Poe mated him often until Josh started playing aggressively with his pawns. Everyone wanted to help. Hustlers who were usually close-mouthed about their tricks, faded masters who floated to the marble tables high on grass—all of them had something to show him: a Levenfish attack, a crafty little opening trap in the Benoni. Wouldn’t it be something if the little kid who’d started here when he was six won the national championship?