Word: chess
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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...
Darrach paints all his characters with rich strokes. Almost too rich, in fact. He describes one U.S. chess official as a "Huckleberry Babbitt," a man whose "pink scalp looks like a ham in mourning." Such vivid excesses might be well placed in a short treatment. But served in book-length bunches, the cumulative effect is a bit like overdosing on chocolate fudge...
...interpretations, most of them bad, Darrach grants him his due. As he notes, many of the seemingly outlandish demands Bobby has made over the years have not only been justified but have since been adopted as rules for tournament play. Al though he recently resigned his world title because chess officials rejected additional demands, Fischer has more than made good his own bold promise:"I'm gonna put chess...
Still, upon hearing of the book's publication, Fischer reportedly told his law yers to "get Darrach." Bobby, who for years shunned women in favor of his trusty chess board and Bible, will probably be most annoyed by a pair of revelations. First, that during off moments in Reykjavik he frequently took to the mineral baths with a pair of adoring young lovelies in bikinis. And second, that for six months thereafter, while secluded in a California compound run by the Worldwide Church of God, he not only dated but, at his request, was introduced to "vivacious" girls with...