Originally published February 8, 1964
At the moment the toughest customer in anybody's chess club is a 20-year-old Brooklyn boy named Bobby Fischer. Tall and gangling, awkward in gait and closemouthed, he looks and moves like a gunslinger who just rode into town in search of bad trouble. When he was 13 he figured he could beat the New York crowd, and so, one summer afternoon, he took a subway over from Brooklyn and introduced himself at the Manhattan Chess Club. Among chess players the Manhattan Club is considered one of the toughest in the country. Fischer defeated all comers.
Several months later, just after his 14th birthday, he won the U.S. Chess Championship for the fi rst time. (He has of the American chess community, a sullen and temperamental young man who often overlooked the amenities proper to the game. Unlike the other celebrated chess masters of the past 50 years, nearly all of whom were highly educated scholars or mathematicians, Fischer never bothered to fi nish high school. “The stuff they teach you in school,” he once said, “I can't use one way or the other.”
