I guess the shock triggered it.” What the shock triggered was the wildest day in the world of chess since a Danish earl outplayed King Canute and was hacked to hamburger by His Majesty’s bullyboys. At a moment when he couldn’t stand the slightest shock, he got a bad one. “Someone will come to you as quickly as possible.” Later Davis told me: “Bobby was scared. “Don’t leave the room,” Davis told him firmly. Minutes later he was on the phone to one of his lawyers, Andrew Davis. A husky young fellow named Jackie Beers, who was visiting Bobby, strode to the door and with one strong shove sent the reporter reeling. The man with his foot in the door smiled and kept trying to wheedle an interview. A journalist! The match hadn’t even begun and already the press was hounding him! Bobby angrily ordered them to leave.
Keeping his foot firmly in the door, the first intruder said he was a British journalist and wanted an interview. Startled, Bobby started to close the door. Instead, he saw a short, heavy-set middle-aged man in street clothes. Looking vague and unready, Bobby opened the door and peered out, expecting to see a Yale Club employee. Who else? Only his lawyer and a few friends knew he was staying at the Yale Club. He had hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his doorknob. He had slept 20 hours since arriving in New York about 36 hours before but even so, he kept slipping deeper into exhaustion. But he didn’t want to think about that right now. That left Saturday night yet if he flew up on Saturday night, he would arrive on Sunday morning dog-tired from the trip just a few hours before the game began. He couldn’t fly tomorrow night, because the Sabbath began at sundown on Friday and for religious reasons he couldn’t fly on the Sabbath. Five nights in a row, he had been booked on a northbound plane and five nights in a row he had not shown. Eleven hours before the plane left for Iceland.
Three days before the first game of his match with Boris Spassky for the world chess championship. It was sometime after ten A.M., Thursday, June 29, 1972.
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