SPORT OF THE SPECTRUM:

Steiner reported on the match for The New Yorker and eventually turned his long article into a book, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik (1974). Describing Fischer's strange genius, Steiner writes:

The cutting edge, the rapidity, the precision of Fischer's intellect as a chess player, his memory for every aspect of the game are breathtaking. At certain very special levels, his cortex is operating under pressures and with an efficacy that ordinary men and women and, it would appear, most of his competitors cannot sustain. Almost the totality of his cerebral, nervous, even bodily resources are compacted to focus, to "laser in," on a severely delimited area. ... Whatever Fischer's idiosyncrasies, there are abundant impulses to paranoia and unreality in chess itself, in the violence and autistic passion of the game.

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