Return of The Prodigy

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.