The End of the Golden Era of Chess

Outside of 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. Benko was a top grandmaster and one of the game’s great artists. After defecting from his native Hungary in 1957, he moved to the United States, competing in tournaments and also composing ingenious puzzles that introduced generations of young players to the mysteries of the endgame.

But his singular contribution to American chess wasn’t at the board. Without Benko, there might not have been Bobby Fischer—at least not the Fischer who delivered the U.S. perhaps its greatest cultural victory of the Cold War. 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. 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.

The two hadn’t always been on the best of terms. 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,” wrote Frank Brady in his Fischer biography, .  But they reconciled