BOBBY FISCHER: THE WANDERING KING

Authors: Hans Bohm and Kees Jongkind

160 pages

Price: $19.95

B.T. Batsford Ltd. (2004)

 

Reviewed by Randy Bauer

Randy’s Rating: 7.5

 

Bobby Fischer is back in the news, and this is an interesting look at his checkered past coupled with the recognition of his brilliant contributions to chess. In general, I’ve had misgivings about many some books about Fischer, which tend to either gloss over his bad conduct or revel in it. Here, however, the authors have presented a fairly balanced portrait of a legendary chess genius with, unfortunately, more than his share of fatal flaws.

 

The genesis of the book was a documentary done by the sports division of the Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation. Author Jongkind was one of the principals on that project, and he enlisted the assistance of Dutch International Master Hans Bohm in completing the project. Bohm, who was in attendance for much of the 1972 Fischer-Spassky World Championship match, provides a useful first hand perspective of the events surrounding that historic match. 

 

The original television documentary, released in 2003, was 50 minutes, but the research necessary to put together a program of that length was significant. The depth of that earlier work shows throughout this book. Jongkind, in the book’s forward on the making of the documentary, details the many false leads, phone calls, emails, and trips to distant lands he and other members of the production crew made to hunt down information for the book. This was complicated by Fischer’s status as a recluse and the desire of those close to him to maintain his privacy.

 

The book provides a capsule view of Fischer’s entire life, but most of the material deals with the time from the 1972 World Championship match and beyond. Much of the discussion of this period is done through interviews with chess players who have had direct contact with Fischer during this period, including Anatoly Karpov, Jan Timman, Yasser Seirawan, and Zsofia Polgar. There are also interviews with other top players who have had contact with Fischer over the years, including Pal Benko, Victor Korchnoi, and Hans Ree.

 

The interviews provide some telling glimpses of Fischer as a legendary chess player and an erratic, troubled person. I was struck by Karpov’s discussion of their many attempts to play a match – his comment about the failed 1975 match (“I don’t want to claim that he was afraid of me: most probably he was afraid of himself”) is pretty insightful. We also learn a lot from Zsofia Polgar, who idolized Fischer as a player. Even though Fischer spent a lot of time at the Polgar household, what most would consider a minor issue (her giving a simultaneous exhibition in an American Club in Hungary) was elevated by Fischer into something that destroys their friendship. In the end, Polgar says she’s not even sure that she’s glad she met him.

 

There are also fascinating stories involving Timman and Seirawan’s contact with Fischer.  Of all the top players, Timman probably portrays Fischer in the most positive light.  Seirawan and his wife, Yvette, met Fischer first on the beach and later at his apartment during the Fischer-Spassky match in Yugoslavia.  In his interview, Seirawan presents a pretty balanced view of Fischer, noting, for example, that Fischer’s extreme distrust of Jews may have been influenced by a variety of early bad experiences with Jewish people.  On the other hand, Seirawan’s explanation of the discussion with Fischer sounds so comical on Bobby’s claims that the games amongst the top Soviet players were not only fixed but the moves themselves were determined before the fact that one can only conclude that Seirawan believes Bobby to be way off the mark.

 

Some of the more revealing content involves lesser-known chess (and non-chess) personalities. For example, Harry Sneider, a world champion weightlifter who doesn’t play chess befriended Fischer after meeting him in California in 1972. Sneider provides a lot of information about Fischer’s time in the Worldwide Church of God as well as the period around the second Spassky match. Sneider, who still keeps in contact with Fischer, expresses a common concern – he hopes doing the interview doesn’t damage their friendship.

 

The most detailed discussion is contained in an interview with Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, joint chief editor of New in Chess (NIC) magazine. During the second match with Spassky, Fischer asked NIC to provide all the games that Spassky had ever played.  Geuzendam was soon on his way to Yugoslavia and arrived just after the completion of the fifth game. 

 

Geuzendam provides an insightful commentary of the meeting where he provided the data to Fischer, explaining that things were “going well, until he saw that the pages weren’t numbered. The way in which he commented on that, with such a loud voice, made it clear to me that not all was well with this gentleman.  Torre said, like a father: ‘We can number them ourselves.’ That was a good plan. But where? At the bottom of the pages maybe? Problem solved. Fischer then suddenly asked: ‘With what color pen?’ It was then completely clear to me that he had become different. They finally decided to use a black pen.”

 

Geuzendam speaks of the disappointment of the meeting, where one of his idols is shown to be “clearly sick, who had arrived at a phase of his life that you do not wish anyone [to be in].” Geuzendam concludes the interview with his belief that Fischer “is a split personality, in which the angry side is gaining all the time.”

 

Besides the interviews and coverage of Fischer past and present, the book discusses a variety of other chess topics. Given the Dutch authors, it’s not surprising that they spend several pages on the relationship between Dutch former world champion Max Euwe. There is also a discussion of “who is the best chess player of all time,” a look at “what is genius?” and a brief look at computers and chess. The book closes with four pages on Fischer’s recent struggles to leave Japan, where he was detained by authorities because he did not have a valid U.S. passport. 

 

While I generally enjoyed the book and found it reasonably neutral in its approach to the subject, there are places where the book drifts, and the content is also somewhat disjointed. First, the interviewees are relating to Fischer at differing periods in his life, so the book jumps around quite a bit. Second, the authors sometimes get fixated on a specific topic, and it gets discussed and then rediscussed in multiple chapters. The issue of Fischer’s claims that the Soviets cheated in the Curaccao Candidates Tournament in 1962 is an example. The book covers this issue in multiple places with more or less the same discussion and interpretation of the events. It comes up in the book’s discussion of Fischer’s career, then is rehashed in interviews with Korchnoi, Benko, and Geuzendam, and after awhile you wish they would find something else to talk about. Finally, the book may greatly benefit from the front-page headlines discussing Fischer’s legal problems and his relocation to Iceland, but it does not cover those later developments. Players hoping for that discussion will have to wait.

 

In conclusion, BOBBY FISCHER: THE WANDERING KING is a well researched look at the life and times of Bobby Fischer, particularly the periods surrounding both matches with Boris Spassky. Interviews with many well known chess personalities provide much interesting content, but the book can be hard to follow in places and doesn’t cover the latest headline developments in Fischer’s legal problems in Japan that led to his relocation to Iceland.

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