Word: chess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...squally night two years ago, just when it seemed that Bobby Fischer was finally going to board a jet for Reykjavik, Iceland, when it looked as if his match with Boris Spassky for the world chess championship might actually take place, all hell broke loose at Kennedy International Airport. This time the perpetrator was not a freaked-out Fischer but a small boy who discovered the skittish grand master hiding in an airport bar and led a charge of newsmen to the scene. Bobby bolted out the door, across a highway and vanished into the gloom. His handlers meanwhile, fending...
...more? Brad Darrach surely does, and so will the readers of his fast, funny account of the Great Airport Caper and other misadventures of the Brooklyn bad boy. Darrach, who became Fischer's confidant while covering his matches for LIFE, offers many new and intriguing facts about the "Chess Match of the Century." At one point in the hectic go, no-go negotiations, Darrach reports that despite diplomatic requests from such noted peacemakers as Henry Kissinger ("In short," Kissinger said later, "I told Fischer to get his butt over to Iceland"), Bobby, the exercise buff, refused to budge because...
Spassky also harbored some surprises. Though often pictured as the witty, urbane sportsman going against the Brooklyn brat, Boris was himself a spoiled chess darling. Depressed, out of shape, drinking too much and beset with marital problems in the months before the match, he was "less interested in winning the title," says Darrach, "than in pulling himself out of the worst emotional hole he had ever been...
Prophetic Dreams. The contestants had no monopoly on strangeness. Throughout the frantic days when it appeared that the match would be canceled, Gudmundur Thorarinsson comported himself with the kind of cool dignity befitting the president of the Icelandic Chess Federation and a Reykjavik city councilman. Except, that is, for that one moment when, by the light of the midnight sun, he assured some foreign friends that the match would take place because, based on consultations with a spiritualist, "prophetic dreams" and "certain powers" unique to his people, "I know a miracle will happen...
...Cambridge, and then, under the pseudonym V. Irisin, wrote in Russian a number of novels "of not altogether displeasing preciosity" while living in Paris as an exile. These books took such themes as a voyeur's cruel peep at blindness, a beheading, and the defenestration of a chess master. Vadim Vadimych emigrated to the U.S. and taught Russian literature at Quirn University. Transforming himself by an astounding feat of linguistic ability into a master of English, he began to turn out a second shelf of glittering novels, the most notorious of which, A Kingdom by the Sea, examined...