AThe Tampa Tribune Tampa, Florida Wednesday, July 05, 1972 - Page 41
Boris Vasilevich Spassky: A Cool World Champion
(UPI) Boyish Boris Spassky stays cool when those around him sweat and squirm.
He sits on a Moscow stage under boiling klieg lights, surrounded by a hundred newsmen. His future is at stake. A powerful and determined man wants his job. In a soft and nonchalant voice, he says:
“I do not know who will win, but I am sure it will be an interesting and important event.”
Boris Vasilevich Spassky, 35, of Leningrad, Russia, is the world champion at the game of chess.
HE COULD NOT be more unlike America's Bobby Fischer, the cocky and controversial chess genius who is challenging for Spassky's title and boasting he will win.
Spassky, who defeated fellow Soviet player Tigran Petrosyan for the world title in 1969, looks more like a 25-year-old track and field star than a 35-year-old chess champion. He sounds more like the nice boy next door than a celebrity.
Slender and broad shouldered, without an ounce of fat, Spassky can be recognized in a crowd by his thick brown way hair and his almost baby face. The soft facial effect is sharpened by a prominent beak of a nose and ice blue eyes that never seem to blink.
THE CHAMPION is soft spoken, courteous, modest and unassuming in the extreme.
Once at the chess board, however, Mr. Nice Guy disappears.
Like Fischer, Spassky is an aggressive, attacking, chess player although generally rated not quite as quick and a bit more profound in style. Spassky demolished defensive master Petrosyan for the title three years ago, beating him in only 24 moves in one game with his “hurricane attack.”
Spassky was born in Leningrad in 1937 and took a degree in journalism, although he is strictly a professional chess player.
He began playing chess at age nine, became an international master at age 16 and World Junior Champion at age 18 in 1955. He first challenged Petrosyan for the world title in 1966 and lost.
WHILE HE HAS a gentle and charming personality in public, Spassky represents a chess juggernaut that pours every resource into its gifted players and protects them from public scrutiny in typical Soviet style.
Little, therefore, is known about his private life or preparations for this match.
It is known, however, that like all Soviet chess players he preps with heavy athletic training as well as mental tuning. He was a track athlete as a young man and likes swimming now.
Spassky lives in a three-room Moscow apartment with his second wife, Larissa, a refrigerator engineer, and their son Vasily, who became five years old Sunday.
He also has a 12-year-old daughter, Tatiana, by a previous marriage.
Robert J.(Bobby) Fischer A Cocky U.S. Challenger
UPI — Possibly what most worries the man-on-the-street in Moscow these days is a chess player from Brooklyn, N.Y., named Robert James Fischer.
For a Russian, the thought that Fischer could defeat their champion is something akin to what an American would feel at the idea that nine Soviets could whip the Pittsburgh Pirates in four straight.
THE OBJECT of the Russians' concern is still called “Bobby” though he is now 29 years old.
Fischer was born in Chicago March 9, 1943, but raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., where his family moved when he was two years old.
His sister taught Bobby the fundamentals of chess when he was six. With the help of a neighbor interested in the game and his own remarkable powers of memory and concentration, Fischer became United States champion at the age of 14.
Since then, the 64 black and white squares of the chess board and the desire to prove himself unequaled in his mastery of them, have become Fischer's obsession.
Fischer has won an unprecedented string of victories in the past two years, the last over the Armenian master of defensive chess, Tigran Petrosian, to earn the right to face Spassky, who had earlier defeated Petrosian to win the world title.
WITH AN unsurpassed memory and encyclopedic knowledge of the game, Fischer is a great positional player and ferocious attacker. But his complaints about flashbulbs, noise, living conditions and spectator movement have been known to drive tournament directors wild.
American experts are confident of a Fischer victory, although Spassky has won three games and drawn two in their previous encounters. Characteristically, Fischer agrees.
Once asked who he thought was the greatest player in the world, Fischer replied “It would be nice to be modest but it would be st*p*d if I did not tell the truth. It is Fischer.”
