Karpov v. Fischer

   April 1975: the greatest chess match that never was

in march 1943, a boy named Bobby was born in Chicago to a Jewish mother who had fled the Nazi takeover of Europe. Eight years later, in May 1951, a boy named Tolya was born into a working class family in the industrial city of Zlatoust, in the Urals region of Russia. One would have thought that the distance between these two boys, in terms of geography, language, and class, would have been so great that there was almost no chance they would ever learn of each other’s existence, to say nothing of come into contact. But there was one common force in both of their lives that drew them into one another’s orbit.

When Bobby was six years old and his family had been living in Brooklyn, New York for almost four years, his sister taught him to play chess. At the age of 13 he became United States Junior Chess Champion and one year later he became the overall U.S. Champion.

Tolya was taught to play chess by his father at age five. At the age of 14 he had not achieved the same level of success as Bobby, but he was nevertheless a Soviet Master of Sport and by 18 he became Junior World Champion. One year later he became Soviet Champion.

By then, the young, ambitious, and exceptionally talented Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov already knew about one another and likely assumed that their paths would ultimately cross.

The early 1970s marked the dawn of a golden era for chess, especially in the USSR. Chess clubs thrived in schools and Pioneer centers. On the boulevards, amateurs would spend hours rubbing their chins, hunched thoughtfully over chessboards. Chess had the distinction of being simultaneously a “popular” and an elite pastime. You could find a chessboard in any House of Culture. You could buy large, wooden chess sets with heavy pieces, or miniature, light ones with little pins sticking out of the bottom of each piece — traveling sets that let you stick queens and bishops into special holes so they would not get lost if the train lurched. There were chess sets sold in combination with checkers – if you wanted you could play a more intellectually challenging game, or you could relax and move the checkers around. A popular form of entertainment at Soviet “Houses of Rest” were huge outdoor chess sets with a “board” painted on the ground and pieces almost the size of human beings.

But at the same time, chess was not a game played by little ruffians. The stereotype of a chess player was a tousle-headed boy in glasses oblivious to everything around except the pieces on the board. Chess was traditionally thought of as a “Jewish” game. You could stop a Jewish boy from getting into university or not hire a Jew for a job, but how could you stop Botvinnik, Tal, or Korchnoy from winning at chess? “Jewish brains are good for chess,” was the conventional wisdom, and Jewish mothers did not argue with this, sending their sons off to chess clubs. Nobody drew such sweeping conclusions about the Armenian brain based on Petrosian or the Russian brain based on Spassky, but no matter – a stereotype would not be a stereotype if it could withstand close scrutiny.

Chess may be exceptionally absorbing, but it does not lend itself to gambling. It is not like a card game that you can use to fleece a chance traveling companion in just a few minutes. A real game lasts five hours, and the players keep track of their total time by pressing buttons on a special game clock that gives the whole process an aura of seriousness. There is, of course speed chess, where each player has a total of only five minutes for all his or her moves, but even here neither luck nor cards up your sleeves will do you any good. In short, for chess you need a good head, but no matter how clever you are you will not be viewed as a “card shark.”

The sixties and the seventies was a time when the intelligentsia was being subtly rehabilitated. In movies in the 1930s, members of the intelligentsia had to be shown learning something from the workers and being amazed by their simple folk wisdom, their integrity and straightforwardness. The 1960s provided a new hero. Nine Days in One Year, a film by director Mikhail Romm, romanticized the profession of physicist. The ironic, intellectual scientists, played by the fascinating Alexey Batalov and Innokenty Smoktunovsky, could contemplate the most profound questions of philosophy, yet also split atoms. And what game do you imagine they played? They certainly weren’t slapping their cards down on the table with a loud exclamation of “rummy!” Their game of choice was of course chess.

Beside being an officially recognized source of Soviet pride, a “sport” celebrated on a par with figure skating and soccer, chess was popular throughout the entire world and earned millions for the country. Soviet chess champions could only catch a fleeting glimpse of these millions before joyously turning them over to their beloved motherland. For 24 years, the quarter century between 1948 and 1972, the world chess champions were all Soviet citizens, and chess was firmly implanted in the Soviet consciousness as “our” game.

Then, suddenly, from out of distant and mysterious Brooklyn there appeared an American upstart, Bobby Fischer, and he began beating everyone. Fischer immediately captivated everyone’s attention. His strange behavior, his youth and impertinence, his stunning successes all won him hearts all over the world, including in the country where he managed to take down an entire generation of great chess players. Bobby Fischer crushed brilliant Soviet chess players with offhanded ease. He beat them at countless tournaments and Olympiads. He bulldozed the brilliant Mark Taimanov, destroying him in a match to decide who would face the world champion. Taimanov never recovered from the humiliation inflicted by Fischer, who beat him 6-0. Fischer also shut out the Dane Bent Larsen.

