The Morning News, Wilmington, Delaware, Friday, January 15, 1960
Why Not Chess?
The Russian government subsidizes chess players. Russia has the best chess players in the world today, including world champion Botvinnik and most of the leading challengers for his title.
The American government doesn't subsidize chess players. Since the best of them aren't rich, they can't even enter international competition unless they find a patron to finance them. But there aren't enough enthusiastic patrons to go around.
The result is that when American players do meet Russians in international competition, they are under much of the same sort of handicap as amateurs in other fields carry when they meet professionals.
These are some of the facts adduced by an ad hoc group recently formed to petition Congress to provide funds to groom the 16-year-old Brooklyn schoolboy, Bobby Fischer, for a real try at the world championship.
Young Bobby is considered the most promising American chess player since Paul Morphy. He has already won the national title three times in competition with the older international grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky; and in the last year he has done well in international competition. If any American player can bring the world title back over the Atlantic, Bobby can.
Non-chess players, who in this country are legion, may ask, “So what?” The committee has an answer. We are going in for “cultural exchange” with Russia in a big way. We meet the Russians in athletic competition, stage fairs behind the Iron Curtain, send musicians and actors and even vice presidents over there as a sample of our wares.
But chess is the Russian national game, and tournaments there are played in large theatres with overflow crowds standing in the streets. If we can afford to send over these other performers in pursuit of good will, why not the amiable, attractive Bobby Fischer? He would wow them.
Remember the sensation caused in Moscow when Van Cleburn of Texas went over there and played Tchaikovsky on the piano in a music competition? Russians suddenly realized that America was not a nation of cultural barbarians. We think the Committee for United States Champion Bobby Fischer (that's its name) may have something.
