Bobby Fischer and the Match of the Century

On Tuesday July 4th, 1972, a young American flew into the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. He was several days behind schedule, and only just in time to ensure that his journey was not wasted altogether. His name was Bobby Fischer, his business was the game of chess, and he had come to challenge Russia's Boris Spassky for the world championship. With America hopelessly mired in Vietnam, Richard Nixon was in the White House, Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin, and the world's finest athletes were gearing up for the Munich Olympics. And in the US capital just three weeks previously, five men had been charged with breaking into the Democratic Party's Watergate headquarters.

Yet the eyes of the world were not on Washington or Munich or Moscow or Saigon; the eyes of the world were on Reykjavik. Iceland was not used to such attention, and neither was chess-except perhaps in the Soviet Union, where it was a way of life - but the press were already calling the confrontation between Fischer and Spassky the match of the century. Just weeks previously, few Americans could even have named the world chess champion, but all that had changed. It had changed because of the extraordinary achievements of 29-year-old Bobby Fischer. That an American should contest the world chess championship, a Soviet possession for a generation, made the contest part of the Cold War. And Bobby Fischer was a phenomenon. Six months short of his sixteenth birthday, he had become the youngest ever grandmaster, and en route to his championship challenge, he had simply destroyed the rest of the field. Although Spassky was champion, few gave him much chance against a man already considered by many to be the strongest player the world had seen.

But no one re aches the pinnacle of world chess without being something special, and Boris Spassky, six years older than Fischer at 35, was a brilliant all-round player. He was also the only opponent whom Bobby Fischer had never defeated.