The debate was already raging when I joined the small group downtown, well-wishers of chess who enjoy discussing the literature of the game, and the people who play it. The question was: Who is the greatest chess player of all time?
I could not answer the question then and I cannot do so now. The argument is futile. Some would say Fischer, some would say Kasparov. Before Fischer, the last supermaster was Alekhine. Preceding him, in reverse order, were Capablanca, Lasker and Steintz, all world champions who comprised a magic circle of greatness. Players like Tal and Spassky have touched the perimeters of the circle and even entered it on occasion, but were never card-carrying members. Bobby Fischer is.
There is a mystique about Fischer which continues to fascinate people who are not even remotely connected to chess. No other chess player alive or dead has succeeded in capturing the imagination of people around the world like Fischer did.
He did more to popularise chess than any other player who has ever lived. His tantrums and inexplicable actions were front-page news wherever he went. Bobby Fischer the eccentric, the rebel against authority, the monomaniac, the enfant terrible, the ego-crushing titan of chess whose intransigence approached sublimity, the brilliant, temperamental, self-centred genius from Brooklyn who singlehandedly broke the Soviet hegemony on chess — he was already a legend before he even played for the World Championship.
US champion at 14; Grandmaster at 15, at the time the youngest in the history of the game; US champion eight times; winner of tournament after tournament; and, finally, chess champion of the world after beating Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, 1972. In his march to secure the World Championship title, Fischer lost five games,(one of them a forfeit because playing conditions did not suit him), out of sixty-five.
At the rigorous Interzonal tournament at Palma de Majorca, where the strongest Grandmasters in the world were present with the exception of the World Champion, Fischer crushed the opposition with 15 wins, seven draws and one loss–to Bent Larsen. Russia’s Yefim Geller was 3/
