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The End of the Golden Era of Chess
September 5, 2019
This is the title of an article in The Atlantic by Peter Nicholas
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...er-era/597343/
The recent passing of Pal Benko and Shelby Lyman draws the curtain on an American period that produced some of the game’s most sparkling play.
An excerpt:
The loss of Benko and Lyman draws the curtain on an era in American chess that produced some of the game’s richest personalities and most sparkling play. The players and teachers who dominated the firmament in the mid-20th century were the game’s greatest generation. They bested a Soviet pipeline of grand masters who once had a stranglehold on the title.
One by one, they’re dying out. Fischer is gone, having died in Iceland in 2008, at age 64. Bill Lombardy, who served as Fischer’s second during the 1972 match and was a world-class grand master in his own right, died two years ago, at 79. Larry Evans, who helped Fischer write the influential chess book My 60 Memorable Games, passed away in 2010, at age 78. Robert Byrne, who in 1963 lost to Fischer in one of the most artful chess games ever played and later wrote a chess column for The New York Times, died six years ago, at 84.
There may never be another generation like it, or a set of geopolitical circumstances that would make a chess match quite so absorbing.
September 5, 2019
This is the title of an article in The Atlantic by Peter Nicholas
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...er-era/597343/
The recent passing of Pal Benko and Shelby Lyman draws the curtain on an American period that produced some of the game’s most sparkling play.
An excerpt:
The loss of Benko and Lyman draws the curtain on an era in American chess that produced some of the game’s richest personalities and most sparkling play. The players and teachers who dominated the firmament in the mid-20th century were the game’s greatest generation. They bested a Soviet pipeline of grand masters who once had a stranglehold on the title.
One by one, they’re dying out. Fischer is gone, having died in Iceland in 2008, at age 64. Bill Lombardy, who served as Fischer’s second during the 1972 match and was a world-class grand master in his own right, died two years ago, at 79. Larry Evans, who helped Fischer write the influential chess book My 60 Memorable Games, passed away in 2010, at age 78. Robert Byrne, who in 1963 lost to Fischer in one of the most artful chess games ever played and later wrote a chess column for The New York Times, died six years ago, at 84.
There may never be another generation like it, or a set of geopolitical circumstances that would make a chess match quite so absorbing.
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