The times being what they were, I first learned the result from the newspaper I was delivering.
The afternoon Washington Evening Star’s front-page, top-of-the-fold headline for Sept. 1, 1972 — exactly 50 years ago this Thursday — proclaimed that Russian Boris Spassky had conceded the adjourned 21st game of the stormy match in Reykjavik, Iceland, by phone making Bobby Fischer the 11th official world chess champion and the first American to wear the crown. Fischer’s decisive 12½-8½ match win ended the Soviet Union’s quarter-century stranglehold on the title and set off a chess boom in the United States that has never been equaled.