1972 World Chess Championship

Quick question for someone who was alive in 1972. (Preferably someone who was living  in the US at the time) 

Was the world championship match between Fischer and Spassky really as publicized as people make it sound like today? I mean from what you read online it sounds like it was practically as big as the Super Bowl or the Olympics. I find it hard to believe that the public was this interested in a chess match. 

I have a book covering from when Fischer walked out of the Interzonal tournament leading up to the `69 championship matches to after Spassky's defeat in 1972. At one point the network covering the match switched to the Democratic national convention. It was flooded with complaints and went back to the match an hour later. The US Chess Federation reported a tremendous upsurge in memberships. Chess sets were THE hot item to buy. Fischer revolutionized how chess was perceived by the non-chess public. Fischer was even invited to the White House. I'll see if I can find the book.

I wasn't actually around but I do know that the cold war context is something that mattered at that time and is difficult for us to totally get. Hockey is obviously huge in Canada but the 72 summit series took it to a whole new level. There are many quotes of "our way of life vs their way of life"

I'm pretty sure that Fischer challenging the USSR for a title fell in a similar boat. It was a way of proving that capitalism was better than communism. 

I was just starting to play tournaments when Fischer started his run.  You ask if it was as big as the Olympics or the Superbowl; no, it was bigger than both, combined (throw in the World Series, too).  In my life, the only thing I have seen that generated as much coverage and interest was the start of a war.  Dig this: In 1972, there was a war in Viet Nam, a Presidential race marred by scandal (anyone remember the Eagleton Affair?), a severe confrontation in the Middle East, a moon launch, an Olympics marked by triumph (Mark Spitz) and terror (Black September), and the one story that dominated the headlines throughout the year was the Fischer-Spassky match.  The coverage for Desert Storm was comparable.  Chess was the lead story on the evening news almost every night, and the games and positions were published on the front page of the NY Daily News (unheard of!) and the Wall Street Journal (unthinkable!).  It took the murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich to knock chess off as the lead story, but that was for a week or so, with Fischer-Spassky the second story.  The chess club I was in at the time closed in May with 5 people present.  When it re-opened in October, there were 350 people who wanted to play.  We didn't have the space, the boards, nothing to accommodate the overwhelming crowd that showed up.  And chess tournaments border-to-border and coast-to-coast broke (no, shattered) attendance records.  So, yeah, it was bigger than the Olympics and the Superbowl, and I doubt that I will see anything like it again in my life.

The Fischer--Spassky match did receive a lot of coverage. Not as much as the Super Bowl or the World Series (shouldn't that really be the US Series?), but far more than any other chess event. My recollection is that USCF membership more than doubled that year, as more people discovered chess due to the coverage.

You have to remember that information was not quickly available in those days. The night of the first game, I knew that it had been played and was dying to know the result. Brilliant idea: call the local newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But what department? The sports desk seemed to be the most likely, so around midnight I got the guy on duty at the sports desk on the line. With a tremor in my voice, I managed to ask, "Did Fischer beat Spassky?" The answer was, "Let me see. Where were they fighting?" Obviously, I didn't find out that night, but the bad news was fairly prominent in the paper the following day.

Jackattack57, yeah, no kidding.  I was looked on like a master because I knew the difference between a Ruy Lopez and a QGD.  And BTW, I met Shelby Lyman a couple of years ago--he teaches English at a high school near here now.

OldPatzerMike, maybe you didn't watch the news that day?  The result of that game was on the CBS, NBC, ABC network news casts, and the game itself broadcast on PBS.  I was living in rinky-dink backwater upstate New York at the time and knew the result, even though the antenna we used didn't bring in PBS all the time--planes flying over messed with reception.  In NYC, I knew friends that went to electronics stores because the display TVs in the windows had the match on.  And from the pre-match negotiations in May until the end of the match, tell me what competed day-to-day with chess as the headline story?  What Superbowl or Olympics commanded the attention of the US for seven straight months?  There were individual days and/or stories ("I'm behind him 1000%."), the DNC/RNC conventions, etc., but nothing competed for long.  The only thing in my life in which coverage was as sustained as Fischer-Spassky was Desert Storm.  I was just breaking into chess and what a time to start playing.  I'll never forget it.

Yes, it was big news. Everyone in the US knew who Bobby Fischer was. Nobody today has a clue as to who Fabiano Caruana is.

I suspect that the upcoming world championship match would be more publicised in the US and more popular in mainstream culture if, for example, Sam Shankland was the challenger to Carlsen. Sadly that is the reality.

'The Sporting Scene: White Knights of Reykjavik', by George Steiner, is an excellent account of the tussle.

Here's a link to an interesting article on the TV coverage of the match.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-man-behind-the-fischer-spaky-show

I was born in 1972, and not precisely on the US. But Bobby and Boris are the only chess players whose names sound familiar to my mother, a Spanish housewife with zero interest on the game. Must have been a big deal.

It was a big deal, huge really, but my recollection is much closer to poster #10 than others on here.  If you read my previous post you'll see TV coverage was nothing more than a couple guys in a TV studio on the phone to Iceland posting moves on an analysis board.  Hardly a Super Bowl.

I was 21 at the time and a huge Fischer fan so I definitely had an interest in the tourney.

There were three major broadcast stations, NBC, CBS, and ABC, that probably only broadcast brief chess match updates from time to time. I believe that even that has been unparalleled before or since. There was also something that had been called educational television, and it was on that (considerably less popular) channel that there was a panel discussing the moves shortly after they were played. I have read that, sadly, there has not been a preserved record of those shows.

my dad actually kept newspaper cuttings of the match way out here in singapore.  he plays but isn't that into it.  so i can only imagine how it must have been in the us.

I was eleven and did not play chess but I watched the games on channel 13 being analyzed as they were being played. It was a very big deal and suddenly everyone in my neighborhood it seemed was buying chess sets and books on chess. I was living in New Jersey and yes it was a very big deal. It was the thing to watch in the summer of 1972.

As I remember it, newspapers did indeed run the moves of the games.

I have a question, how are the interzonals decided? I had noticed before I would have expected Tal, Leonid Stein, Walter Browne, and a young Karpov to have been at least competing, but they arent in the interzonals at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interzonal#zonal%20tournaments

https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/zonals/1969-72.htm