The Miami Herald Miami, Florida Thursday, January 13, 1972 - Page 138
Letters To The Editor: Champion Chess Game Won't Be Slow Going
The comments made in your Jan. 8 editorial concerning your “loss to understand why” Yugoslavia has made a bid for the forthcoming World Chess Championship Match between Boris Spassky of the USSR, the present world champion, and Bobby Fischer, of the United States, are not entirely objective.
Obviously, you are not a chess aficionado and you are not familiar with the overwhelming foreign press and TV coverage (by satellite) of important chess events such as that given Bobby Fischer's recent crushing defeat of the Russian number two grandmaster, Tigran Petrosian, recently at Buenos Aires.
During this match, TV viewers around the world, with the exception of the United States, saw a game-by-game and move-by-move commentary as did newspaper readers in every country in Europe who followed the news on their front pages. This event is of momentous interest to chess players the world over for it makes the first time in more than 100 years that an American champion has emerged who has earned the right to challenge a grandmaster with the stature of the present world champion, Boris Spassky, the man who is the greatest chess player of a nation of 10 million chess players.
Consequently, how could such an event, which nations such as Chile, Argentina and even Iceland are bidding in the six-figures to attract, be as you say “awfully slow going,” when it involves a 28 year old capitalist upstart by the name of Bobby Fischer who is favored to become the next world title holder?
Robert Tralins
Letters To The Editor: Champion Chess Game Won't Be Slow Going 13 Jan 1972, Thu The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida) Newspapers.com
