AThe Sydney Morning Herald Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Saturday, October 30, 1971 - Page 7
Chess Has Its Day from Derryn Hinch, “Herald” reporter in New York
FORGET BASEBALL, football, ice-hockey and all those other body-contact sports that Americans lust after at this time of year.
The sport that's occupying most of the headlines here is one involving two men sitting head-to-head across a table. There are no shoulder pads, no batting helmets, no home runs, no girls in short skirts and pom-poms acting as cheerleaders.
Just two men trying to humiliate each other with 32 carved ornaments on a chequered board.
The game of course is chess, the centuries-old version of non-physical warfare which — thanks to a young whiz kid from Brooklyn — has produced chess-mania in the United States.
The Brooklyn genius is Bobby Fischer, 28, who defeated the Russian grandmaster Tigran “Tiger” Petrosian (6½ to 2½) in Buenos Aires last week to win the right to challenge the world champion, Boris Spassky, next year.
Obviously it is an exaggeration to say that the daredevil Fischer popularized chess; there are an estimated 60 million chess buffs in the world.
But the young American has emerged as the Cassius Clay of the chess world — egotistical, supremely confident, colourful, and victorious.
Subsequently the progress of the young chess player — with the gaunt, fanatical dedication of Ralph Nader — became big news in America.
Instead of game results appearing in the chess columns they popped up on page one. As the battle for supremacy raged between the veteran Russian grandmaster and the young American, the story made the news bulletins on national television.
Never before, however, had the public been given so many details about two chess-players. We learned how Fischer always kept a glass of orange juice at his elbow, how his favourite mid-game snack was a grilled kidney sandwich, how he perpetually lounged in his swivel chair.
We discovered that when under pressure “Tiger” Petrosian would step behind a screen to sip coffee from a vacuum flask prepared by his wife, “a small round woman who watched her husband from the fourth row, which is actually the first row because of Fischer's request that the first three be kept empty.”
Sparked by Fischer's successful “Tiger Hunt” thousands of people are dusting off their chess-boards.
