the knight's pawn

Fischer assessed the board. He knew that there was a reason he was better than his opponent. Than any opponent they could throw at him. The reason? A strange kind of courage. Which would burn itself out, no doubt, sooner or later. It was all to do with a fearless flair, a willingness to place his pieces in the line of danger, to make moves that encompassed a level of risk that more conservative players, which included every other player in the world, lacked the nerve or the imagination to take. One day, the balance of risk to result would collapse. His judgement, which was the preservation of an instinct as much as the cultivation of a strategy, would slacken, like an old golfer’s swing. All the same, he knew that he could never have acquired this level of talent, this perhaps unsurpassable level of talent, had he not realised that the risk inherent in making the move was correlative to how effective the move could be. This realisation, and his capacity to sustain and impart faith and play, or live, by this realisation, was what had initially separated him from the ordinary chess players, and then from the extraordinary, and now from the very champions themselves.

Fischer’s belief in his own genius was not arrogance. To believe anything else would have been false modesty. All that truly scared him was the knowledge that one day his nerve, this instinctive nerve, would wither. In this realisation he committed himself ever more wholeheartedly now, knowing the nerve was still strong. There is no move on the chess board that does not encompass risk. The minute this is forgotten, the game sinks to the level of the predictable. Fischer could not abide the idea.

When his chess nerve finally failed him, he retreated, and then compensated in the cruder game of political diatribe.