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                                                                                CHESS, Page 49

Return of the Prodigy


A chess bonanza attracts the near mythic but still callow Bobby
Fischer

By PAUL GRAY


    Any sentence that contains both "Bobby Fischer" and
"controversial" should probably be written off as redundant.
Still, chess fans and interested civilians woke up last week to
reminders of what they have, or have not, been missing during
the 20 years that Fischer has spent in mysterious seclusion.
Bobby was b-a-a-a-ck! and being -- well, some strong synonym of
controversial.

    The flap centered on a marriage made not in heaven but in
Yugoslavia. A Belgrade millionaire named Jezdimir Vasiljevic put
up $5 million in prize money, with two-thirds going to the
winner, to lure Fischer, 49, into playing chess against his old
rival Boris Spassky, 55. The venues? Sveti Stevan, a resort town
on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast, and then Belgrade.
Theoretically, the new matches would rivet widespread, upbeat
attention on Yugoslavia through a reprise of the epochal
Fischer-Spassky collision in Reykjavik, Iceland, during the
summer of 1972; back then, against the backdrop of the cold war,
the brash, brooding, raptorial American defeated the defending
champion from the Soviet Union and won the world title. Three
years later, Fischer was stripped of his crown for refusing to
play Soviet challenger Anatoly Karpov.

    Attention was piqued, sure enough, when the principals
agreed to meet again, but not necessarily by the anticipated
quality of the chess. As was true the first time around with
Fischer-Spassky, politics preceded play, only now the issues
were different. The cold war is over, the U.S.S.R. no longer
exists and neither, for that matter, do large swatches of the
host country. What remains of Yugoslavia happens at the moment
to be a renegade in the eyes of international law; it is under
U.N.-approved economic sanctions for failing to curb Serb
aggression and "ethnic cleansing" in the breakaway republics of
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Is it seemly, some asked, for
Fischer and Spassky to play in a multimillion-dollar chess
exhibition 50 to 70 miles from where civilians are being bombed
and shot down in the streets?

    More to the point, both players' participation in this
extravaganza could subject them to legal consequences for
violating U.N. sanctions. Spassky, now a French citizen, is
apparently not in any trouble with his government. But the U.S.
has warned Fischer that he is putting himself at risk for up to
10 years in jail and $250,000 in fines. At a bizarre news
conference in Sveti Stevan the day before play began, Fischer
responded to a written question about his legal liabilities by
1) pulling a letter out of his briefcase, 2) reading a sentence
aloud: "This is the order to provide information and cease and
desist activities from the Department of Treasury, Washington,
D.C., August 21, 1992," 3) spitting noisily on the document and
4) commenting, "This is my reply to the order not to defend my
title here."

    This performance showed that Fischer is still capable of
all the boorishness that mesmerized his friends and enemies two
decades ago. If anything, he has grown even more offensive.
Rumors have circulated for years that Fischer had grown
virulently anti-Semitic; his mother, from whom he has been
estranged in the past, is Jewish. So up he pops while the world
watches, defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism on
a technicality (``I am definitely not anti-Arab, O.K.?") while
castigating Zionism, berating the U.N. and accusing Karpov and
Gary Kasparov, the current chess world champion, of fixing title
matches during the 1980s.

    Fischer, the eternally callow prodigy, has been forgiven
much in the past thanks to the splendors of his chess; at his
peak he was, many experts believe, the greatest player ever.
So, apart from speculations about whether he will wind up in
some federal slammer, spitting on the guards, the big question
as the games in Yugoslavia began was, How good is Bobby now?

    An answer will take a while to develop. Fischer's
first-round victory -- Spassky resigned after making his 49th
move -- displayed some tentativeness coupled with sound,
patient, relentless strategy; there was nothing particularly
brilliant about Fischer's game, but nothing reckless or stupid
either. The rules of this exhibition -- adapted to Fischer's
specifications -- seem to reward circumspect strategy, since the
prospect of saving a risky mistake by playing to draw afterward
has been rendered unprofitable. When Fischer and Spassky met in
1972, draws gave each player one-half point toward the victory
total. This time, ties do not count, and the winner will be the
first to pick off 10 victories. Should the combatants reach a
9-9 tie, the prize money will be divided equally.

    All of which could add up to a very long haul for
Fischer-Spassky II, especially if unavoidable draws -- the
outcome of the second game, a seven-hour marathon --
proliferate, delaying the accumulation of wins. The prospect of
two weary, middle-aged former world champions going after each
other in frozen Belgrade next January is not very appealing. It
was clear at the outset that this rematch would not be a case
of deja vu all over again; what remains to be seen is whether
history will repeat itself as farce.