AThe Miami News Miami, Florida Monday, October 28, 1957
Mother Is Worried
Boy's A Chess Master
By Wambly Bald, North American Newspaper Alliance
Manhattan—What price child prodigy?
That question comes to mind regarding 14-year-old Bobby Fischer, an intense, nail-biting youngster now hailed as the youngest chess master in the United States.
When the slender, sandy haired boy won the U.S. open chess championship in Cleveland last August, triumphing over 176 other players, Al Horowitz, editor of Chess Review, was heard to remark, “Nobody in the world could have played better than Bobby on this occasion.”
And at the Manhattan Chess Club, where Bobby, the youngest member, plays several evenings a week, Hans Kmoch, the club's general manager said:
“He's so great that he shows the same potential as the immortals Paul Morphy and Jose Capablanca. He may some day become a world champion.”
It was at this club that young Bobby was observed while he sat at one of the tables. He was playing rapid transit, a kind of blitz chess in which moves must be made within 10 seconds. On and on he played, never looking up, constantly biting his nails or drumming his long, thin fingers on the table. “Come on; hurry up and move,” he kept saying to his opponent.
Very shy as well as nervous, he paced restlessly about the room when a reporter talked to him, “All I want to do is play,” he said, and quickly returned to his table.
One of the members said: “He's so sensitive that he used to go off and cry whenever he lost a game. He hates to lose, and we sort of used to baby him around here. But he doesn't cry any more. He's growing up.”
Bobby lives with his mother and 20-year-old sister in Brooklyn. His mother, a cheerful-looking visiting nurse, said the young chess genius, a high school sophomore, was precocious even as an infant. In nursery school, she said, he was a whiz at cutouts and other puzzle games.
And at 7, he was a master of magic and card tricks. He was about the same age when he first learned to play chess, having become immediately fascinated when his sister Joan brought home a set she had picked up at a notion store. And from then on, he's been practically living with the game.
Mrs. Regina Fischer said, “By the time Bobby was 8, I had to take him out of public school and put him in a private school because he was so restless. In the private school he got along fine because teachers understood him and encouraged him to develop his own personality.
“Bobby has always been a nonconformist. He likes to wear dungarees and polo shirts because he considers good clothes sissy, and he doesn't like ties. He doesn't even own a tie.”…
Mrs. Fischer has long been concerned over her son's total absorption in chess. Outside of a little tennis, which he plays at high school, where his grades are average, he doesn't appear to have any other interest at all, she said.
“It's chess, chess, chess, from the minute he opens his eyes in the morning” she declared.
