"I won’t play on Friday, but that’s just God’s law"

1968 – At the Kibbutz with Bobby

“I think I would be able to make a draw with God with white,” he said. “I play the Ruy Lopez and this will be so balanced that I won’t lose. Maybe if He’ll play the Sicilian it would be difficult… but no, I’ll play Bc4 and I’m better, so what can He do? Unless He would use tricks, like clouding your mind…”

Obviously all this was said in jest and God was used as a metaphor for perfect play. Nevertheless, to say that as white you wouldn’t lose against perfect play is quite a strong statement too.

I consider it my luck that I met Bobby Fischer when he was probably more relaxed than at any other event of his chess career. It was in 1968 at the tournament in Netanya, a coastal town in Israel. For me the tournament was strong enough, but for Bobby it was far below his standards, without any other top player being present. Eventually he was to win it with 11½ points out of 13 games, 3½ points ahead of Abe Yanofsky and Moshe Czerniak, who shared second place.

…
He spoke a lot about crime in the U.S., lawlessness and riots in the streets. He read the crime magazines, with true stories about violence and murder. “They all made a mistake,” he said about the victims. In his apartment in Brooklyn he had two alarm systems installed, one for the door and one for the window. I found that excessive then, but in retrospect it just seems a sensible precaution.

We talked about American politics, as there would be a presidential election that year. Who would he vote for? For nobody, he said. They were all crooks. Among this bunch he thought that George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, was probably the most honest. My own favorite was Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic candidate who wanted to end the war in Vietnam.

Bobby found McCarthy ridiculous and he said it was unthinkable that a man like him would ever be president of the U.S. Right he was.

His political views were radical already, but the opposite way of what they would become later. He said that the U.S. should put an ultimatum to North Vietnam and threaten to throw an atom bomb on Hanoi, where the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was living himself, as now Ho just didn’t care how many peasants were dying.

But what if they refused to bow to this ultimatum, I asked. “They won’t, but if so, we’ll have to do it,” he said, obviously deploring this sad turn of events.

I had read that Bobby’s interests were limited to chess, but this was certainly not true. He knew a lot about American underground literature and even more about American popular music. Almost all the songs of Aretha Franklin he knew by heart and during one of our walks he gave an amusing imitation of the Four Tops, a popular Motown group at the time.

He was an avid magazine reader, mentioning Mad, Newsweek, Playboy and Time, and was especially interested in the evangelist Billy Graham and the World Wide Church of God, a sect that many years later would lay its hand on a large part of Bobby’s money. I asked him if he belonged to a religious group, but this he denied. “I won’t play on Friday, but that’s just God’s law.”

Despite his pugnacious views about the Vietnam War, Bobby Fischer was quite critical of American life. He found that in Israel and in Europe everyone was interested in chess, while the U.S. was only interested in money. He thought the country had become a jungle. A kibbutz, like in Israel, based on cooperation, would be considered a joke in the U.S, he thought. “The country is going to hell, with crime and pornography everywhere. The only good thing is the money. For the time being I’ll stay in Europe. I think I belong to the world.”

At the kibbutz we played some blitz. In our tournament game I had collapsed as soon as Bobby had uncorked an opening novelty. Playing blitz I hoped for… well, not really revenge, but maybe one draw out of a series of games, was that too much? But no way. After a while he wanted to give me knight odds. I protested, but I had to oblige. That game he won also, and then he refused to go on. “No challenge,” he said.

“Fischer is Fischer, but a knight is a knight,” said Mikhail Tal when Bobby had claimed that he could give knight odds to any woman player. But for me, a knight was not enough.

Afterwards we were looking at the games from the recent Candidates matches, Tal-Gligoric and Kortchnoi-Reshevsky. About the latter match I could contribute some insights, as it had been played in Amsterdam and Dutch masters had been analysing the games. Our days at Bernstein’s kibbutz were pleasant and I’ll always remember the sight of Bobby embracing a horse and whispering sweet little words into its ears.

NY Times 1992 – Fischer and Spassky Ready to Play Chess Not Far From a War