R.I.P. to an accidental TV star from forty-seven years ago, after the jump ….
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In my mis-spent youth: I recall the summer of 1973 as the one where I watched the Senate Watergate hearings chaired by Sam Ervin diligently. The year before I was glued to the TV set on my summer school break watching …. a chess match: and the host of that unlikely hit series has died this week at the age of eighty-two. That match did not make TV host Shelby Lyman rich, but it changed the face of chess in the United States (and he made a living from it for the rest of his life). A look at his life and the lightning-in-a-bottle he presided over is well deserved.
Born as Shelbourne Lyman in Brooklyn in 1935, his family moved to the Boston area, where he learned chess from his uncle Harry Lyman, who had been New England champion. Shelby himself became champion of Boston, while attending the prestigious Boston Latin School and eventually graduating from Harvard in 1961 with a masters in sociology. Moving back home, he taught for four years at the City College of NY (CCNY) before leaving to teach chess full-time.
Today (at least in the US) the championship matches that have featured the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway — who had to defeat a Russian opponent in 2016 in his second title defense, in sudden-death overtime, as well — garner little attention. Even his title defense just last year against an American — also winning in sudden death— was not covered in the US press much.
In 1972, however: the looming title defense by Soviet champion Boris Spassky against the brilliant (yet mercurial) Bobby Fischer of the US was awaited by more Americans than usual, due to the Cold War and the stranglehold the Soviets had had on the title (since 1947). Although Spassky appeared on-the-surface to be a grey Soviet apparatchik, he was not — later, having lived in France for over thirty years — whereas that was somewhat more applicable to Anatoly Karpov (who was champion from 1975-1985).
The former chess champion Garry Kasparov (today a conservative anti-communist, Never Trumper — who hates Vladimir Putin even more) wrote how while growing up in the Soviet Union he was a Bobby Fischer admirer and wanted him to win to break that stranglehold, as he chafed not only under communist rule but also their grip on the Soviet chess program.
Years later, Bobby Fischer became a truly toxic figure (an overt anti-Semite despite his Jewish heritage and a conspiracy theorist galore before his death). Back then, he was merely a top-tier jerk (whom my father couldn’t stand) and gave all sorts of reasons why he could not travel to Reykjavik, Iceland to face Spassky (even receiving a personal plea from Henry Kissinger), all of which served to whet the general public’s appetite over the match. Eventually, the prize money was boosted by a British financier to $250k ($1.5 mill in today’s dollars) and the match was on.
Enter a TV executive named Mike Chase, who had formerly worked at CBS and was now head of TV operations in NYC for the State University of New York (SUNY) as well as being a member of the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan. And while it was not possible to broadcast the match live from Reykjavik in those days (even if it was allowed, Fischer would have balked), Chase saw the concept of a live analysis show — where everyone could guess or suggest the next move, and have an open discussion — as a viable strategy. Not unlike an NFL game where the announcers (most famously Hank Stram) would predict the next play. And Mike Chase thought of an old friend … who just might make this happen.
This was Frank Leicht, a VP at the public TV affiliate WNET (Channel 13) in New York, whom he had worked together with at CBS. Leicht trusted his old friend, and besides: in 1972, summertime afternoons on PBS (after the morning cartoons) were a quiet spot they had trouble obtaining underwriting for — so why not? The downside for Mike Chase: he was given a tiny budget, and had to staff the show on-the-cheap.
Until now, I had thought the broadcast originated from WNET’s NYC studios …. it turned out that Chase used a SUNY studio in the state capital of Albany, NY — as it was the routing station for all of the public TV networks in New York State. As host, he thought of his friend from the Marshall Chess Club, Shelby Lyman — who had no experience on TV at all — who accepted the job in exchange for only Amtrak fare to Albany and a $10 per diem (worth much more at 1972 price levels).
The studio was set-up with two boards: the Master Board (of the actual game position, which only changed when the next move took place) and the Analysis Board, where Shelby could test-out possible moves along with his guests. A phone line was set-up to Reyjavik, and when the next move was relayed: a bell rang, where Mike Chase’s wife Chris would hand Shelby the next move on a piece of paper … and then he’d adjust the master board.
The “Analysis” board to test-out movesWhat made the show unpredictable were … who the studio guests were. Sometimes they were grandmasters, or writers … or even Mike Chase’s friends. One time there was an analysis of a possible Spassky move among the experts … only to have a guest who was a patzer (novice or inept chess player) say something like, “If you do that, then Rook to Q8, checkmate” — at which Shelby and the others had a good laugh over, saying “See how much we know, huh?!”
One regular guest was Bruce Pandolfini— a twenty-four year-old member of the Manhattan Chess Club in NYC — who was also a fledgling poet and stockboy at the Strand Bookstore in Greenwich Village (making $3/hour).
His time on the show raised his exposure and said the best advice Shelby Lyman ever gave him: was to go into chess teaching (with Lyman telling him to take over some of his students, due to a lack of time). After the series, he was soon earning $15/hour and today is estimated to have given over 25,000 private or group lessons (possibly among the world’s highest totals). He was portrayed by Sir Ben Kingsley in the 1993 film Searching for Bobby Fischer and has said that if he had not been able to turn to chess teaching ….… “I would have continued to write bad poetry”.
