White: Resigns
Jan. 18th, 2008 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogBy the turn of this century, he'd gone past eccentricity into downright lunacy, but for one brief shining moment in the early 1970s, millions of televisions were tuned in to a mocked-up re-creation of a series of chess games featuring Bobby Fischer, dead today at the age of 64. What more fitting end for a Grand Master than an age matching the number of squares on the board?
Several people, elJay and otherAy, have noted that PBS (or at least its New York affiliate) actually devoted daily coverage to these matches, hosted by chess master (and upstate New Yorker) Shelby Lyman. I was one of those seventh-grade geeks riveted to Channel 13 for the event. I've scoured YouTube and the like to see if any video of the coverage remains, and the consensus seems to be that it wasn't preserved. Here's one still shot, though, I think of Lyman's partner in the venture:
That DEFINITELY was The Board. The match itself had no television coverage, due to the eccentricities of the players, so Lyman took relays of the moves and displayed them on that board at a studio in Albany which got beamed back to WNET.
Not only did I watch these every day after school, I even placed 7th in the Woodland Junior High chess tournament (its first and most likely last ever) by mating three straight opponents with the same three-move sequence I'd learned from Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.
God I was a geek back then.
(Shout from daughter in next room: "As opposed to you blogging about it 36 years later?")
Several people, elJay and otherAy, have noted that PBS (or at least its New York affiliate) actually devoted daily coverage to these matches, hosted by chess master (and upstate New Yorker) Shelby Lyman. I was one of those seventh-grade geeks riveted to Channel 13 for the event. I've scoured YouTube and the like to see if any video of the coverage remains, and the consensus seems to be that it wasn't preserved. Here's one still shot, though, I think of Lyman's partner in the venture:
That DEFINITELY was The Board. The match itself had no television coverage, due to the eccentricities of the players, so Lyman took relays of the moves and displayed them on that board at a studio in Albany which got beamed back to WNET.
Not only did I watch these every day after school, I even placed 7th in the Woodland Junior High chess tournament (its first and most likely last ever) by mating three straight opponents with the same three-move sequence I'd learned from Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.
God I was a geek back then.
(Shout from daughter in next room: "As opposed to you blogging about it 36 years later?")
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-19 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-19 04:20 am (UTC)