Beckley Post-Herald Beckley, West Virginia Friday, July 14, 1972 - Page 4
Fischer's Moves Put Chess in Headlines
After months of moves by Bobby Fischer of the United States and Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union over where, when and how to hold a chess match as well as the how much — the match itself will be anticlimax.
If he has done nothing else, Bobby Fischer has done more for chess than any man since Lewis Carroll. Customarily a chess match raises as much popular interest in this country as the annual meeting of beekeepers or a seminar on the teaching of Esperanto to the Incas. This time there is a difference, and mostly it's been Bobby.
The Russians deserve some credit. For years the Soviets haven't just held the title; they've owned it. Until Bobby Fischer came along, a world chess match was truly a case of Russian roulette.
THIS TIME FISCHER stole the headlines before the sedentary match got under way. Take his insistence on money. ([That he, Fischer refused to allow the Soviets to deflate, devalue the value of the match when Argentina, Mexico and Australia were offering between 150,000-225,000 dollars to host the match, offering prize money as high as $200,000? And why shouldn't Bobby resist efforts of the Soviet to bury the match?]) He acted so American.
Spassky was in there trying, but his nyet had little bite to it. He couldn't engage in yak-yak without asking Moscow's permission.
The way he walked out of the first scheduled meeting resembled a poor road version of the act Andrei Gromyko used to stage so regularly in the United Nations, but the way the two were checking each other it seemed unlikely they would ever be mated.
Compounding their cold war was that their chosen arena was Iceland. Chess players are like that. Olympians choose places like Tokyo and Munich, regular tourist stops, but the chess federation ([whose upper echelons is heavily tilted in favor of the Soviet Union]) only takes Iceland ([knowing that it is unreasonably racist and heavily Anti-American, with that hostile atmosphere useful as a tool for the Soviet's aim to demoralize Robert Fischer, and upset his game])
The self-effacement of the game may be summed up by the knowledge that the head of the international federation is a man named Euwe. It's quite possible that chess needs a Bobby Fischer and his emphasis on “Me!” Certainly it's received more attention this year than ever in memory.
Fischer's Moves Put Chess in Headlines 14 Jul 1972, Fri Beckley Post-Herald (Beckley, West Virginia) Newspapers.com
