Endgame Read online

  Nigro had no problem teaching Bobby. The boy could hardly wait for his weekly lesson, and eventually he began to defeat Tommy. “I started going to Mr. Nigro’s house on Saturdays,” Bobby later wrote, “as well as meeting him on Fridays at the Club. My mother was often on duty on weekends at her job as a nurse, and was glad to have me go [to Mr. Nigro’s house].”

  In 1952, still not yet turned nine, Bobby made his first entrance into competitive chess. A group of Nigro’s protégés won the first match with a score of 5–3; the score of the second match has been lost or forgotten. Auspiciously, Bobby won his first game and drew his second against ten-year-old Raymond Sussman, the son of a dentist, Dr. Harold Sussman, a nationally rated master from Brooklyn. Dr. Sussman was also an amateur photographer, and he captured some portraits of Bobby that worked their way into the Fischer oeuvre years later. Fittingly, Sussman also became Bobby’s dentist. “He had a great set of teeth,” Sussman remembered.

  That summer and fall, Bobby also spent time playing against his grandfather’s septuagenarian cousin Jacob Schonberg, who also lived in Brooklyn. Regina would take the boy with her when she nursed Schonberg and Bobby would play his great-cousin as the old man sat in bed. Years later Bobby could not remember how strong Schonberg was or how many games the two played, but one could tell by the inflection in his voice that he was affected by the experience, not so much by the playing of the games, but by the encounter with a family member, however distant. It was a ritual that was all too rare for him.

  Carmine Nigro was a professional musician, and taught music in a number of styles. Since Bobby was such a sponge in absorbing the intricacies of chess, Nigro tried to foster in him an interest in music. Since the Fischers didn’t own a piano, Nigro began giving Bobby accordion lessons, lending him a somewhat battered “twelve-bass” instrument so he could practice at home. Soon Bobby was playing “Beer Barrel Polka” and other tunes and felt competent enough to give performances at more than one school assembly. After about a year, though, he concluded that the amount of time he was spending practicing the accordion was impinging on his chess studies. “I did fairly well on it for a while,” Bobby said, looking back, “but chess had more attraction and the accordion was pushed aside.”

  Until he was ten, Bobby’s regimen was fairly routine: He played at the Brooklyn Chess Club every Friday night, with Regina sitting on the sidelines, reading a book or doing her nursing homework. Late Saturday morning Nigro would pick him up in his car, and if Tommy Nigro was uninterested in playing, which was more often than not, Nigro would drive Bobby to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to get the boy some competition at the open-air chess tables. Nigro also had another agenda: At first, Bobby was somewhat of a slow player, and the chess players in the park were just the opposite. Nigro felt they wouldn’t tolerate Bobby’s sometimes languorous tempo, so he’d be forced to quicken his play and therefore his thinking.

  To boost his competitiveness Bobby spent hours after school at the Grand Army Plaza library reading almost every chess book on the shelves. He became such a fixture there, and displayed such seriousness, that a photograph showing him studying appeared in the library’s newsletter in 1952 with a caption identifying him. It was the first time that his photograph appeared in print. Within a few months, he found that he could follow the games and the diagrams in the books without the use of a board. If the variations were too complex or lengthy, he’d check the book out, and at home, sitting in front of his chess set, he’d replay the games of past masters, attempting to understand and to memorize how they’d won—or lost.

  Bobby read chess literature while he was eating and when he was in bed. He’d set up his board on a chair next to his bed, and the last thing he did before going to sleep and the first thing he did upon awakening was to look at positions or openings. So many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, bowls of cereal, and plates of spaghetti were consumed while Bobby was replaying and analyzing games that the crumbs and leavings of his food became encrusted in the crenellated battlements of his rooks, the crosses of his kings, the crowns of his queens, and the creases in the miters of his bishops. And the residue of food was never washed off. Years later, when a chess collector finally took possession of the littered set and cleaned it up, Bobby’s reaction was typically indignant: “You’ve ruined it!”

