Positivevibes420
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Re:Does anyone remember how they watched Fischer world championship? - 2006/08/14 17:41
It was a hot 1972 summer. I still lived in Ann Arbor (MI) but was about to move to Texas. This was about the end of the hippie movement but the hippy restaurant Marx on Williams, next to the University of Michigan campus didn`t go belly up yet, it still hosted chessplayers who played a lot of chess there while ordering next to nothing except for a chessboard and pieces supplied by the restaurant.
Summer vacation time in a small university town is lazy, sleepy. With my friend, USCF master dwb,
building, they would let us browse the endlessly unreeling teletype sheet, and we would filter
and Spassky`s moves. My friend was very unhappy when Fisher lost the first game, then it was 0:2. I had mixed feelings, I liked Spassky. The gloomy time was soon over, Fischer got a decisive advantage. then a long series, the longest ever, of draws followed with Spassky trying hard but getting nowhere.
At one time several of us were analyzing the consecutive adjourned position, where Spassky had an advantage. After listening for a while I had drawn my own conclusion and I tried to talk others into analyzing my suggestion. They wouldn`t listen. After my few attempts my another master strength friend, expert rr told me in a stern voice: Wlodek, masters are analyzing the game! Next day he called me home to tell me: on the behalf of chessplayers from Marx I apologize to you. -- It turned out that Spassky played my move. Byrn`s comment in NYT was: the only move which attempts to preserve the advantage. That`s all.
In those days we knew that Fischer was something of a difficult character but we had no idea that he was a racist. Even today I admire Fisher`s integrity as a chessplayer and artist, but all of it lost it`s meaning when combnined with racism.
Was he, is he the greatest chessplayer ever? No way. One of the greatest? Yes. He was lucky, like Karpov, to play when his own and the younger generation was not too strong. He had to overcome only the older generation. It was a formidable one, and Fischer, in a sharp contrast to Karpov, has achieved what he did cleanly, on his own, against the odds.
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Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
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