He was teaching chess in New York when one of his students, a TV executive, tapped him to host a PBS show covering the Fischer-Spassky match. Though not a world-class player, Lyman did more to popularize chess in America than anyone not named Bobby Fischer. Read: ‘Pawn Sacrifice’ and the quest to understand Bobby FischerĪnother chess master who was central to the Fischer story also died last month: Shelby Lyman. “His own personal interest was secondary to the bigger picture.” “Pal felt that Bobby could change the chess world-which Bobby did-and if Bobby became world champion, that would benefit the whole game,” Susan Polgar, a friend of both men and a former women’s world chess champion, told me. But they reconciled and stayed friends to the end. ![]() Playing in a tournament in 1962 in the Caribbean, they squabbled one night and got into a fistfight-“the first fistfight ever recorded by two grandmasters,” Frank Brady wrote in his Fischer biography, Endgame. Fischer, who had been playing sporadically throughout the 1960s and who seemed on the brink of quitting the game altogether, tore through the qualifying tournaments before dethroning Spassky in a 1972 match that riveted America.īenko and Fischer hadn’t always been on the best of terms. His competitive career fading, Benko stepped aside in 1970 and let the younger, more talented Fischer take his place in the competition to determine a challenger for the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. ![]() perhaps its greatest cultural victory of the Cold War. Without Benko, there might not have been Bobby Fischer-at least not the Fischer who delivered the U.S. After defecting from his native Hungary in 1957, he moved to the United States, competing in tournaments and composing ingenious puzzles that introduced generations of young players to the mysteries of the endgame.īut his singular contribution to American chess wasn’t at the board. Benko was a top grand master and one of the game’s great artists. ![]() Outside the cloistered world that serious chess players inhabit, few would have taken any special note of the death last month of Pal Benko, at age 91.
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