The Battle of the Brains

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by winning the world title from Petrosian. "I never thought about making chess my life," he says. "It came suddenly upon me, and now the chess figures are like my relatives. I know the peculiarities of each one, but I do become discouraged when I see too much of them." For all his outward cool today, Spassky, like Fischer, was an intense, flashy competitor while he was on the way up. When he blundered away his advantage and lost one game in 1958, he wept openly. "You will understand Spassky better," says one friend, "if you know that his favorite writer is Dostoevsky."

Dostoevsky never had it so good.

Awarded the Soviet Badge of Honor and a medal For Valiant Labor, Spassky lives in a modern Moscow high-rise with his second wife Larisa, who is an engineer, and their son. Of his first wife he says: "We were like bishops of opposite color." His $500 monthly income from exhibition matches and as chess coach of Locomotiv, a railway-union sports club, is one of the highest in the Soviet Union. Despite these rewards, Spassky has refused to join the Communist Party. "If Boris were a writer or a composer," says one grand master from an Iron Curtain country, "he'd be in jail for anti-Soviet thinking. He is a freethinking man in many ways." Some of his freest thoughts are about chess. "I would be the happiest man alive if I were no longer world champion," says Boris. "Since I won the title my whole life has—well—stiffened. I like to play chess for fun and not fame, and my idea of a pleasant evening is to share some wine with friends and play chess."

Fischer's idea of a big evening is secluding himself in a hotel room and —slam! crash! chop!—working out a new king's side attack. He always requests a room without a view lest he be distracted from the game. If he ventures out, he always takes his trusty leather pocket set with him. On elevators, in taxis, between dinner courses—he is always at it, busily fiddling away like some old crone at her knitting. "Why should I bother with anything else?" he asks. "Chess is my profession, isn't it?"

20-to-1. Bobby Fischer is an American primitive. He has no home. He lives out of two enormous plastic suitcases and a couple of shopping bags crammed with transistor radios and chess periodicals in eight languages (English, Russian, Dutch, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, French). The radios are for digging the latest Motown sounds. The literature is for those little off moments. Like the time after his victory over Larsen in Denver, when some chess buffs dragged the two players off to a nightclub featuring operatic singing. While the performers trilled and boomed, Fischer sat buried in a chess book, oblivious to all else. "I don't mix well," he says.

When he walks, he gallops. When he eats, he gobbles down two and three full-course meals at a sitting. He wears suits made for him by a tailor in Zagreb, Yugoslavia; all dressed up, he is the picture of a Russian Deputy Minister of Power and Electricity. Bachelor Bobby does not have time for dating. He once said that when God gets ready, he will drop a girl in his lap. Most often, he rises late in a day that almost invariably ends with chess, chess, chess until dawn. Then he dozes off to the soothing swoosh of an