AThe Morning News, Wilmington, Delaware, Saturday, January 11, 1958
14-Year-Old Champ
Chess may be a game for graybeards, but it's the young fellows who excel at it. The new United States champion is a 14-year-old Brooklyn schoolboy named Bobby Fischer.
To the best of our knowledge and belief, Bobby is the youngest person ever to win the national title; and we have never heard of any other country, now or in the past, with a champion that young. Most of the outstanding players of the past were impressive while they were still in short pants, but didn't win any really big championships until they were older.
The new champ replaces Samuel Reshevsky, who had been winning American championships so regularly that he seemed to have a permanent lease on the title. Sammy is a former child prodigy himself. Coming here from his native Poland as a small boy, he toured the country giving simultaneous exhibitions against scores of adults in various cities. Grown up, he became perennial national champion and an international grand master, who finished third in a tournament held to select a new world champion after the death of Alexander Alekhine a decade ago. But now he is pushing 50, which is rather old for a chess champion to retain his title. Tournament chess is a young man's game: surprisingly, it takes a lot of physical stamina.
Young Fischer, who deposed of Reshevsky this week, is a veteran who has been playing in tournaments for several years. Last year he won the U.S. Open title, but the Open is a less exalted event and Reshevsky was not entered. Now in the U.S. Championship Fischer has finished first, with a score of 9½-2½. The best Reshevsky could do was second, with 8½-3½.
Two losses late in the event were too much for the international grand master. He was defeated by William Lombardy, a youth who went abroad in 1957 to bring home the world junior championship, and by James T. Sherwin, another young fellow. Fischer, the eventual winner, only drew in his game with Reshevsky but did better against the other entrants.
With such good young American players developing, it begins to look as if Russia's grip on the world championship might not be so secure as it has appeared to be during the last decade.
