As usual, Lothar Schmid started the clock. As usual, Fischer was late. The game opened with a Sicilian. On his second move, Fischer, black, played pawn to e6, yet another new line for him. Spassky was fueling himself with cup after cup of coffee. It may have been the surprise of Fischer’s seventh move—a pawn thrust tried before but considered somewhat dubious—that unsteadied the Russian’s hand, causing him to spill his drink. With his clock ticking, he went in search of a cloth. Fischer watched the cleanup operation as though his opponent were crazed.
The queens came off early, leaving Fischer with the advantage of two bishops against bishop and knight, but with the disadvantage of double isolated pawns. “[When] Fischer obtained an edge,” Spassky said later, “I felt everything was finished.” On move eighteen, the champion sacrificed a rook for a bishop and pawn in a reckless bid to create complications and perhaps winning prospects. Move thirty was the turning point. Rather than retrench, set up an impregnable fortress, and settle for a draw, Spassky pushed his knight pawn two squares to g4, allowing his opponent to create and exploit deadly weaknesses in white’s flailing defense. Fischer played out the ending with unremitting, nerveless accuracy.
Adjournment came at move forty-one. Spassky seemed exhausted. He invested only six minutes’ thinking time on his last move, which was then committed to paper and handed over to Schmid, who carefully sealed it in the adjournment envelope. Fischer signed the flap, a standard security check. Now the audience could relax and chat, and as they rose from their seats, the conversation was of who held the positional edge. Fischer had by now sacrificed back a pawn, so with his rook and two pawns against Spassky’s bishop and four pawns, the combatants were in theory evenly matched. But Spassky’s pieces were tied down, going nowhere. Meanwhile, Fischer’s rook’s pawn was “passed” (that is, it had a clear view to the eighth rank, with no opposition pawns on its file or the adjacent files). Every pawn has the potential to be reincarnated as a higher being, a more powerful piece, normally a queen, but a passed pawn is a particularly potent threat. And Fischer’s rook and king were well stationed to shepherd its advance.
Most amateurs would have rated the prospects for either side as about even. However, the experts realized Spassky’s struggle to retain the title was over; his doughty fight back had collapsed and the grandmasters were predicting a Fischer victory. In Moscow there was already an acceptance that their man had lost: the champion had told Geller that there was no point in fussing over the analysis. Spassky knew he had not sealed the best move.
The following day, there was an audience of 2,500 people, some of whom had arrived early to guarantee a good seat and all of whom had paid $5 in the expectation of witnessing an exciting denouement. Fischer bounded in late, looking confident but, surprising for one who normally took care to appear impeccable, dressed in a hastily selected and still unpressed blood-red suit. For a change, Spassky’s seat was the one empty.
Two hours earlier, at 12:50 P.M., the champion had put in a call to the arbiter Lothar Schmid. He officially informed Schmid of his resignation; he would not go to the adjourned session. Schmid had had to phone Euwe: Could he accept a resignation by telephone? Euwe ruled this was permissible. Fischer was not informed and might not have found out until later, had the Life photographer Harry Benson not bumped into Spassky at the Saga hotel as the now ex-champion was on his way out for a walk. There followed a flurry of calls. Benson rang Fischer, who rang Schmid, insisting that, if true, this resignation must be put in writing. Schmid wrote something out himself but said Fischer would still have to show up at the scheduled hour for the adjourned session.
The match was over.
This was no grand finale, no knockout punch sending the champion to the mat, no winning hit into the stand or breasting of the tape. There were no hats thrown into the air, no stamping or cheering. This was the way the crown passed, not with a bang but a formal announcement. Once Fischer had arrived, Schmid walked to the front of the stage and addressed the halclass="underline" “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Spassky has resigned by telephone.” Polite applause broke out around the room. The spectators had seen no action for their entrance fee, but they were witnesses to chess history. The new world champion gave a gawky wave but rejected Schmid’s proposal to take a bow. The Italian daily Corriere della Sera severely disapproved of Spassky’s nonappearance: “He missed the salute he deserved. But he no longer deserves it. One should fight until the end. It is the law of sport, and he has betrayed it.”
Icelandic government cars were parked in front of the hall alongside the U.S. ambassador’s car. Victor Jackovich was also waiting there.
It was all a ploy, because Fischer did not want to talk to anyone or be accosted by the press. So the plan was that he would come out of the side door and hop into my car—a pretty nondescript yellow and black Ford Maverick. I had been told, “Don’t stop for anybody. As soon as he gets in, just take off for the base.” So I drove him to the base, where he had a celebratory steak and a glass of milk, it was always a glass of milk. I don’t recall him being jubilant; he was a bundle of nerves, still high like a sportsman at the end of a game. It was the same Fischer I’d always taken to the base.
In victory, Fischer was at least magnanimous about his defeated opponent. Spassky was “the best player” he had met. “All the other players I’ve played crumpled at a certain point. I never felt that with Spassky.” President Nixon sent Fischer a telegram of congratulations. Spassky himself gave some interviews. He looked exhausted and said he needed to “sleep and sleep and sleep.”
The New York Times deployed Nietzschean rhetoric in their investigation of what they called “the aura of a killer.” “Basically the Fischer aura is the will to dominate, to humiliate, to take over an opponent’s mind.” It was uncanny, they pointed out, how players defeated by Fischer never fully recovered. A loss to another opponent could be excused away, put down to a bad day or a rare oversight. “But a loss to Fischer somehow diminishes a player. Part of him has been eaten, and he is that much less a whole man.” Fischer was guilty of serial “psychic murder.”
For their part, the Soviets were asking whether Fischer was guilty of other crimes.
20. EXTRA-CHESS MEANS AND HIDDEN HANDS
Sniff out, suck up, and survive.
It is striking how, to this day, some Soviet participants believe dirty tricks played a part in Spassky’s defeat.
On arrival in Iceland on 10 August, Larisa Spasskaia was conscious of the overwrought atmosphere in her husband’s suite on the seventh floor of the Saga hotel. With the wives of his team members, she had left Moscow at a time when a heavy brown haze covered the city from the heathland fire that had been steadily creeping toward the suburbs for more than a month, engulfing thousands of acres. It had reached to within fifteen miles of the suburbs and had taken the military as well as firefighters to control it. So dense was the smoke that their flight had been switched to the domestic airport, Vnukovo, because planes could not depart from the international airport at Sheremet’evo.