ATampa Bay Times St. Petersburg, Florida Thursday, October 28, 1971 - Page 18
He Deserves A Call
To the small but growing coterie of chess fanatics, the name of Bobby Fischer deserves a place in the Pantheon of great Americans. Fischer at the age of 28 has just won the semifinals of the world chess challengers tournament in Buenos Aires.
WITH TIGRAN Petrosian of the Soviet Union out of the way, Fischer will go into training for the showdown next March in which he will challenge world champion Boris Spassky, another Russian, for the world title. It has been a Soviet monopoly since 1948.
Chess players have been described as people who are “completely cloudy, completely blind — madmen of a certain quality.” Bobby Fischer's life style is sufficiently bizarre to meet this standard. He lives out of a succession of hotel rooms; goes to bed at 5 a.m.; dines often at the Automat in Manhattan on watermelon and tomato juice; and thinks about little but chess. Naturally, he is not married.
FISCHER DROPPED OUT of high school and never went to college, but there;s nothing wrong with his mind. Before tackling Petrosian, Fischer had won his last 19 games in matches against grandmasters. That's like hitting 19 home runs in 19 at bats.
George Bernard Shaw once called chess “a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something clever, when they are only wasting their time.” But not even Shaw's put-down can detract from the sublime quality of Fischer's chess victory over Petrosian. He deserves a phone call from the President.
