The Sydney Morning Herald Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Saturday, January 08, 1972 - Page 16
They're All Playing Chess from Robert Darroch in London
Suddenly everybody's playing—of all things—chess.
Sales of chess sets are booming, shooting up 20 per cent in the United Sets over the past six months. And in Britain chess club membership lists are filled.
The most obvious reason for this upsurge of interest in one of the world's oldest games can be given in two words: Bobby Fischer.
His campaign to wrest the world chess championship from the bear-like grip of the Russians (who have had a monopoly of it for over a generation) is attracting the sort of interest normally reserved for Wimbledon or the Olympic Games.
When blind, blue-eyed Fischer played “Tiger” Petrosian, the Russian former world champion in Buenos Aires recently, their every move was avidly followed by the world's 60 million chess players. And when Fischer triumphed, winning the right to face the world champion, Boris Spassky, the news made front pages all over the world.
Already dozens of cities in Europe and South America are clamoring to be the venue for the “match of the century” between 28-year-old Fischer and 34-year-old Spassky scheduled for next year.
Favorites at the moment are Rio de Janeiro; Brazil; Bogota, Colombia; and Zurich, Switzerland.
The winner will have to provide facilities for an audience four or five times as large as the 1,500 that watch the Fischer-Petrosian match in Buenos Aires.
The world's press will be there in force to report every move, both on the board and behind the scenes, and there is talk of beaming the entire series (which could last over a month) via satellite all over the globe.
For millions Fischer is the great white hope, fighting to bring back the world title for American democracy. And Fischer with his IQ of
[(Bobby corrected this myth on the Dick Cavett show: https://youtu.be/zIE3CFNpZ5Y?t=841 confirming he himself does not know his IQ because the high school tested him but never gave him the score! He proceeds to emphatically clarify he has no interest in such things. Contemporary reports from 1950s state Erasmus High school officials reported Fischer's IQ in the “generally superior range”. https://fischer-notes.blogspot.com/2019/04/bobby-fischers-iq-of-123-tested-by.html)]
his diet of steak and apple juice and his affiliation to an obscure ultra-conservative, fundamentalist religious sect he declines to identify, is equally convinced of his righteous crusade.
The glamour and mystery that surrounds Fischer has brought unaccustomed excitement to a game whose previous public image has been of elderly eggheads making incomprehensible motions over a draughts board at the pace of a handicapped snail.
Chess shops in England are taking advantage of the boom by mounting displays of usual chess sets in office windows. One London shop has displays in nine building society windows throughout the city featuring a chess problem with “10 per cent off any chess set” for people who come up with the correct solution. At lunchtime the crowds are four or five deep around these displays.
They're All Playing Chess Sat, Jan 8, 1972 – Page 16 · The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) · Newspapers.com
