AThe Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, Tuesday, September 01, 1992 - Page 2
Fischer Faces Off Against Chess Foe, World Opinion
Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia — Bobby Fischer, the enigmatic genius of international chess, will venture out of his walled, ocean compound tomorrow to open a match whose end-game, he now predicts, will force him to seek asylum in Eastern Europe to escape prosecution in the United States.
Sponsors said Sunday that it was not easy to persuade the reclusive Fischer to turn his back on world opinion and violate a United Nations embargo against trade with Yugoslavia.
It took a dozen handmade shirts — copies of the one worn 20 years ago when he became the only American to win the world chess crown — and an agreement to raise the tournament-hall toilet seat by an inch. Since then, demands have been raised about everything from the lighting to the height of Fischer's seat.
All this, of course, plus a winner's purse said to be in excess of $5 million, according to sponsors of a sporting event billed as “The Revenge Match of the Century.”
This rematch featuring Fischer and Boris Spassky, who held the world chess title before emigrating from the Soviet Union to France, is a grand clash of personal ambition and international gamesmanship set amid much conflict.
Take the location.
The series opens tomorrow in this exclusive resort on the coast of Montenegro, the tiny republic that is the only ally of the Serbian dominated government of Yugoslavia in its conflict with the now-independent Bosnia. The first player to win 10 games wins the series.
Fischer has sought to maintain his reclusive lifestyle while preparing for the match and has hidden out behind the resort's walls, aided in his pursuit of solitude of 200 aides and security personnel hired by match sponsors.
“Even Tito didn't have that many guards with him,”said a Montenegro resident.
But Fischer's contemplative life has been shattered by the US Treasury Department, which has phoned, faxed and even sent a middleman from Congress to inform Fischer that he risks a $250,000 fine and/or 10 years in prison if he goes ahead with the match in violation of trade sanctions the UN imposed in May.
After deciding to end two decades spent in self-imposed seclusion with a religious sect in California, Fischer, 49, confided to sponsors that, after the match, he may seek asylum in Yugoslavia or perhaps in Hungary.
“Maybe I will never return home again,” is what Jezdimir Vasiljevic, the millionaire financier and sponsor of the event, recalled Fischer saying in a recent conversation.
