Shelby Lyman on Chess: A Fateful Meeting
Sunday, April 26, 2015
(Published in print: Sunday, April 26, 2015)
In 1954, an American chess team suffered its second of three brutal postwar defeats at the hands of a group of Soviet players. The score was 20-12. Clearly, a powerful and unprecedented force had emerged in international chess.
Watching thoughtfully from the audience at the Hotel Roosevelt grand ballroom was a small 11-year-old boy taking the measure of the triumphant visitors in the tournament hall as he would later take their measure on the chessboard itself.
He was not a Sammy Reshevsky, Arnold Denker, Robert Byrne or a Larry Evans, bulwarks of the U.S. team seated at the chess tables before him, but a future incarnation with all their qualities, and more, combined.
A mighty pantheon of Soviet players, present and future, would be as unable to halt the American as had the ill-fated King Laius to deter the future patricide, his son Oedipus, or the colossus Goliath to stop the laughably smaller David.
Despite their best efforts, the Soviets would also flail and fail. Although they could not know it, their future and fate were sealed in the person of this small, hardly noticeable child, Robert James Fischer.
Full article here.