  He even maintained his involvement with the game while bathing. The Fischers didn’t have a working shower, just a bathtub, and Bobby, like many young children, needed to be urged to take at least a weekly bath. Regina established a Sunday night ritual of running a bath for him, practically carrying him to the tub. And once he was settled in the water, she’d lay a door from a discarded cabinet across the tub as a sort of tray and then bring in Bobby’s chess set, a container of milk, and whatever book he was studying at the time, helping him position them on the board. Bobby soaked sometimes for hours as he became engrossed in the games of the greats, only emerging from the water, prune-like, when Regina insisted.

  The neurons of Bobby’s brain seemed to absorb the limitations and possibilities of each piece in any given position, storing them for future reference. They remained there, tucked into his memory, deep within a cave of abstract thoughts: information and ideas about pawns and squares to be used, discarded, or ignored—all in perfect cadence and synchronicity. Studying the games of masters from the past and present, Bobby seemed to appropriate and learn from many: the intuitive combinational ability of Rudolf Spielmann, the accumulation of small advantages as demonstrated by Wilhelm Steinitz, the almost mystical technique José Capablanca had of avoiding complications, the deep but beautiful murkiness of Alexander Alekhine. As one chess master said of him: “Bobby virtually inhaled chess literature. He remembered everything and it became part of him.” The boy—and then the man—had one salient cognitive goal, although he didn’t express it openly: He wanted to understand.

  He enjoyed playing over what are called miniature games, short encounters of usually twenty moves or less, as if they were musical exercises, works of art unto themselves, usually with only one pervasive idea.

  Beginner’s books such as An Invitation to Chess and other primers were quickly discarded as Bobby then became engrossed in advanced works such as Practical Chess Openings and Basic Chess Endings; the two volumes of My Best Games of Chess by Alexander Alekhine; and a then newly published book, 500 Master Games of Chess. He was also particularly interested in the collection titled Morphy’s Games of Chess, which displayed the great player’s tactical ingenuity and his adherence to three general principles: rapid development of one’s pieces, the importance of occupying or capturing the center squares of the board, and mobility—the necessity of keeping lines, ranks, files, and diagonals open. Bobby absorbed these lessons and would act on them for the rest of his life. He once told master Shelby Lyman that he’d read thousands of chess books and retained the best from each.

  It should be stressed that these works wouldn’t have been easy to read even for an experienced adult player: They aren’t accessible unless a person has the drive to excel in the abstraction of chess. That an eight- or nine-year-old boy had the power of concentration to get through them was highly unusual. That the same boy was able to understand and absorb what he read was nothing short of remarkable. Later, Bobby would increase the degree of difficulty by reading chess books in multiple languages.

  In the realm of academics Bobby’s level of achievement was more erratic. Aside from summer camps, the first classes Bobby ever attended were at the Brooklyn Jewish Children’s School, a kindergarten, where he was taught songs by rote for Hanukkah and Purim, in both English and Yiddish, a language he didn’t know. He couldn’t relate to the other children. At first, he couldn’t figure out the purpose of a dreidel—a four-sided spinning top that’s played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. He didn’t like the idea that he had to wear a uniform—a white shirt and pressed pants. And in the restroom he may have seen that his penis was different from the rest: He was
n’t circumcised. After a few weeks Regina withdrew him from the school. Although she was Jewish, she wasn’t religiously observant; Bobby never had a bris (the circumcision ceremony usually performed on the eighth day after birth for Jewish boys), and he later claimed that he’d received no training in Judaic customs or theology and was never taken to a synagogue for religious purposes. He may have simply failed to recall it.

  Attempts by Regina and Joan to engage Bobby in schoolwork were usually fruitless. Bobby could concentrate on puzzles or chess for hours, but he fidgeted and grew restless when confronted with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Attending the Brooklyn public schools was also problematic. He was a loner and invariably separated himself from the other children, possibly because of acute shyness or fear of competition. By the time he reached the fourth grade, he’d been in and out of six schools—almost two a year—leaving each time because he wasn’t doing well in his studies or couldn’t abide his teachers, classmates, or even the school’s location. In frustration, Regina registered Bobby in a school for gifted children. He lasted one day and refused to go back.

