AThe South Bend Tribune South Bend, Indiana Tuesday, January 30, 2007 - Page E2
All For Love of the Game
Inspired by Bobby Fischer, chess players still going strong.
By Virginia Ransbottom, Tribune Staff Writer
Mishawaka — It's been 25 years since Bobby Fischer won the World Chess Championship.
The year was 1972 and Wednesday afternoon chess players at the Battell Community Center remember it well.
“Bobby Fischer made chess very popular back in the Seventies,” said Roger Blaine, of Mishawaka.
That's also the year Floyd Smith, of South Bend, and Steve Cooper, of Mishawaka, started playing the game.
“I was in Toledo, Ohio, in 1972 for my Uncle Henry's funeral when my cousin Milton asked me if I wanted to play a game,” Smith recalled.
“I wanted to learn it for something to do.”
It started the same year for Cooper.
“I was in the military with the Air Force security police force and started playing out of boredom,” Cooper said. “It takes your mind completely off reality.”
George Abraham, of South Bend, started playing chess ahead of the Bobby Fischer-era at the age of 5. He's considered the Battell chess master.
While Fischer fueled Abraham's interest in chess, so did his chess coach, Donald Brooks, of South Bend, who was a 12-time Indiana state chess champion by 1972.
“We used to play chess until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning,” Abraham said of Brooks, who taught around 1,500 youngsters the game.
Brooks himself met Fischer at a Manhattan chess club when Fischer was only 12.
According to Tribune archives, Fischer asked 54-year-old Brooks to play a match and afterward said, “I appreciate playing with you. I'm someday going to be the champion of the world.”
At the time, 12-year-old Fischer and 54-year-old Brooks agreed the best way to start a game was with a P-K4 move.
Two years later, Fischer became the youngest U.S. champion in history at the age of 14.
And 17 years later, Fischer was the only U.S.-born chess player to ever win the World Chess Championship.
That year was 1972, and by then Brooks was 71 years old.
Brooks died in 1975, Blaine said.
Abraham has been playing chess at the community center for the past 15 years and coaches children in chess at Jackson Intermediate Center.
“It's all for the love of the game,” he said.
