ASt. Louis Post-Dispatch St. Louis, Missouri Wednesday, January 22, 1958
Boy Chess Champ From Brooklyn
BROOKLYN, N.Y. Jan 22.
Bobby Fischer is a 14-year-old boy living in Brooklyn.
He is also chess champion of the United States and qualified, with famed Samuel Reshevsky, to represent the United States in the world championship interzonal tournament to be held in Europe next year.
Chess is associated in the public mind with two old codgers facing each other over the board, their equally stolid expressions broken only by Van Dyke beards and curving pipes.
Master Fischer is beardless—no oddity at his age—and doesn't smoke. But he can play chess. Early in the fall of 1957 Bobby upset more than 200 of the country's top-ranking players to win the United States open chess championship. Then earlier this month he capped his growing list of honors and became the United States champion, winning the Lessing J. Rosenwald trophy at the Manhattan Chess Club of New York.
His brilliant play has won him the title of master, leading some wits to dub him Master Master Fischer. Learning the rudiments of the game from his sister Joan when he was six years old, Bobby spent the next seven years studying the game, playing with friends, and poking through foreign language chess books to absorb the moves of classic games. Two years ago he entered his first big tournament, the United States junior championship, and won in a breeze.
Not only in actual triumphs but in manner of play has Bobby earned the plaudits of the chess world, one of his victories bringing from the “Chess Review” the description as “The game of the century.”
The great concentration he shows in tournaments—at which he once used to burst into tears when he lost—is in sharp contrast to his restlessness in his high school classroom.
Told that Bobby sat for five hours at a chess tournament, one of his school teachers gasped, “In my class, Bobby couldn't sit still for five minutes.”
Said to be of generally superior intelligence by school authorities, Bobby is no better than an average student. His wakeful moments are for chess.
The problems of this sport are his problems, during meals, while watching television and at his bedside where there is a permanent chess board with pieces arranged.
Although these chess triumphs of her teen-age son are sources of pride to Mrs. Regina Fischer, she is not a forth-right adherent of the value of her son's single mindedness on the subject.
“For four years,” she told one interviewer, “I tried everything I knew to discourage him. But it was hopeless.”
During his summer vacations, Bobby is to be found nightly at his “favorite hangout,” she continued, and “sometimes I have to go over there at midnight to haul him out of the place.”
The hangout: the ancient and dignified Manhattan Chess Club, “hangout” of numerous champions and chess masters.
Among the club's membership is international grand master Samuel Reshevsky, considered perhaps the finest player in the western world. But, in the recent tournament, the youngest American ever to be awarded the title of chess master, Bobby Fischer, edged grand master Reshevsky, with a score of 10½-2½ to 9½-3½.
The New York Herald Tribune Post-Dispatch Special Dispatch.