  Eventually, she found a school that was an appropriate match for her problematic son. In the fall of 1952, when Bobby was nine, Regina secured scholarship enrollment for him in Brooklyn Community Woodward, a progressive grade school of approximately 150 children. Housed in a stately brownstone that had originally been a private home, it was one of the loveliest school buildings in Brooklyn. The school’s philosophy of education was based on the principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, an eighteenth-century Swiss educator who opposed memorization exercises and strict discipline, and concentrated on the individual’s development though a series of experimental techniques. The school promoted the concept of Anschaung, a personal way of looking at things that was inherent and individual to every child. The seats and desks weren’t permanently fixed in place as they were in most schools, and the children were encouraged to forget the distinction between study and play. To learn early American history, for example, students dressed in costumes of the era and were taught how to spin yarn, hook rugs, and use quill pens.

  Bobby’s way was chess, and what it meant to him. He was already showing talent for the game, and he was accepted by Community Woodward with the understanding that he’d teach the other students to play, and also as a result of his astronomically high IQ test score of 180.

  A bright spot in his social and physical development at Community Woodward occurred when he was chosen to be on the baseball team, and he began to emerge from his shell. He fell in love with the game, could hear the roar of the crowds from nearby Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, while at school or at home, and on class trips attended games at the stadium. He had a knack for fielding and batting, but although he was fast, he wasn’t a particularly coordinated runner on the bases. “He incited a great deal of interest in chess here,” one of his teachers said later. “He easily beat everybody, including the chess-playing members of the faculty. No matter what he played, whether it was baseball in the yard, or tennis, he had to come out ahead of everybody. If he’d been born next to a swimming pool he would have been a swimming champion. It just turned out to be chess.”

  One day Bobby bounded up the three flights of stairs to the safety of his home, only to find it empty. Joan was still in school, staying late for the Biology Club; Regina was in a nursing class, to be followed by library work and then a night shift after that. He found a note, penned in a small, blue spiral-bound pad, propped up on a chair in the kitchen:

  Dear Bobby—Finish off the soup and rice. Milk in refrig. I may get back after 3 to drop off groceries, and will then go back to study. Love, M.

  Being alone in the apartment was the default position of Bobby’s life from the time that Regina felt her son could be left by himself without supervision, and this persistent solitude might well have been a catalyst for his deeper involvement in chess. As he sat in front of the chessboard, often at the kitchen table, with a chess book spread open, the pieces became his companions, the book his mentor. Neither the loneliness nor the learning was easy for him, however. He would have liked to have had a friend, some other boy that he could play and share adventures with, but since chess was already occupying most of his time, interest, and thoughts, that potential friend would have had to not only know how to play chess but play it well enough to engage Bobby’s attention and loyalty.

  A certain compulsion forced him to continue to search for the secrets of the chessboard, and this preoccupation commanded his attention for hours on end. He was happy when the glare of the winter light ceased to pierce the broken shade of the kitchen window; it interfered with his thinking. When his sister Joanie or mother Geenie—as they were known by their friends—would come home in the late afternoon or early evening, they’d sometimes find Bobby in the dusk of the apartment, unaware or not caring that the lamps were unlit, staring at the board and lost in a reverie of tactics or strategies.

  Even though Regina felt Bobby was fairly independent, she was worried that he was home alone too much, and she had been seeking someone to childsit for him, to be sort of a companion. Money was a problem: Even a token payment to a caretaker was difficult to raise. So she had placed the following advertisement in the campus newspaper of Brooklyn College, not far from the Fischer home:

  Baby sitter wanted for schoolboy, 8½. Evenings, some weekends, in exchange for room, kitchen privileges. Sterling 3-4110 7 to 9 PM.

  A young math student replied—he even knew how to play chess—but for unknown reasons he didn’t take the job. Bobby remained alone.

  Unlike Joan, Bobby seemed to have little interest in school, and whenever Regina helped him with his homework he typically gave it short shrift, impatient to go back to chess. She had great difficulty coping with his imperiousness: “I want to play chess!” he’d demand, with all the pomposity of a crown prince talking to a servant. And off he’d go to his chessboard, without his mother’s permission, leaving his school assignments in abeyance.

