Chess moved out of dilapidated back rooms to become part of consumer and commercial society. Advertisers and marketing managers called on it as a brand image to add allure to their products. To anyone wanting to identify the match as one between two political systems, the gleeful speed with which capitalist America responded to the business possibilities of the game should have been proof enough.
In New York, just up the road from the UN, the Metropolitan Museum put on an exhibition of chess pieces collected from all around the world. Department stores like Macy’s placed full-page advertisements in the press for chess courses as well as for chess books. Chess was now in fashion—and, like glamorous models, could be used to sell. An upmarket men’s clothing store encouraged custom with a picture of a board and the slogan YOUR MOVE, GENTLEMEN. The Dime Savings Bank also had a chessboard in its advertisement, this time with the slogan SMART SAVERS MAKE THEIR MOVE TO THE DIME. A sports shop used a picture of chess sets with the headline NOW IT’S AN AMERICAN SPORT!
And it was. With the transformation in the visibility and appeal of chess, there was a sudden thirst for information on the game—articles appeared on other grandmasters, on former world champions, on chess terminology. There was a bonanza in the sale of chess sets; in Britain, shops sold out of traditional wood sets, and plastic sets had to be imported from abroad. Booksellers reported with astonishment that chess books, once the slowest-selling items in their stores, were now leaving their shelves faster than romantic fiction.
Across the United States, during lunch breaks and after work, boards would be set up in public squares. The chess epidemic infected all generations and classes: the old played the young, business suits looked across the board at blue collars. An article appeared about two construction workers who had played each lunch break since the Fischer-Spassky match began. A photo shows them concentrating on the game, still wearing their hard hats. African Americans took up the game in increasing numbers—a lasting legacy of Reykjavik. Kibitzing decamped from the obscure club to the park bench: “Come on, patzer, even Fischer would resign in your position.”
In bars and saloons, people who barely knew the moves began to place bets on the outcome of the Reykjavik games. The bookmakers Ladbrokes of London established official betting odds, with Fischer as favorite at six to four. In Atlanta, the owner of a basement snack bar, Anita Chess, discovered that misled chess fanatics were swamping her café, the Chessboard. A composer of politically inspired songs, Joe Glazer, found he had caught the mood with his seven-minute paean to Robert Fischer. The lyrics, composed well before Reykjavik, opened presciently enough:
Inevitably, chess metaphors spilled into other items in the news, most particularly into politics. In The New York Times, an opinion piece by Tom Wicker described President Nixon’s decision to choose Spiro Agnew as his vice presidential running mate in the forthcoming election as a sort of “king’s pawn opening.” Why a “king’s pawn opening” as opposed to a “queen’s” or “queen’s bishop’s pawn” was unclear and unexplained.
Predictably, diplomatic correspondents called on chess to describe negotiations between Washington and Moscow. One such article satirized the recent superpower summit, imagining it as a chess contest between Bobby Nixon and Boris Brezhnev. Far from shunning publicity, à la Fischer, Nixon courted it. “Nixon has insisted from the start that the match be held in as large a place as possible, that television cameras be turned on and kept on well before and after each game, that either he or his second be interviewed daily, and that all games be scheduled between 8 P.M. and 11 P.M., Los Angeles time….”
In Britain, a broadsheet daily The Guardian wrote, “Getting President Nixon and Mr Brezhnev together [in May 1972] was child’s play compared with the Fischer-Spassky chess summit.” The editorial assumption was that readers on both sides of the Atlantic had followed the chess drama. “Mugs sell mags” is the rule, and the tall, besuited genius made a compelling picture, while his personality and behavior could be relied on for a peg or angle to hook the reader.
The press attention given to the match was all the more surprising in the light of the competition for space.
Most important, there was Vietnam. As Kissinger shuttled between Washington, Saigon, and Paris in search of a peace agreement, Nixon pledged that there would be no letup in the bombing of North Vietnam without substantial progress in the negotiations, though he continued to withdraw American troops. Meanwhile, jury selection had begun for the trial of Daniel Ellsberg on charges of conspiracy, theft, and espionage of the top-secret Pentagon Papers, the seven-thousand-page study of America’s involvement with Vietnam.
The conflict in Southeast Asia was not the only fissile issue preoccupying the president: the election was looming. At 2:30 A.M. on 17 June of that year (Iceland’s Independence Day), five burglars wearing rubber surgical gloves had been arrested at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex. The police found they were carrying electronic eavesdropping equipment, cameras for photographing documents, walkie-talkies, and large sums in consecutively numbered $100 bills. As the match went on, two young journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were on the trail, their articles slowly forcing their way from the inside to the front pages.
Nixon was already involved in attempts to conceal the White House’s role in the break-in and continued to be at the center of the cover-up as summer turned into autumn and his thoughts were occupied with preparations for the Republican convention in late August (he was renominated by 1,347 votes to 1). The Watergate film All the President’s Men has the radio reporting Fischer’s forfeiture of game two as Woodward finds his first message from the secret source “Deep Throat” hidden in his breakfast New York Times. With the growing involvement of Congress and the courts and daily fresh evidence from the press, as the match ground on, Nixon became engaged in his own desperate game of chess, making move after move to save his presidential skin.
Chile was the scene of increasing anarchy (fueled, as we know now, by the United States) under the divisive and ultimately doomed government of the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende.
In Northern Ireland, it was a summer of dreadful riots, paramilitary killings, and bombings. The psychopathic ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, expelled the country’s fifty thousand Asian citizens on 5 August, accusing them of “sabotaging the country”—in fact, the Asian community was at the heart of Uganda’s business and commerce, as the country discovered to its cost after the expellees had grudgingly been given refuge in Britain by the Conservative government.
Readers seeking relief could turn to the sporting pages. Billie Jean King beat Evonne Goolagong in the Wimbledon women’s final, while Stan Smith defeated Ilie Nastase in the men’s. In golf, Lee Trevino won the British Open, and Belgian cyclist Eddie Merckx took the Tour de France for the fourth time. And as the chess match was drawing to a close, attention was shifting to Munich and the Olympics: Soviet hearts would beat faster when tiny Olga Korbut rippled her way to gymnastic gold. Among other American triumphs, Mark Spitz would capture seven swimming gold medals.
Munich would be remembered for the spilling of blood. A few days after the closing ceremony in Reykjavik, the Black September Palestinian terrorist group took eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage and then murdered them.