Chess on a New Plateau
SOLTIS, ANDREW
Chess on a New Plateau_ Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World By Brad Darrach Stein and Day. 256 pp. $8.95. Fields of Force By George Steiner Viking. 86 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Andrew...
...Sure enough, that fall, following Fischer's victory, a Texas fried-chicken magnate staged perhaps the most lavish international tournament in American history...
...Should he refuse to play on schedule next July-exactly three years since Reykjavik as Federation regulations require-he would be stripped of his title...
...More hardcover books were commissioned over the next 12 months, too, than in the previous 10 years...
...In Bobby Fischer vs...
...But several thousand words weeks or months later (and without the cooperation of some of the central characters...
...An ambitious "National Chess League" featuring regional teams coached by grandmasters never materialized...
...Both volumes are, to a large degree, reruns...
...they were going to take the game away from its devotees...
...Darrach quotes him as explaining to one of his closest friends: "We all got genes, Jackie, but the difference between you and me is, I got good genes and you got bad genes...
...In the furor of the summer of 1972, among the millions of words provoked by the events in Reykjavik, this modest truth has been largely forgotten...
...the Rest of the World by Brad Darrach, Time's movie reviewer for 10 years, chess meets the New Journalism...
...Traditionally, tournament patrons tended to be old-money philanthropic types-the wife of Gregor Piati-gorsky, Prince Rainier of Monaco, various members of the Rothschild family, and so on...
...After lengthy discussion about the effects on the group's image from association with a TV show (those big-money interests again), the governors gave their OK because "no one but a few players are going to watch it anyway...
...Meanwhile, chess books began climbing up the bestseller lists...
...The "they" that I and the other pre-Reykjavik players had in mind were the big-money interests who would overwhelm chess, turning players into performers and friendly tournaments into huge promotions...
...That's why I'm a great chess player and you're a piece of shit...
...Billed as "the most indiscreet biography ever written," Darrach's work, while far from being a genuine biography, is nevertheless vastly entertaining...
...When another lavish international tournament was held in Pasadena last April, the organizer went broke...
...Steiner's is a polished version of his October '72 New Yorker essay, which became one of the most talked about pieces in that magazine's history...
...The chess book boom all but collapsed by the summer of '73...
...In four paragraphs, for example, he makes more sense about why computers haven't become grandmasters (despite considerable experimentation) than a recent cover-story in Scientific American...
...The big push of a title match that everyone says chess needs to reach the next plateau will have drifted by without anyone having noticed it...
...Darrach has the New Journalist's penchant for telling a story with rich detail and voluminous quotation...
...Here, also, is Bobby blackmailing the World Chess Federation, freaking out with delusions of grandeur and indecision over whether to go to Iceland, whether to leave Iceland, how to respond to Spassky's complaints, what to demand next...
...The match to choose his 1975 challenger, begun quietly in September 1974, would become ex post facto the world championship match of the 1973-75 period...
...I remember sitting at a meeting of the board of governors of the Marshall Chess Club in June '72 when Mike Chase, who produced the televised analysis that subsequently won an extraordinary audience, asked for permission to use the club's facilities...
...Reviewed by Andrew Soltis Chess columnist...
...Chess did not succeed in making the transition from small-scale pastime to superaudience spectator sport that golf and tennis had...
...It is fashionable in chess circles to hold to the "plateau theory"?i.e., although enthusiasm for the game has dropped off since the craze of two and a half years ago, interest remains at a higher level than before Reykjavik...
...An enormous number of titles were already in print dealing with some instructional or entertainment aspect of the game (many more Americans know how to play chess than contract bridge, not to mention backgammon), but hardcover sales had rarely pushed 10,000, and paperback reprints didn't do much better...
...Meanwhile, the chess world remains in a kind of Beckett-like stagnation-waiting for Bobby...
...He also gives an excellent analysis of how good chess players think...
...reporter...
...It's a wonder he hasn't been stolen away for service in the CIA...
...But last June Bobby announced he was "resigning" his title because the World Chess Federation hadn't bent far enough backwards on a rules dispute...
...But around the week Time and Newsweek put Bobby on their covers-perhaps on the day New York's public television station was deluged with angry phone calls because it had cut away from an analysis of the 14th game in Iceland to show the Democrats replacing Thomas Eagleton with Sargent Shriver-i was suddenly struck by a fear: Chess would never be the same...
...Steiner is less concerned with minute reconstruction than with finding reasons for the world's three-month preoccupation with a relatively esoteric sport-a phenomenon that surprised no one more than chess players themselves...
...Fields of Force by George Steiner gives us a clear-headed explanation of what the game is all about by one of our most prominent literary critics...
...Still, it is troubling to read an almost minute-by-minute account of Bobby's decision to leave New York for Iceland, the major portion of the book, knowing that the author providing the details was 3,000 miles away at the time...
...Chess may well be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more...
...Finally, and possibly most important, Steiner does not fall into the trap of saying the game has some great message for us: "But, marvelously profound and possibly central as these cerebral techniques are, their object remains totally trivial...
...Various plans for weekly television programs with chess themes died on story boards...
...And that would be the cruelest joke on the chess community...
...Yet somehow the takeoff stalled...
...Of course, one can put together parts of quotations hours after an event from friendly sources...
...Here is Bobby gliding through the streets of Manhattan and Reykjavik, brimming with paranoia and megalomania...
...New York "Post" Up until the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky match in the summer of 1972, chess in America was a quiet recreation played by restrained, thoughtful individuals whose only serious reward from winning a game was the cheerful satisfaction of having destroyed another human being...
...Darrach is even able to penetrate conversations conducted in Russian and Icelandic...
...Shortly thereafter, Bobby Darin announced he, too, would sponsor such an event...
...Darrach's is a reworking of articles he wrote for Life, Playboy and People...
...And these two books, dealing with chess but without any knowledge of the moves necessary, suggest a new status as well...
...If Fischer would only play again, his American supporters have been saying for two years, chess would return to Johnny Carson's monologues and Jimmy the Greek's odds quotations...
...To explain the chess boom of '72, Steiner retraces the origins of championship events and the careers of those masters who dominated...
...In the wake of Fischer-Spassky, though, one instant-book, a grandmaster analysis of the games mass-marketed within a fortnight of the match, sold a half-million copies in a few months...
Vol. 58 • January 1975 • No. 1
