Frank Brady - Endgame: Bobby Fischers Remarkable Rise and Fall - from Americas Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

Copyright 2011 by Frank Brady

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brady, Frank, 1934
Endgame : Bobby Fischers remarkable rise and fallfrom Americas brightest prodigy to the
edge of madness / by Frank Brady.
p. cm.
1. Fischer, Bobby, 19432008. 2. Chess playersUnited StatesBiography. 3. Chess
Collection of games. I. Title

GV1439.F5B68 2010
794.1092dc22

[B]
2010033840

eISBN: 978-0-307-46392-0

Jacket design by David Tran
Jacket photograph Stephen GreenArmytage/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

v3.1

To Maxine,
always my talisman

CONTENTS

A S SOMEONE WHO knew Bobby Fischer from the time he was quite young, Ive been asked hundreds of times, What was Bobby Fischer really like? This book is an attempt to answer that question. But a warning to those who turn these pages: Paradoxes abound. Bobby was secretive, yet candid; generous, yet parsimonious; naive, yet well informed; cruel, yet kind; religious, yet heretical. His games were filled with charm and beauty and significance. His outrageous pronouncements were filled with cruelty and prejudice and hate. And though for a period of decades he poured most of his energy and passion into a quest for chess excellence, he was not the idiot savant often portrayed by the press.

As Virginia Woolf observed in her one attempt at writing a life story, that of artist Roger Fry: A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand. Many lives, and then second and even third acts, constitute the drama of Bobby Fischer, but my attempt here was to delineate just one of Fischers kaleidoscopic personalitiesthat of a genius, an inwardly tortured warriorand within that framework to capture his shifting identities and roles. The renowned psychologist Alfred Binet noted that if we could look inside the mind of a chess player we would see there a whole world of feelings, images, ideas, emotions and passions. And so it was with Bobby: His head was not merely filled with chess bytes, phantom computer connections on a grid of sixty-four squares, but with poetry and song and lyricism.

I ask forgiveness for my occasional speculations in this book, but Fischers motivations beg to be understood; and when conjecture is used, I inform the reader of my doing so. To vivify Bobbys extraordinary life I sometimes use the techniques of the novelist: elaboration of setting, magnification of detail, fragments of dialogue, and revelation of interior states. But always my use of those devices is based on my research, recollection, and study of the man. I want readerswhether they play chess or notto feel as though theyre sitting next to Bobby, on his side of the chessboard, or in the privacy of his home, experiencing the rush of his triumphs, the pain of his defeats, and the venom of his anger.

Ive been following Bobby Fischers life story from the first time we metat a chess tournament when he was a child and I was a teenall the way to his grave in the remote and windswept countryside of Iceland. Over the years we played hundreds of games together, dined in Greenwich Village restaurants, traveled to tournaments, attended dinner parties, and walked the streets of Manhattan for hours on end. He was light-years ahead of me in chess ability, but despite the yawning gap that separated us, we found ways to bond. I knew his family and had many talks about Bobby with his mother.

Though Bobby and I were friends, with a tempestuous relationship that remained on for years and eventually was off, I was also a privileged official witness to his greatness. As a director of one of the first rated tournaments he played in as a child, I noted his steadfastness. As an arbiter when he accomplished his historic 110 clean sweep at the 196364 U.S. Championship tournament, I stood by his board and observed his pride of accomplishment. And as the initial arbiter for Bobby when he was banned from traveling to Cuba for the Havana International Tournament and forced to play remotely by Teletype entry, I spent hours alone with him in a closed room of the Marshall Chess Club, watching how his deep concentration was being compromised by fatigue.

Although Endgame includes many incidents to which I was an eyewitness or in which I participated, the book is not in any way my memoir, and Ive tried to remain invisible as much as possible. Through original research, analysis of documents and letters heretofore untapped, and hundreds of interviews over the years with people who knew or had a different perspective on Bobby, Ive tried to capture the story of how he not only transformed himself, but also how, through a mysterious alchemy, he affected the image and status of chess in the minds of millions. And also how, unexpectedly, he saw his life become intertwined with the Cold War.

Mainly as a result of Bobbys charisma and his widely publicized contretemps, his winning the World Championship created more furor and attentionand more awareness of the game by the general publicthan any other chess event in history. Bobby had an uneasy relationship with his extraordinary celebrity and ultimately grew to despise it. It was the publics intrusive gaze that caused him, in later years, to lead a determinedly reclusive, almost hermetic life.