APittsburgh Sun-Telegraph Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Saturday, January 04, 1958
World of Chess - 14-Year-Old Leads N.Y. Tournament
Grandmaster Robert Fischer leads with 7½ points in the U.S. Championship Tourney at New York.
The 14-year-old savant extracted a draw from the adjourned game with Reshevsky, a Sicilian. He has draws with Herbert Seidman and Hans Berliner. His other six games were wins.
There seems to be no accounting for the phenomenal skill, patience, exactitude and self-confidence of the youngster. In the present standing he is ahead of the best America can produce in chess talent — men like Reshevsky, Lombardy, Sherwin, Bisguier, Denker and Kramer.
Indeed, he has had no bad showing in the many matches he has entered in his brief career. Every master has an “off” season, a tourney in which he cannot get a “purchase” as witness Larry Evans in the recent Dallas International where he recorded a last place.
The Brooklyn grandmaster is adept in the openings; imaginative, resourceful and resolute in the middle game, and an artist of precision in the codas. How, we wonder, does all this success against the best of the Western Hemisphere effect Fischer's personality?
In what, if any esteem, does he hold the general run of adults that a child encounters such as parents, teachers, policemen, tradesmen and clergymen? Does he regard himself as a superior being or does he feel that he is just normal, with the misfortune to be born into a world of knuckleheads.
To people unfamiliar with the meaning of mastership in chess, the immense stature of Robert Fischer cannot have true significance. We cannot find a basis of comparison, with the possible exception of Wolfgang Mozart.