  It’s not that Bobby rejected the studiousness displayed by his sister and mother. Rather, he was bent on the acquisition of another skill: chess. The difference was that it was more important to him to study how to win with rook and pawn than to learn the three branches of government or where to move the decimal point in long division. The three Fischers, prototypes of Talmudic scholars, were always studying: Joan her textbooks; Regina her medical tomes; and Bobby the latest chess periodical. The apartment was often as silent as a library.

  One of Bobby’s few non-chess interests emerged unexpectedly during his eighth year in the summer of 1951, when Regina sent him to the Venderveer Nursery School, a day camp in Brooklyn. Despite its name, the school accepted older children for its summer camp, and the program provided a place for Bobby to go once the school year ended. Either Regina or Joan would drop him off in the morning and fetch him in the late afternoon. Bobby fully expected to hate the camp—or at least dislike it—but he found that he enjoyed many of the physical activities it offered. Most important to him was Venderveer’s large outdoor pool, where he learned to swim.

  Thereafter every summer, when he was in one of the camps he attended and when he wasn’t studying chess, Bobby would train to take various Red Cross swimming tests, easily qualifying as an “Intermediate” and then “Advanced” swimmer. A true Piscean, he loved the water, especially if swimming meant competing with the other children in races. He was fast, determined, and alert, and the instant the swimming coach blew the whistle Bobby would kick off, often landing in the water when the other swimmers were still in mid-dive. Swimming gave him the chance to move and exercise his body, to uncramp it from the stiffening stillness of sitting with a chessboard or a book. He discovered that he loved moving through the water, and he found that he loved competition itself, whether swimming or playing chess. There seemed to be virtually nothing else he enjoyed doing.

  Regina began to fear for Bobby’s future if he didn’t take his schoolwork s
eriously. More than that, she was worried that his interest in chess was becoming obsessive. She believed he was so engrossed in the game that he was never quite in touch with the reality around him, so addicted to chess that he would not—could not—control it, and that eventually, because of the exclusion of everything else, this accidental interest might ruin his life.

  For Regina, discussing Bobby’s overcommitment to chess with Nigro was a hopeless endeavor. If anything, Nigro was constantly encouraging him to play more, to study, to enter tournaments. Bobby became Nigro’s protégé and chess companion. A caring man who was aware of Regina’s strained financial state, he never charged her for the lessons he gave Bobby, whether chess or music. Nigro and Bobby began to play clocked games together, at two hours each—the official speed of tournament chess—and with each encounter Bobby seemed to become stronger, which made him study even more, until he was beating Nigro in the majority of games.

  Much to Bobby’s consternation, Regina insisted that he have a psychological evaluation to determine whether something could or should be done to temper his relentless preoccupation with the game. When she brought the boy to Dr. Harold Kline at the Children’s Psychiatric Division of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, Bobby was less than cooperative. Sensing this, Dr. Kline didn’t give him any of the battery of personality, intelligence, or interest tests usually used to assess a child. He simply talked to the boy. “I don’t know,” said Bobby sullenly, when asked why he spent so much time playing chess and not on his schoolwork. “I just go for it.” With just a word of advice to Bobby about not neglecting his schoolwork, he asked the boy to step outside. Dr. Kline told Regina that she shouldn’t worry about Bobby, that children often became intrigued, virtually obsessed, with games, toys, sports, and other things, and that after a while they either lose interest or step away from such heavy involvement. No, he didn’t think that Bobby was neurotic, and he didn’t recommend therapy. “Neurotic” was a word that really explained nothing, he added, pointing out that Bobby was not hurting himself or others, chess was probably stretching his mind, and she should allow him to play as often as he liked. Her son’s resistance to schoolwork was a mild disorder that many children go through, but his study of chess, an intellectual activity, was supplanting it. Perhaps, he added, she could fashion some of his schoolwork as a sort of game, which might pique his interest.