When I won the World Championship in ’72, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country.
There was open collusion between the Russian players. They agreed ahead of time to draw the games they played against each other. Every time they drew they gave each other half a point.
Sometimes girls write me. One girl in Yugoslavia sent me a whole slew of love letters. I don’t know how she got my address. She was in a crowd watching me play. She says when I left there the stars fell out of the sky over Yugoslavia, or something like that.
As Olafsson showed me, White can win… It’s hard to believe. I stayed up all night analysing, finally convicing myself, and, incidentally, learning a lot about Rook and Pawn endings in the process.
Well, I’m not sure I know what you mean by a prima donna, but if something doesn’t interest me or if someone bores me, or if I think they’re a phony, I just don’t bother with them, that’s all.
