Unknown ... or Unnecessary? by Taylor Kingston The Unknown Bobby Fischer, by John Donaldson and Eric Tangborn, 1999 International Chess Enterprises, Figurine Algebraic Notation, Softcover, 191 pp., $18.95. I recall that after the great guitarist Jimi Hendrix died in 1971, it seemed that Hendrix albums started coming out faster than they had while he was alive. Knowing anything with "Hendrix" on it would sell, his record company scraped up every performance they could find, good, bad or indifferent, and put it on vinyl. I'm not sure, but the posthumous Hendrix discography may have more titles than he released while alive. It's somewhat the same with Bobby Fischer. Though he's not dead, his self-imposed retirements have prompted all manner of chess writers to fill a perceived void with all manner of Fischer- related material of highly variable quality. The authors of The Unknown Bobby Fischer acknowledge this when they survey some of this large, uneven genre and conclude "Bobby Fischer has had more books written about him than about any other player in the history of chess." Quite likely true, and a reasonable corollary is that one should hesitate to add another book to the Fischer pile unless it supplies new and worthwhile information about him. This title inspired hope that it might resemble The Unknown Capablanca (by Hooper and Brandreth, 1975), but that proved unfounded. Instead of a well-written work shedding new light on an important chess figure, we are given an uneven pastiche, practically a jumbled scrapbook, of which maybe half is new in any meaningful way, but rather less is worthwhile. In choosing material, the authors apparently had a very broad definition of "unknown." While the term obviously is not meant literally, it does seem reasonable to expect that the great preponderance of the book would consist of little-known games, stories, and other material that has not seen national publication in America. Certainly off-hand games circa 1953-55 by the then class-B-strength Fischer qualify (on grounds of obscurity if not quality), but can a 1963 Fischer game, annotated by both him and Paul Keres, and published in both the American Chess Life and the British magazine Chess, reasonably be considered "unknown"? Or the oft-quoted all-time-top-10 list Fischer wrote for Chessworld in 1964? Or a game from Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games? Or a 1974 letter published in GM Larry Evans' national column? Or an excerpt taken verbatim from the well-known book No Regrets (ICE, 1992)? And what of the ten- page segment on the 1954 USA-USSR team match? This features such decidedly not unknown material as the famous game Taimanov-Evans, and its only connection to Fischer (age eleven at the time) is that he was sometimes a spectator. The two longest chapters deal mostly with Fischer simuls circa 1960-64. While the term "unknown" applies fairly well to this material, so does the term "uninteresting". The local journalists' and spectators' accounts are numbingly alike, and the games are rarely worthwhile. Among simul scoresheets, those that survive longer than one evening tend to be the upsets, by definition the GM's poorer games. A notable exception was a 1964 exhibition in Wichita, Kansas, from which 18 of the 40 games have survived, including this flashy brilliancy (See Diagram): 15 Ncxd5! exd5 16 Nxd5 Qd8 17 Nf6+ Ke7 18 d5 Nxe5 19 Re1 Kf7 20 Rxe5 Nd7 21 Qxh7+ (one of several winning moves; also good were 21 Re8, or 21 Nxd7 followed by 22 d6! intending 23 Bc4+) 21...Rxh7 22 Rxh7+ Kf8 23 Rh8+ Kf7 24 Rxd8 Nxe5 and 1-0, 34 (Fischer-Self, simul, Wichita, 1964). However, there aren't enough such games in Unknown. More typically, we see something like this (See Diagram): 24 Bxc7?? Rxb7! 25 Qxb7 Bd5, 0-1 (Fischer-Carbonell, simul, Houston, 1964). If you enjoy seeing a great player make that kind of blunder, then you may be willing to pay for this sort of thing; I would not be. Speaking of blunders, the introduction to one of the simuls, in New Orleans, has a curious error, that "During the period 1917 to 1937, [Andrew] Lockett was the dominant player in [Louisiana]." At least for the period around 1922-26, surely that distinction belonged to Carlos Torre. Do not expect great writing. Some of the articles have been salvaged from small regional and club newsletters, and feature such deathless prose as "We are the Pioneers For the most animation. First here, First there, First most everywhere, We are ready, up and forward! Let's schusse! Log Cabineers!!!". As far as they concern the early Fischer, these often resemble the sort of article one finds in teeny-bopper magazines ("The Backstreet Boys' Favorite Colors!"), e.g. "Bobby chews gum continuously, is a Dodger fan, likes Elvis Presley ..." etc. Now and then there surfaces an interesting anecdote revealing something of Fischer as a person or chess player. For example, one indicates that Fischer's ill-fated interest in a certain religious sect may have begun with his learning of it from a postal opponent during his brief flirtation with correspondence play around 1955-56. In another, the uncanny power of Fischer's memory is described by GM Yevgeny Vasiukov, one of many strong Soviet players with whom Fischer played numerous blitz games during a visit to Moscow in 1958. Meeting Fischer again in 1971, Vasiukov was astonished that Fischer not only remembered the won-lost record of their games, but could also recite back all the moves! Also, some of these stories invoke names now largely forgotten that deserve to be remembered: Max Pavey, Elliot Forry Laucks, Alexander Liepnicks and others, good men devoted to chess who had a positive influence on the young Fischer. What some other anecdotes reveal, we're not sure. For example, we learn of the 1962 death of Abe Turner, a respected master and friend of Fischer who was fatally stabbed by a mentally imbalanced co-worker at Chess Review. The authors cite a tribute in Chess Life that said "Abe did not need the income or respectability of a job ... It is ironic, but had he not taken that fatal job he would be alive right now." Are we to infer that working (at least for Chess Review) may be hazardous to one's health? Speaking of mental imbalance, we are mercifully spared the bulk of Fischer's appalling (and all too well known) 1999 Philippine radio interview, but we do see one excerpt: "After I played [Petrosian in 1971] I gave ... twenty-five, thirty simul exhibitions [in Argentina] ... all the players had to give me their copy of the score ... maybe between six hundred and a thousand scores ... What the hell are they worth? Thousands, millions of dollars." Uh, sure, Bobby. Only readers who place such an inflated value on any Fischer game, or who have an unquenchable thirst for any and all Fischeriana, need bother with this book. Unless he stages yet another comeback, it looks like we are reaching the bottom of the Fischer barrel. The Unknown Bobby Fischer is a slapdash collage that may have started with good intentions but ended up padding itself out with filler. It is not so much an exploration of the unknown as an addition to the unnecessary.