Besides being a chess master, I am also an avid baseball fan. During this offseason, I found time to read The Echoing Green, an excellent book by Joshua Prager that recounts the tale of Bobby Thomson's famous home run that won the 1951 pennant for the New York Giants against their archrival Brooklyn Dodgers. I was intrigued by the following sentence in the Author's Note: "Not all those I contacted were helpful, baseball fan Fidel Castro not caring to share if he recollected the game, Brooklynite Bobby Fischer willing to reminisce only for $200,000."
I wonder how that interview might have gone. Perhaps Prager would have asked Fischer if he could hear the roar from the crowd at Ebbets Field when he was a kid growing up in Brooklyn.
According to Prager, the Giants stole the opponents' signs from late July 1951 through the end of the season, aided by an electrician who ran a wire from the clubhouse in center field to the bullpen where a buzzer sounded to indicate what pitch was to be thrown. Supposedly one of the Giants coaches used a telescope in the clubhouse to spy the catcher's hand signals.
If all this has a familiar ring, it sounds like Topalov's accusation that Kramnik aided by a cable in the ceiling of his bathroom received assistance from a computer in winning this year's world championship chess match in Elista. Hopefully we won't have to wait half-a-century to find out what really happened.
I wonder how that interview might have gone. Perhaps Prager would have asked Fischer if he could hear the roar from the crowd at Ebbets Field when he was a kid growing up in Brooklyn.
According to Prager, the Giants stole the opponents' signs from late July 1951 through the end of the season, aided by an electrician who ran a wire from the clubhouse in center field to the bullpen where a buzzer sounded to indicate what pitch was to be thrown. Supposedly one of the Giants coaches used a telescope in the clubhouse to spy the catcher's hand signals.
If all this has a familiar ring, it sounds like Topalov's accusation that Kramnik aided by a cable in the ceiling of his bathroom received assistance from a computer in winning this year's world championship chess match in Elista. Hopefully we won't have to wait half-a-century to find out what really happened.
