Checkmate

...It seemed unlikely that any foreign player could overcome such coordination and passion, and less likely still that he would be an American...

...Chess was an unlikely venue for a '70s sporting showdown between bear and eagle...

...Any devastating rout in match play, now not much seen, would undoubtedly be measured against Fischer's 6-0 annihilations of Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen in the 1970 Candidates playdowns...

...It is the only place where Bobby Fischer isn't BOBBY FISCHER...

...Fischer, for his part, refused to defend his title...

...What the new book supplies—along with a more detached, scholarly attitude—is our first detailed view of the struggles of Spassky, the squabbles within his own team, and the Soviet documentation on the match...

...On arriving, Fischer quarreled about the chairs provided for the competitors, whined about the lighting and the composition of the chessboard custom-built for the match, had the games transplanted behind a curtain on the stage of the Laugardalshoell arena, and tried to ban "noisy" cameras whose footage was necessary to recoup the staggering costs of the exhibition...

...he was to prove convincingly over time that he really was nuts...

...But by Game Three, his opponent had been driven nearly mad himself by the tension Fischer had created...

...The Rest of the World, an uproarious (and out-of-print) first-hand account issued in 1975 by Brad Darrach...

...Today he gives occasional, and invariably demented, radio interviews in Asia...

...His clock was started, and after an hour he was forfeited...

...His work of New Journalism remains the best extant psychological portrait of Fischer...

...In 1982 he published a pamphlet with the incomparable title "I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse...

...Soviet Man had taken over in 1948, when Mikhail Botvinnik won a tournament to succeed the late champion, the alcoholic emigre Alexander Alekhine...

...When a young player crushes an older hero convincingly, the game everyone looks to is Byrne-Fischer 1956, a chaotic masterpiece won by Fischer at 13...

...Russians had held the World Championship continuously since 1937...

...But it is also the most thorough tome yet on a fascinating, tragic subject...

...1 DMONDS AND EIDINOWS BOOK tells the story well, though one finds oneself a little nostalgic for 4Bobby Fischer vs...

...By then, chess dominance had become a Soviet obsession, a symbol of communism's moral strength...

...wiped out...

...The tacit Russian cooperation in skewing tournament outcomes infuriated him...

...At 15 Fischer became history's youngest grandmaster...

...These victories are chess's analogue to Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point night, or Wayne Gretzky's 50 goals in 39 games: They represent the incomparable...

...Young New Yorker Bobby Fischer started out as just another smart youngster hanging out at the Marshall Chess Club...

...After losing the first game on an embarrassing error, he refused to show up for the second on account of the imagined distractions...

...Fischer's antics were surely no mere tactic...

...I want to see the U.S...

...Later prodigies have Colby Cosh is a columnist for the National Post of Canada...

...Fischer's tournament play was always characterized by tantrums, and in 1972, when his title shot came along, they reached the point of absurdity...

...Soviet participants (including Spassky) are sticking mostly to their old and self-serving stories, and there's no indication that the sports commissars ever knew anything beyond the obvious—namely, that Fischer had unparalleled ability to throw an opponent off, and that Spassky's gentlemanly passivity would probably make it hard for him to overcome Fischer's genius...

...Today he lives in Japan, where go and shogi are preferred to the Indo-European game...

...c4...

...Soviet-bloc players visibly tended to agree to quick draws with one another in major tournaments, and the occasional game may have been thrown to favorites of officialdom...

...moved the bar lower, by inches, but none has emulated Fischer's further rise to the top...

...With the chess world agog over a credible challenge to Soviet supremacy, he refused to fly to Reykjavik until a British businessman doubled the $125,000 purse and dared him to turn up...

...But once again, the intolerable thought that he might go down in history as a coward brought Fischer back to the board, where he won Game Three and never looked back...

...Fischer emerged on the scene, accomplished things no other human has, captured the wider world's imagination for a few precious months—and, in essence, vanished, spurning competitive chess to travel the world in search of privacy and pretty girls...

...A red-diaper baby whose mother had trained as a nurse in Moscow, Fischer conceived an enduring, venomous hatred for Russians and Soviets in general...

...Darrach, sent to cover the championship by Life magazine, became an informal member of Fischer's team, penning tales of the challenger's absent-mindedness, misanthropy, and social ineptitude...

...The new book Bobby Fischer Goes to War recounts the apotheosis and terminus of Fischer's chess career—his decisive victory in the 1972 World Championship against the Russian Boris Spassky...

...For the history of chess, 1972 will forever be an unmistakable border between eras...

...But a preternatural talent for pure abstract thinking can appear anywhere...

...although he finished as low as second only twice between 1962 and 1972, he felt he was being robbed...

...If you want to prove that Capablanca or Tal or Petrosian was the best, Fischer is the comparison you try on first...

...Within two years he was the U.S...

...Down 2-0, he was widely written off...

...Checkmate Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (Ecco, 342 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by Colby Cosh BOBBY FISCHER might not have been the strongest chessplayer of the 20th century, but he is the gold standard...

...Always neurotic and anti-social, Fischer spent the '60s eternally frustrated at earning so little money for being a star in a sport played worldwide...

...it seemed doubtful he would return to play at all...

...There is nothing, however, that dramatically alters the former consensus...

...champion...

...But in 1956 he suddenly seems to have intuited some deep secret at the game's heart: in his own words, he "just 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 BOOKS IN REVIEW got good...

...One senses that this book was undertaken in the hope of a post-Cold War archival bounty of revisionism...

...Spassky, one of the greatest postwar Soviet players, was never the same after Reykjavik...

...F—k the U.S...

...It has ended up as a competent, somewhat perfunctory recounting of events, rendered in the same flat tones as most multi-author books...

...Before the sun had set on September 11, 2001, in the Western hemisphere, he was on the Filipino airwaves crowing, "I applaud the act...

...Politically orthodox top players, particularly Botvinnik, enjoyed state funding and help from teams of talented assistants...