Tigran and the Tiger

Most nights, Moscow's Estrada Theater is alive and kicking with song-and-dance troupes. For the past two months, though, sellout crowds have packed the old hall to watch two men sit for hours at a table, each exquisitely immobile except for an occasional flick of the wrist. A whole line of swiveling chorines could not have elicited more excitement than those flicks, for the event was the world championship of chess, the No. 1 sport and all-round mania of the Soviet Union.

The defending champion was wily Tigran Petrosian, the former street cleaner who swept through the ranks of top chess players to win the world title in 1963. The challenger was bold, brilliant Boris Spassky, who closeted himself with a psychologist for six months to get in shape for the match. Their championship contest was only the seventh held in the past 21 years. The fact that once again, as in the previous six title matches, both men were from the U.S.S.R.* attests to the country's domination of the game. In team play, the Soviets have won every World Team Championship, held biennially, since 1952.

Sentimental Favorite. At least 4,000,000 people in the Soviet Union play chess regularly, including 30 of the 85 players in the world who are ranked as international grandmasters, the equivalent of karate's black belt. Every town from Khabaroush to Kiev has a chess club. Taxi drivers vent their pent-up hostilities across the boards during lunch breaks. City parks teem with chess hustlers. Soviet children, who learn the game in Young Pioneer youth groups, argue Sicilian defenses and queen's gambits with the same passion that American kids show when they talk about double plays and quarterback sneaks. Professionals of the caliber of Petrosian and Spassky, both of whom are paid handsomely as the coaches of trade-union teams, are recognized on the street wherever they go and asked advice about chess tactics.

Petrosian, an affable, absentminded man, was the sentimental favorite. His fellow Armenians kept their champion supplied with fresh cherries from home to bolster his diet and cheered him so boisterously at one point that authorities had to draw the curtains on the stage to allow the competitors to concentrate. Petrosian, who likes to stroll about or read the newspaper between moves in less important matches, slipped off to watch a hockey game between championship rounds, a practice unheard of for competing chess champions, who supposedly must keep their minds riveted to the board.

Spassky, after losing to Petrosian in the 1966 title match, was tautly primed for a comeback. While working his way through three years of preliminary matches, he swam daily laps and boned up on Psychological Analysis of a Chess Player's Thought by Nikolai Krogius, his mentor. Nonetheless, in the opening match of the 24-game title series, he inadvertently touched the wrong piece and, obliged by the rules to move it, lost the game.

Crushing the Crocodile. Capitalizing on his strong, versatile middle game, Spassky rallied to win the fourth, fifth and eighth games and go ahead by the score of 5 to 3 (players receive one point for each game they win, 1/2 point for a draw). The Armenians in the audience moaned. Said one official: "It was like the funeral of a father." Then Petrosian rallied. Baffling Spassky with his impenetrable defenses, he tied the score at 6 to 6. For the next six games, the contest was a standoff; one expert described it as a battle between "the young tiger who jumps on his prey and the old crocodile who waits for the right moment for the decisive blow." Then, in the crucial 19th game, Spassky quickly went to the attack and, with a flurry of brilliant closing moves, crushed the old crocodile.

Grandmasters covering the matches on TV and radio shook their heads. "As in any sport," said one authority, "age is the single most important factor in chess. At 32, Spassky is able to maintain that slight edge of sharpness that makes the difference at the very summit." Petrosian, visibly weary from the two-month grind, fell farther behind and eventually lost by a score of 12 1/2 to 10 1/2. One morning last week, the two contenders met at the Moscow Chess Club to sign a document that signified Spassky was the new world champion. It was Petrosian's 40th birthday.

* America's lone hope, Bobby Fischer, 26, again lived up to his reputation as the Brooklyn bad boy by dropping out of the preliminaries in a dispute over scheduling.

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