Bruce Pandolfini (b. 1947)In addition to the studio guests, Shelby Lyman would often telephone someone at either the Marshall or Manhattan Chess Clubs (the second of which closed in 2002). Most often, he telephoned the Latvian-born grandmaster Edmar Mednis— who in his youth had defeated Bobby Fischer in a match and had also drawn with Boris Spassky — whose family had emigrated to the US in 1950. With his photographic image on the screen, Mednis would answer Shelby Lyman’s “Edmar, what are you seeing with the latest Spassky move?” Often they disagreed, which only added to the fun and intrigue.
Edmar Mednis (1937-2002)Yet the star of the show was always Shelby Lyman, whom one writer described as a “sociology professor with a cocker-spaniel face” to becoming the “Julia Child of chess”, referencing PBS’s main superstar. Although the Cold War was still strong — President Nixon held his famous summit with Leonid Brezhnev only a few months earlier — neither Lyman (nor his guests) ever hyped the US vs. USSR angle, referring to the participants as “Boris and Bobby”.
Whenever he tired of analyzing the current situation — often the players used up a good deal of time on their clocks, leading to long stretches without a move — he would suggest that all go quiet, and let everyone (including viewers at home) to just contemplate. He would stuff pieces from the Analysis Board in his pocket, then drop them and pick-up while still looking at the camera. And whenever he returned to the Master Board, the phrase he uttered more than any other was “This is the position”. It all came across as very human, and accessible to the non-chess fan … in much the same way that Julia Child demystified cooking for many.
PBS suddenly found that they had struck gold. Local station WNET was receiving 300 calls-a-day from viewers, saying (in today’s parlance), “more of this, please!” and their viewer donations skyrocketed. These included people who had little knowledge of chess ... but who sensed they were watching history-in-the-making. People walking along the streets in Manhattan would stop to watch TV sets in electronic store windows (as if it were a World Series game) and the NY Post ran a survey of twenty-four taverns in Manhattan.
Today, sports bars with multiple TV sets are ubiquitous, but back then only seventeen of the twenty-four taverns surveyed had even a single TV … yet of those seventeen: fifteen were tuned into chess (with some patrons asking to switch to it, rather than a Mets or Yankees weekday afternoon game).
They made the feed available to other stations, which was picked-up in Boston and Philadelphia … and later IBM agreed to underwrite it, making the series available to any affiliate in the nation. (IBM’s involvement seems prophetic, as twenty-five years later its Deep Blue computer defeated then-champion Garry Kasparov). The match became PBS’s highest-rated series in its history at the time.
ABC started covering the series on Wide World of Sports, and sent the noted sports illustrator Leroy Nieman to Reykjavik to do sketches, who said later:
“I thought that going to that chess match would be like watching the grass grow. But it was far more exciting than I ever expected it to be. It was like the Ali-Frazier fight, all over again.”
On Friday, September 1, 1972, Boris Spassky resigned the last game of the match, making Bobby Fischer the new world chess champion … with John Chancellor opening up his NBC Nightly News broadcast as follows:
“Good evening. We’ll have more on the developments in the Watergate bugging case, we’ll hear George McGovern talking about tightening up his campaign organization, and we’ll have a look at the new unemployment figures, but first …... Bobby Fischer.”
Andy Soltis, a grandmaster who has written a chess column for the NY Post since 1972, said that prior to the match, people would look at him reading a chess magazine on the subway quizzically — and afterwards, reading over his shoulder.
It spawned a chess boom that was not destined to last — Bobby Fischer’s petulance leading him to forfeit his title (when he would not defend it) took some air of the boom soon after — but the game is more much more popular in the US today than prior to that tournament, with many more schoolchildren playing today, than before.
Four years ago, the match was commemorated in the 2015 film Pawn Sacrifice— with Tobey Maguire in the role of Bobby Fischer and Liev Schreiber portraying Boris Spassky.
As noted, Shelby Lyman did not become rich from the series and said that he did not mind leaving the spotlight. Besides teaching and writing books, his main vehicle in later years was writing a syndicated column (sometimes headlined “Lyman on Chess”) and below is an example.
A Shelby Lyman column (circa late 1980’s) — Beginner’s Corner, an essay and a move-by-move gameAt its peak, his column appeared in eighty-two newspapers world-wide, and at last count appeared in forty-five different publications (including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan). He lived a quiet life on a farm in upstate New York, when he was diagnosed with cancer earlier this month.
Shelby Lyman died last Sunday, August 11th at the age of eighty-two. “Shelby was extremely honest and very compassionate,” his wife Michele Lyman said. “He had empathy for everybody. He could find good in people I never could.”
“This will be the last set of chess quizzes,” his wife said in an e-mail addressed to the publications that carried her husband’s work (including Gulf News in the United Arab Emirates) that will appear for the final time this week. “It was his great pleasure to be part of your papers for all these years.”
Shelby Lyman w/MicheleBruce Pandolfini summed-up how unpretentious this accidental TV star was, while they were having dinner in a Manhattan restaurant during the series:
Suddenly a man rushed over exclaiming, “Shelby Lyman? I am so glad to meet you!”
Mr. Lyman replied, “Do I know you?”
He did not recognize Dustin Hoffman.
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