AThe Philadelphia Inquirer Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Sunday, June 25, 1972 - Page 54
Fischer's Ego Matches Skill
New York (UPI). — There are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible moves in the average chess game.
Robert James (Bobby) Fischer learned the first dozen or so from his sister in Brooklyn when he was six-years-old.
He picked up a few more from a stock broker in the neighborhood and stunned the chess world by becoming the United States champion.
AS A CHILD, Bobby would cry when he lost. He doesn't cry anymore — possibly because he never loses.
Fischer has won an unprecedented string of victories in the past two years and on July 2, in Reykjavik, Iceland, will stare across the board at world champion Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union.
Fischer has not been seen in public or heard from since he played in a celebrity tennis tournament in California more than a month ago.
But few doubt that Fischer will compete for the world championship that has obsessed him since he started playing. As an added incentive, the winner of the Fischer-Spassky match will take home $125,000 in prize money.
BY HIS OWN estimation, Fischer will merely be going through the motions in Iceland since he has frequently and publicly, to the outrage of many grand masters, proclaimed the superiority of his own talents.
Once asked who he thought was the world's greatest player, he replied, “It would be nice to be modest but it would be stupid if I did not tell the truth. It is Fischer.”
Fischer's supreme self-confidence has been a major factor in his ability to consistently defeat, overwhelm, outrage and awe his opponents. He has even shed one.
In 1961, Bobby walked out of a match with former U.S. champion Samuel Reshevsky, and when judges ruled Fischer had forfeited, he filed suit in New York Supreme Court to bar his opponent from appearing in any other games until the match was completed
THE DISPUTE was typical of Fischer's controversial career but not to be unexpected from a man whose life is wrapped up in the 64 squares of the chess board.
Fischer was born in Chicago March 9, 1943, and raised in Brooklyn, where his family moved when he was 2.
His formal education ended when he dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn his junior year.
