Philadelphia gave Bobby Fischer his first big win.
It was July 1956 when Fischer, who died yesterday at age 64 in Iceland, arrived here from Brooklyn for the U.S. Chess Federation's junior championship.
He was 13, the youngest player at the event, held at the Franklin-Mercantile Chess Club, in Center City. And when he won, he was the youngest victor in the annual contest for the under-21 set.
"He was intense, yeah," Herb Fisher said today, remembering the thin young teen. Fisher, 76, who dropped by the chess club with his Pekingese today, said he shook the prodigy's hand.
Back then, Fischer was only an expert-level player, not a master, Fisher said.
But the guy he bumped from the junior throne was a master - and a Philadelphian. Charles Kalme, three years Fischer's senior, was the youngest national master. He had earned the rank two months earlier, from the U.S. Chess Association.
Kalme was a Latvian emigrant who had learned chess moves in a displaced persons' camp in Germany. A Central High School athlete, he went on to captain the soccer team at the University of Pennsylvania and win the 1957 U.S. Intercollegiate Chess Championship.
Kalme became a math professor at the University of California-Berkley, then returned to Latvia, where he died in 2002.
His opponent that day in 1956, however, was not as well-rounded. Temperamental, erratic and arrogant, the high school dropout held that an education was not a prerequisite to chess greatness.
Anthony Koppany of Lansdale, witnessed that arrogance a dozen years later when Fischer made a tour stop at the Cheltenham Township Art Center. He was among 67 players who sat in five rows of tables to challenge the U.S. chess champion and future world champ in May 1964.
Fischer had dispensed with 66 other games by the time he faced Koppany. He had won 62, drawn two and lost two.
"My game was the last one he played, and it was a drawish position, but he wanted to win it," Koppany said today.
Koppany, then a 46-year-old brewery worker, was ranked as an expert, several levels below the grandmaster Fischer, then one of the world's strongest players.
At 8:20 p.m., Koppany was the only player left in the art center. So a tired Fischer sat down to try to finish him off.
Was Koppany nervous? "No, I wasn't. I wasn't."
Koppany, who'll turn 90 in a couple of months, had been in much tougher situations. Before coming to the United States in 1949, he fought on the Russian front with the Hungarian army.
It was a wild game of chess, in which Fischer, playing white, wound up with two rooks and two bishops against Koppany's queen and two knights, according to an online archive that lets players run though every move.
(To see it, go to http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1255218.)
Even for a grandmaster, such persistence seemed a bit arrogant. "I think in a way, yes, because it was a dead-drawish position I had against him and he wanted to win it."
Eventually, after the bishops and knights were gone, and Koppany's queen seemed positioned to check White's exposed king repeatedly, Fischer offered a draw.
They shook hands.
Dan Heisman, a chess instructor in Wynnewood and former Philadelphia champion, never met Fischer, but today he recalled the aura Fischer had among chess players: "Bobby Fischer was very charismatic. He was like Arnold Palmer. People were following him around."
Heisman learned advanced chess under Donald Byrne at Pennsylvania State University. A few months after Fischer won the junior crown, he beat Byrne, a leading American chess master, in what was then dubbed "The Game of the Century."
Byrne went on to play Fischer several more times, and later, when asked what he thought about the chess icon, Byrne would put his hand to his cheek and say: "He's a heckuva nice guy . . . but he's absolutely out of his mind."
Early on, Fischer was known for being hard to get along with, said Heisman, 57. But Fischer also fought for better treatment and playing conditions for chess players.
Despite his eccentricities, Fischer was a chess hero all the way up to his 1972 historic victory in Reykjavik over Russian world champion Boris Spassky, but his later anti-American and anti-Semitic rantings made chess players ambivalent.
"We wanted to embrace him as an American champion, but we didn't want anything to do with his pronouncements or philosophies," Heisman said this morning as he scanned the Internet for breaking news on Fischer's death.
When Fischer beat Spassky, he was actually rated as the favorite, but the drama of the match - from his first loss to his ultimate triumph - riveted many Americans who viewed it as a symbolic Cold War win.
But for the men who gathered at the Franklin-Mercantile Chess Club that summer of '72, it was more than that.
Every time Fischer sat down to play Spassky on the far-away isle of Iceland, they were at the club. A member who lived in the suburbs had a TV that could pick up the games from a New York station. He would phone the moves in to the club, where other members would duplicate them on chess a board.
"For us, it wasn't an East versus West thing," Heisman said today, recalling the sentiment of chess players 35 years ago. "This amazing talent, Bobby Fischer, was finally getting a chance to show his stuff at the highest level and win the world championship."
And in the town where he got his first big win, Philadelphians were living it.