Cathy Forbes |
||
|
From
Chess Monthly, August 1993: Q:
Who and what are you, exactly? F:
I'm basically a chess journalist,
but my interests and activities vary. A former boyfriend, whom I met in
the
Labour Party, said I was a serious member of the Dillettante Tendency
[weak pun
on 'Militant Tendency', a Trotskyite faction purged from the Party in
the 1980s
-MA]. One of my most cherished long-term goals is to become a famous
popsinger,
to which end I devote hours of painstaking practice in karaoke bars,
showers and
bathtubs, when not working on my autobiography, Chess Isn't My Life. Q:
Do you PLAY chess? F:
Not very often and usually not
very well [she's a WIM]. Chess is a very difficult game you know. Q:
Is it true you played chess with
Bobby Fischer? F:
Yes, but again, I didn't really
play well. I blundered after 27 moves. But at least I lasted longer
than Spassky
in Game 9 of the comeback match. Q:
How did you get to play Fischer? F:
Simple. I just took a taxi to
Heathrow, a plane to Budapest, a taxi to Budapest station, a train from
Budapest
to Belgrade, then a train from Belgrade to Titograd, where I was
arrested for
filming the journey; then, having bribed my way out of the police
station, I
arrived in Sveti Stefan for the half-time press conference and wrote
out three
questions on the usual form for Mr. Robert Fischer. The third was "may
I
play a game of chess with you?" Q:
The oldest line in the book? F:
I didn't think of it that way. It
wasn't so much a case of "I wanna be Bobby's Girl!" I mean, I didn't
know the guy. "I wanna be Bobby's opponent!" seemed more appropriate
at that stage of acquaintance. Q:
Were you nervous making such a
cheeky request? F:
It was a tough decision to put
that queston in. Brave, one journalist called it. But I thought, after
a room
full of soldiers and Kalashnikov's, who's afraid of Bobbby Fischer? And
yet,
there I was, shaking in my shoes. He read it out, asked my rating [
2120 ], and
said he'd think about it. The following evening, at the closing party
marking
the end of the first half of the match, he sent over his 'Bobbyguard',
a guy
called Nejsa, who said "Bobby wants to talk to you." I came over to
his table and he said "We'll play a game, just quickly." I thought,
"where? I don't see a set, clock etc." and then I realised he was
indicating his own pocket set. Q:
What was it like to play him? F:
Well, he played his moves
instantly, just casually flicking pieces forward with his fingertips,
but I
didn't follow suit because I just couldn't play at that pace. I wanted
to
concentrate and put up a respectable fight. He spoke to me for the
first few
moves, asking general questions about me and my work, chess in England,
etc.,
but I can't remember exactly what he said because I was trying so hard
to make
sensible moves. This was particularly tough because not only am I
unused to
pocket sets, I was also half-pissed on Montenegrin brandy. Not that I'm
making
excuses, of course. Fischer may be past his peak, but he really is
rather good,
you know! Q:
What was your impression of
Fischer as a person? F:
From the two months I spent
observing him in Yugoslavia I could go and on about him, and I will,
because he
is uniquely fascinating. As everyone says, some with idolatrous wonder,
he is a
genius. All too often this word genius is cheaply bandied about, but
Fischer is
the genuine article, an intellectual extreme. Not hot-housed precocity,
but
extraordinary mental capacity and competitive drive. Prior to meeting
him I'd
read mostly of his weirdness, but much of what is written about Bobby
is
caricature and stereotype, not capturing his complexity. Personally, I
found it
hard to sustain a conversation with him, which was probably something
to do with
my profession. Bobby doesn't like being interviewed and he is
abnormally
sensitive to criticism. His distrust of journalists is so evident that
I had to
smother an irrational sense of guilt in order to write about him, i.e.
to do my
job. Bobby can behave 'normally' when he wants to. He can dance, laugh,
joke and
be friendly. But his behaviour is not consistent; he has highs and lows
like
everyone else, complicated by his unique status as the Messiah of
chess. In
Yugoslavia he was treated more like a head of State. He had more
bodyguards than
President Clinton. They love chess and Bobby there, and he liked that.
His ego,
the tender plant from which the flower of his talent grows, needs that
kind of
sunshine. Fischer is a fistful of
contradictions. Super-efficient data input, muddled data processing.
Informed
but intolerant. Logical but unreasonable. Defiant but frightened.
Lonely but so
fearful of being exploited that he remains both lonely and exploited.
'Protecting' him from the outside world were some of the most
unpleasant
psychopaths I've ever encountered, in a country that is now, sadly, a
trigger-happy psychopath's paradise. A brief psychological pen-picture
of
Fischer goes something like this: a brilliant 50-year-old adolescent. Q:
What about the match sponsor,
Jezdimir Vasiljevic? A:
Well, he surrounded himself with
thugs, and you can judge people by the company they keep. Like many
Serbian men
with a machismo problem, Boss Jezda's idea of impressing a girl is to
show her
the gun in his trousers. He told me it was an Uzi pistol. A real
charmer. As a
businessman, he was rather more original. He suddenly came from
nowhere, chucked
millions of dollars of uncertain origin all over the place, tempted
investors
with impossible rates of interest, and then vanished, as did his
depositors'
cash. I must say the collapse of Vasiljevic's bank and his sudden
emigration to
Israel came as no suprise to me, except that Israel let him in. What
really did
suprise me was how keen Campomanes was to do business with him. FIDE
funded by
Jugoskandic would have been a worse scandal than the Conservative Party
sponsored by Asil Nadir. Q:
Did you have any romance with
Fischer? F: I am often asked this and I hate to disappoint, but the truth is that I just wasn't his type. He was a handsome youth, he's not bad-looking for his age, and I read that Bobby once liked "vivacious girls with big breasts." On that basis I should at least have been in with a chance, but all he asked me for was a copy of The Polgar Sisters. From
Chess Monthly, August 1993 |