After this, the indefatigable Bobby focused his talents on defeating the commanding heights of Soviet chess. Tigran Petrosian held on a little longer than most, for a score of 6.5-2.5. Psychologists and chess players began to seriously distinguish between players who had been “broken” by Fischer and those who still had not been through the meat grinder.

In their titanic match in Reykjavik, in the summer of 1972, Boris Spassky battled long and hard and did not give in easily – the score for that encounter was 12.5-8.5. Bobby behaved terribly, skipped the first game, was late to others, threw tantrums, was capricious, but once he sat down at the board he was transformed into a steely machine.*

Interesting things were going on in the USSR at this time. Everyone seemed to be rooting for Spassky, who bravely bore a superhuman burden. The results of each game were reported on radio and television. National news broadcasts showed the boards for each game and the radio gave a play-by-play, while thousands of people throughout the country took notes and went for their chessboards, replicated the games, and sunk into deep contemplation. Schoolchildren and retirees, workers and housewives, society ladies with little concept of the rules governing each piece – everyone was talking, not so much about the match itself as about Bobby Fischer.

Fischer won, and Spassky was never able to attain his former level. An ironic underground song by Vladimir Vysotsky became popular. It started like this:

I cried out, “How could you do that?

How could you let our honor be defiled?”

And they told me in our chess club,

“Great, you go and defend it!

But keep in mind that Fischer’s pretty bright,

He sleeps with a chessboard, has special powers.

His game is clean, he doesn’t make mistakes.”

“That’s okay, I’m also no pushover.

And I’ve got a special knight move in reserve.”

Я кричал: “Вы что там, обалдели,

Уронили шахматный престиж!”

“Да? - сказали в нашем спортотделе, -

Вот прекрасно, ты и защитишь.

Но учти, что Фишер очень ярок,

Даже спит с доскою, - сила в нем.

Он играет чисто, без помарок...”

Ничего, я тоже не подарок,

У меня в запасе ход конем.

In Vysotsky’s song, the “knight’s move” winds up being something a bit more violent than a chess move and Fischer, seeing the biceps on the Soviet superman flying toward him, immediately agrees to a draw.

In reality, it was the turn of Anatoly Karpov — part of a new generation of chess players and someone yet “unbroken” by Fischer – to face the indomitable Bobby. What hopes, what expectations were invested in him! But Fischer made yet another unpredictable move. Unable to overcome his assorted phobias and after lengthy negotiations, he never showed up for the match. In April 1975, Karpov became World Champion simply because he beat all the contenders who did show up.

The Soviet people should have rejoiced, but the victory was a hollow one. It was tainted by a sense that something had been left undone and unsaid. After all, it would never be settled who was the better player of the two. Karpov apparently also sensed this and made surreptitious attempts to meet with Bobby and agree on a match. There were rumors of a meeting with Fischer in Japan, something that reportedly got Karpov in trouble with the KGB. It is difficult to say whether or not this is true. The Mt. Olympus of Chess is obscured by dense storm clouds and the rumbling from there can be very difficult to interpret.

In any event, Bobby Fischer never again participated in an official chess tournament.

Completely different fates, each tragic in their own way, awaited Fischer and Karpov. Fischer’s mental health continued to decline and he eventually lost the ability to interact with the world around him. He said awful things about the United States, made anti-Semitic statements (which must have had his Jewish ancestors turning over in their graves), wound up in a Japanese jail for illegal immigration, and in the end died of kidney failure in Reykjavik, largely forgotten and unloved.

A brilliant chess career awaited Anatoly Karpov, but so did terrible psychological torments. Chess became increasingly politicized. To the mental stresses of the game were added ideological pressures. First, Karpov had to play a match against Viktor Korchnoy, his former friend (who had defected to the west in 1976), and the battle of the chessboard was cast as a battle between two worlds – the Soviet world and the West, and the mutual hatred of the players only added piquancy to this intellectual bullfight. Later, he found himself drawn into a longstanding duel with Garry Kasparov, which was viewed as much a confrontation between party functionaries (who supported Karpov) and liberals (who supported Kasparov), as a battle between two great chess players. A decision to halt the match was made at the highest levels of the Soviet government. In the 1980s, to say you were for Karpov or for Kasparov (even if you had no idea what e2-e4 means) said everything that needed to be said about your political orientation.

Passions over chess have long since subsided. Chess clubs have been dying off and the life-sized chessboards at resorts are in need of repair. A few retirees may be moving around giant chess pieces, but it is a lot easier now to just play poker on the internet. Furthermore, there are ever more powerful computers that play the game increasingly well. The battle for the title of World Champion has lost the romantic luster it once had.

The golden age of chess has passed.