AThe Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, Sunday, July 12, 1959
The King's Men: World Title Hope Seen In Fischer
By Merrill Dowden
Inasmuch as a crystal ball is not included in the equipage of this department, and I am not exactly proficient in palmistry or the reading of tea leaves, I usually shy away from prognosticating as one would the plague.
However, for this once I'm crawling to the very tip of a very long limb (leaving plenty of room for the saw behind) to predict:
1. That the United States will produce a world chess champion within the next decade.
2. That our champion will be one Bobby Fischer of Brooklyn, who now has reached the ripe old age of 16.
Maybe that phrase, “next decade,” seems that I'm giving myself plenty of rope, but it must be remembered that more than a century has elapsed since we produced our first and only world champion, Paul Morphy.
Bobby, whose “Fischer's Games of Chess” was reviewed in this column a couple weeks ago, already has taken a long step toward the championship. He is the present United States titlist, and is generally regarded as the strongest player for his age in history.
Bobby lost no time in getting started to fame and fortune through the royal game. Born in Chicago on March 9, 1943, he learned the chess moves in 1949 from his sister Joan, then 11. “She often bought different games at a candy store,” Bobby writes, “and one day happened to buy a chess set. We figured out the moves from the directions that came with the set.
And Bobby has been figuring them out ever since, to the consternation of almost every opponent he has faced.
