Fischer started reign with a win in Phila.

The Philadelphia area gave chess wizard Bobby Fischer his first big win - and nearly played a role in orchestrating one last hurrah.

It was July 1956 when Fischer - who died Thursday at age 64 in Reykjavik, Iceland - arrived here from Brooklyn, N.Y., for the U.S. Chess Federation's junior championship.

He was 13 and the youngest player at the event at the Franklin-Mercantile Chess Club in Center City. When he won, he was the youngest victor in the annual contest for the under-21 set.

"He was intense, yeah," Herb Fisher said yesterday, remembering the thin teen. Fisher, 76, who dropped by the chess club with his Pekingese yesterday, said he shook the prodigy's hand.

In November 2006, a Radnor entrepreneur, Ed Trice, met Fischer in Iceland while trying to set up a $15 million match between Fischer and the Russian to whom he forfeited his crown in 1975, Anatoly Karpov.

The game would not have been classic chess, but a Trice-patented variation called Gothic Chess, which uses two extra hybrid pieces on a board two squares wider.

Karpov had signed a contract to play, but Fischer was tough to deal with, ducking meetings and escalating demands for upfront money, Trice said.

Finally, Trice got to talk with Fischer in the corner of a restaurant in Reykjavik - for about five minutes.

The former champ had on "a leatherish cap" and a denim shirt. His beard was trimmed and his fingernails were long.

"When he spoke, he was matter-of-fact, direct. He seemed sharp. His responses were very quick," Trice said.

But he also seemed bored, as if doing Trice a favor by meeting.

"He didn't want to be there," Trice said. "We had done something to press his button, and it wasn't going to happen."

Susan Polgar, a four-time women's world champion and Texas Tech University's chess coach, confirmed that she had been asked, if needed, to fill in for Fischer in the match.

"Both Karpov and I signed the contract, and Bobby was seriously contemplating. The money was there," she said.

She and Fischer were friends, and she knew he had spurned multimillion-dollar deals before. "Money was not the most important thing in his life," Polgar said. "He had his own ideas and principles. He had numerous offers."

A few months ago, through a mutual friend, Fischer sent his fond regards. "I'm glad that was his last message to me and about me," she said. "I think he was basically the king of chess, and the chess world lost one of the biggest heroes of all time."

Anthony Koppany, 89, of Lansdale, remembers playing Fischer in 1964, when he made a tour stop at the Cheltenham Township Art Center. Koppany was among 67 players who sat in five rows of tables to challenge the U.S. chess champion and future world champ.

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 yesterday.

Koppany, then a 46-year-old brewery worker, was ranked as an expert, several levels below the grandmaster.

At 8:20 p.m., Koppany was the only player still making moves. So a tired Fischer sat down to try to finish him off.

Was Koppany nervous? "No, I wasn't. I wasn't."

Koppany, who will 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 at

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that lets players run through every move.

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," Koppany recalled.

Eventually, after the bishops and knights were gone and Koppany's queen seemed positioned to check Fischer's exposed king repeatedly, Fischer offered a draw.

They shook hands.

Also at the 1964 exhibition was Chuck Feldman, then the city's 11-year-old Pee Wee chess champ.

With a teacher's help, he outlasted more than 50 other players before losing to Fischer.

"He was completely stoic. He just moved from table to table . . . and you would get excited if you made him think for a nanosecond," recalled a laughing Feldman, now 54 and a store owner who lives in the Northeast.

Later, he said, he saw Fischer in a dimmer light after his "bizarre" anti-Semitic "rantings."

Despite his eccentricities, Fischer was a chess hero all the way up to his historic 1972 victory in Reykjavik over the Russian world champion Boris Spassky, but his later anti-American and anti-Semitic statements made chess players ambivalent.

"Chess players from my generation just worshipped Fischer," said international master Edward Formanek, 65, a Pennsylvania State University math professor who was at the Sheraton Center City yesterday competing in the 40th Annual Liberty Bell Open.

He never played Fischer himself, but admired him.

"I'm sorry, of course. It was a big disappointment to chess players that he gave up playing after he won the title. He never did what he could have done," he said.

When Fischer beat Spassky, he was 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 1972, 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 a chessboard.

"For us, it wasn't an East vs. West thing," said Dan Heisman, a Wynnewood chess instructor and former Philadelphia champion, 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.