The Wonder Match
"Before he was secretly buried on a dark winter morning in a lonely Icelandic
churchyard at the age of 64 . . . before his last ailing days of bad kidneys
and rotting teeth . . . before the long hours whiled away at a Reykjavik bookstore,
a place that vaguely reminded him of one from his Brooklyn youth . . . and before
his decades of ghostly peregrinations through the world, like a profane monk
or an idiot savant searching for perfect exile . . . before his bizarre eruptions
. . . and before the spectacle of meeting his one-time nemesis, the former world-champion
chess player Boris Spassky, for an anticlimactic 1992 rematch in war-torn Yugoslavia
despite U.N. sanctions against it . . . even way back before their original
1972 meeting, called the Match of the Century, when the eyes of the world were
riveted on him as a shining emblem of American will, innovation and brilliance
. . . even before his brazen, almost obnoxious deconstruction of a cavalcade
of grandmasters who stood in his path to Spassky . . . before he traded the
rags of his youth for his new wardrobe of expensive suits . . . before his mind
slowly unhinged and he became a walking paradox . . . yes, before the whole
circus of his life unfolded, he was a 13-year-old kid in the first flush of
the thing he most loved in the world: chess."
The author of the piece, Michael Paterniti, goes on to describe the October
day in 1956, when the gangly lad faced a future international master named Donald
Byrne, who was 26 and whose aggressive, no-draw style made him one of the country’s
most dangerous players. "Bobby had a habit of leaning over the board and
biting his nails nervously, which at first made his moves seem all the more
provisional, even touching... And then: what was this? The kid suddenly unveiled
an all-knowing Panzer division on attack. Four moves later, in what he himself
came to regard as one of the best chess moves of his career, Bobby offered the
strongest piece on the board — his queen — for a bishop. The audacity
of such a move, especially coming from a 13-year-old, seemed to signal the beginning
of something very unexpected to the world, and something terribly amiss for
Byrne."
Fischer in the memorable game against Byrne in 1956
On Bobby’s scorecard that day, it all looked so simple, so preordained.
When it was over, in his typically illegible hand, he scrawled “Mate”
(it looked like “Mute”) — and then put on his jacket and left
with his mom. In the next year he would win the U.S. championship, and the year
after that, become a grandmaster — a mindboggling, meteoric rise. He would
leave behind dozens of other crystalline scorecards, inventions of their particular
moments, scribbled with what appeared to be the word “Mute,” which
may be the best way to remember the man.
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