The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle Milwaukee, Wisconsin Friday, November 22, 1957
SPORTS WORLD By Harold U. Ribalow
More on Bobby Fischer, the U.S. Chess Marvel
When 14-year-old Bobby Fischer won the United States Open Chess Championship, many American newspapers and magazines that pay no attention at all to chess suddenly got busy and began to check up on the young master of the chessboard. “Life” magazine devoted a picture spread to him and the “New Yorker,” under the title of “Prodigy” yielded him a couple of pages.
And from all these stories we learn the following:
Nobody ever won a major title at so early an age as 14-year-old Bobby. He will, as a result of his new fame, participate in the Hastings, England tournament, always a top show in the chess world, and, finally, he is expected to visit the Soviet Union to show off his wizardry to a people even more farther advanced in chess than they are in space satellites.
Taught by Older Sister
And there is a great deal more:
Bobby was 6 when he first was taught the game by his older sister and at 9 he entered his first tournament, twice winning the U. S. Junior Chess Championship. A year ago, the “New Yorker” reports, he won the brilliancy prize in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament in New York and the “Chess Review” called the effort “the game of the century.”
The new chess hero is in his second year at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn and is a good but by no means brilliant student. His teachers are amazed he sits still for as long as he does while playing chess, for “in my class” one of them declared, “Bobby couldn't sit still for five minutes.”
Now that he has done so remarkably well, his mother, who used to regret his obsession for the game, is now reconciled to his becoming a professional. Most chess pros starve if they depend solely on chess, and Bobby Fischer, who seems well on his way to accomplishing fantastic things in the chess world, would be well advised to learn something besides mastery of the ancient game, if he wants to eat regularly, that is.
