AThe Windsor Star Windsor, Ontario, Canada Saturday, April 01, 1972 - Page 22
Bobby Fischer Chess Strikes
SO YOU THOUGHT Easter was for Easter eggs. Ba, Humbug. Easter is for strikes. Hockey television strikes. Baseball strikes. Vida Blue strikes. Bobby Fischer chess strikes.
The wonderful world of sport.
Years ago when the first rumblings of unionism crept upon professional sports, it was fashionable to declare the athlete would never be unionized.
Take a fellow such as Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox. He has been making in excess of $100,000 a year for several years and is considered the highest paid player in the American League.
Yastrzemski is a member of the Major League Baseball Players' Association which is making strike noises over pension benefits with the championship (salaried) season scheduled to start Wednesday.
A strike is not Carl's idea of maintaining rapport with Boston owner Tom Yawkey. Yastrzemski was not admired by some players for being against the Association in its cash support of Curt Flood in the latter's $3 million suit against baseball.
[…]
THE BOBBY FISCHER chess uproar doesn't have much muscle connected with it one way or another. Fischer is singlehandedly trying to drum up his own business by drawing an inordinate amount of attention to his world title match against Russia's Boris Spassky.
Fischer in the past has customarily played according to his own rules. He could have had a world title match 10 years ago had he been agreeable to international rules as they were then.
[…]
NOW, HE WANTS to make a lot of money, to a point perhaps where he will default if the stakes don't suit him. Fischer has yet to give a rap for anybody else's prerogatives. The world isn't likely to hold still for him.
Fischer's idea is to professionalize chess to a level it has never known across hundreds of years. The agreement he made with tournament people at Belgrade and Iceland would promote that.
But he says it isn't enough. His bargaining position isn't likely that good. The chess world could cut him loose and plod on a few more hundred years. It's that kind of world.
The Bobby Fischer Chess Uproar Sat, Apr 1, 1972 – 22 · The Windsor Star (Windsor, Ontario, Canada) · Newspapers.com
