A legend in his own right

``There is no one alive I can't beat.''

- Bobby Fischer, 1961.

ONLY ONE other man could have made a statement like that, and his name is Muhammed Ali, of course. Like that fellow- American, Robert J. Fischer was absolutely confident and justifiably proud of his abilities. But when he challenged the world thus, he was just 18, and it would take him another eleven years to become the world champion. Recently he was voted the best chess player of the century by the magazine `Chess.'

Garry Kasparov, who has never been beaten by a human in a match and who is the best player in the world for the last 15 years, may be the strongest player of all time, but it was the temperamental American genius who made chess what it is today - a popular game the world over, with big money. Indeed there are many who rank Fischer higher than Kasparov. No other man has done what Fischer did to chess. He revolutionised chess.

Fischer, one of the legends of 20th century sports, brought an end to what looked like a never-ending Soviet domination of the game, and caught the imagination of people the world over.

``I would never have become a chess player, but for the Fischer- Spassky world championship duel in 1972,'' British Grandmaster and chess writer Tony Koston told this writer once.

That world championship final held at Reykjavik in Iceland was a turning point in the history of the game. Like Koston many people were attracted to the game by what has been the most talked about match in chess ever. ``Everyone at that time was discussing this match in Iceland, so I pestered my father to teach me the game. I was 14 then, and had no interest in the game till then,'' recalls Koston.

Never had chess received so much publicity. The cold war between the U.S. and the USSR was quite intense at the time. That an American was taking on a Soviet in the battle for a world title was reason enough for the media to go to town. Fischer, `the unschooled brash teenager from Brooklyn,' had aroused so much interest.

Boris Spassky, who became the world champion in 1969 beating Tigran Petrosian in Moscow, began the defence of his title well. He won the first game, and soon went 2-0 up, as his opponent failed to turn up for the second game.

Fischer had made a lot of fuss about the final. He wanted the official chess board to be reduced by three millimetres in size, and he insisted on the exclusive use of his hotel swimming pool. Those were the days when the Russians and the Americans were at loggerheads. So the Soviet contingent asked for a search of the hall as they felt their player was distracted by some mechanical or electronic equipment. A scan of the players' chair showed that it contained two dead flies. That was all they could find.

On the positive side, Fischer's demands improved the financial stature of the professional chess player quite considerably. The prize fund of the 1972 final was increased considerably. Now the world's top players could earn millions from chess, and they should thank Fischer for that.

Fischer, despite that 0-2 deficit, came back and won 12.5-8.5. The most memorable game of that match was the sixth. In a Tartakower Variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined, the American, with white pieces, won 42 moves with a brilliant attack on the king-side with his queen, double rook and white bishop. It was a crucial victory for the challenger, as he went ahead for the first time in the match - 3.5-2.5. The legendary Argentine Grandmaster, Miguel Najdorf called the game a Mozart symphony.

By the end of the 10th game Fischer had gone 6.5-3.5 up, thanks to his wins in the third, fifth, sixth, eighth and tenth games. Though Spassky made a desperate attempt to come back with a win in the 11th game, it was too late; and that was the last game he won in the match. Fischer won the 13th game, and after drawing the next seven games, won the 21st and last game.

But after his glorious triumph in Iceland, Fischer renounced chess. Sadly for chess, he never played another competitive game. He played Spassky once more in 1992 in Barcelona in another match, which he won. At least a couple of games in the match - the first and 11th - revealed the unmistakable genius of Fischer and reminded the world what it had been missing for the last twenty years. Wrote Raymond Keene, ``It seemed that Fischer's absence for twenty years from the chessboard had in no way blunted the ferocity of his mental edge.''

But there were also games in which he played like an amateur. Really, there has never been such a waste of talent.

Fischer had a phenomenal success rate. From 1962 till the premature, and abrupt, end of his career in 1972 he won every tournament in which he played except the Capablanca memorial in 1965 (he was second half- a-point behind the champion) and the Piatigorsky Cup in 1966 (second, by half-a-point). In the 1964 U.S. championship he scored a sensational triumph, with a perfect score against a strong Grandmaster field, beating everyone. That still remains the most astonishing performance in a chess tournament.

He always played to win, and hated short draws. Said Larry Evans, ``He hates defensive positions. He prefers a weakness in his own positions as long as it holds a possibility of a contest. And don't ever make a mistake. With any grandmaster you can hope to recover, but with Bobby, you're dead.''

Fischer started playing at the age of six. His elder sister Joan had taught him the moves and presented him with a chess set. By the age of nine, he was obsessed with the game, and his remarkable talent was getting increasingly noticed. He abhorred school, which he left at 16 (``You don't learn anything in school. It's just a waste of time. They give too much homework. The teachers are stupid,'' he once said in an interview).

He played in the chess clubs of Chicago, the city where he was born on March 9, 1943, and when he was 13, he began playing in tournaments. Before long he won the U.S. junior championship, and in 1957, he won the U.S. championship.

The following year, at the age of 15, he became the world's youngest Grandmaster (he held the record until that amazing Hungarian girl, Judit Polgar, broke it in 1991). Now the Russians probably knew they had a worthy rival in the west. In the 1960 Leipzig Olympiad, Fischer had met the former world champion Mikhail Tal, that master of sacrifices, and though the game - a French Defence - ended in 21-move draw it is considered one of most exciting draws in chess ever.

Even Mikhail Botvinnik, who was the world champion from 1948 to 1963 and who started the great Soviet chess revolution, acknowledged that Fischer could become a world champion. The Americans naturally were excited about the teenaged sensation, the country's finest player after Paul Morphy. Fischer himself was raring to go. He did not consider the Russian masters as competition. ``They have nothing on me, those guys. They can't even touch me. Some people rate them better than me. They think Americans can't play chess. When I meet those Russians I'll put them in their places,'' he said in an interview.

His IQ was in the range of 180, which is quite high, and he had an amazing memory. There is an interesting anecdote about his visit to Iceland a few days before the 1972 match with Spassky. One day he called up his friend Grandmaster Frederick Olaffson, and a little girl answered the phone. He asked for Mr. Olafson, and the girl said in her native Icelandic that both her father and mother had gone out and would return only in the evening. Fischer does not know Icelandic and did not understand what he heard.

Later that evening he met another Iceland chess player and repeated to him every word the little Olaffson girl had told him over telephone. He could even reproduce her intonation perfectly. The Icelander had no difficulty in translating the message, word for word.

At the end of the unofficial world speed chess championship in Yugoslavia in 1970, he accurately recalled the moves of all his twenty-one games from memory. Once he amazed Russian player Vasiukov by reproducing a game - move by move - the two had played 15 years before.

Fischer could never be accused of false modesty. In 1961, an interviewer asked him: ``Would you consider yourself the greatest player that ever lived, even better, say, than Capablanca, Steinitz, or Morphy?'' ``Well, I don't like to put things like that in print, it sounds so egoistical. But to answer your question, Yes,'' he admitted.

We do not exactly know what Fischer is doing at the moment, but what we know for sure is that he is the most important figure in the history of chess.

P. K. AJITH KUMAR

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