Browne: 'I got this aggression that never quits'

After last week's Fischer: 'I'm not seeing people', let's squeeze one more post out of the aging Sports Illustrated (SI) reports on chess. The American magazine tends to spotlight American sports celebrities and chess is no exception.

Sports Illustrated, 12 January 1976

The article starts,

It is amazing.There he was, a child lost in the concrete anonymity of Brooklyn, solitary, restless, different. And then he cultivated a demanding friend: chess. Obsessed, he would stay up half the night replaying the games of the masters, scorning school and withdrawing deeper into himself. Distressed by his isolation, his protective, foreign-born mother introduced him to the famed Manhattan Chess Club where he became renowned for his killer instinct. A sometimes petulant prodigy, he was given to gloating about "destroying the weakies" when he won and scattering the pieces off the board when he lost.

At 16, declaring that "teachers are stupid," he quit Erasmus Hall High School and became a chess vagabond. He toured the world, winning tournament after tournament, complaining about playing conditions and accusing the Russians of conspiring against him. And then, after settling in California, he mounted an all-out assault to wrest the world chess title away from the vaunted Soviet champion.

What's that? You heard it all before? But that is the amazing thing: you have not. Though the stated facts of their careers are exactly the same, the prodigal son of Brooklyn referred to is not Grandmaster Robert James Fischer but Grandmaster Walter Shawn Browne.

For the rest of the article, see Making All the Right Moves, where the photo shown above is captioned, 'Walter Browne is briefly motionless, not the normal state for this go-go grandmaster who feels he can beat anybody at anything -- and the Russians at chess'. For more about Browne on this blog, see Six Times U.S. Champ (June 2015).