The Pittsburgh Press from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 21

The Pittsburgh Press Friday, June 30, 1972 Page 21 SPORTS On Pages 24-26 EDITORIALS Next Page World Championship In Reykjavik Relentless, Fussy Fischer Faces Ch Title Wily Russian For decade, but at the last moment he always drew back. He charged that there was a Russian conspiracy to keep the world championship in Soviet hands. Plenty Of Complaints Conspiracy or not, no non-Russian has played in a championship match since 1951. There were other things Fischer complained about: the lighting was wrong, the flashbulbs were a nuisance, the crowds in the hall would not keep still. But mostly he held back from tournaments leading to the world championship ri -M I hi i i if '-(Im ml i iiiiiiiriMMrmiiiii A I ONE FOR THE BOOK Bobby Fischer', never far from a chess board, studies'a" book by Russian champ Boris Spassky at dinner for possible insights into the style of his opponent in the world championship tournament starting Sunday in Reykjavik.

MAN TO BEAT Boris Spassky, hero of Russia's national sport with "a great deal more to lose than Fischer" in Iceland, meets the press with Soviet international chess master Jivo Nei, left, and interpreter. U. S. To Let 5 Big Drug Firms, Nixon Contributors, Off Hook because he said the system was loaded in favor of the Russians. At first his objections were dismissed as petulant and unreasonable, because in the world of chess Bobby Fischer is not well liked.

An American grandmaster once said of him: "We get the greatest chess player in history, and he turns out to be a spoiled boy." But a fair analysis of the tournament system seemed to indicate Fischer had a point, and the current world championship is the first played under the reformed rules. May Stage Walkout There are other possibilities. One is that Fischer will find the conditions in Iceland not to his liking and stage another walkout. This could happen because of Bobby's recent falling-out with Lt. Col.

Edmund Edmundson (USAF, business manager of the U. S. Chess Federation who has devoted much of the last two years to keeping Bobby happy. During Fischer's spectacular demolition of his opposition in the preliminaries (including his 6-0 wipeouts of Denmark's Bent Larson and Russia's Mark Taimonov), Edmundson checked out the playing sites, found the quiet hotel rooms, kept flash cameras out of the hall, and hassled room service for chicken sandwiches and prize sirloins. Now Fischer, who finds it difficult to sustain long personal relationships, is back on his own.

A better possibility, I think, Is that Fischer will stay the distance, and that Spassky will collapse from a combination of psychological and chess reasons. Fischer is a dogged fighter who will defend a lost position to the bitter end, and there is this curious thing about his opponents: they keep caving in to extreme exhaustion. Tigran Petrosian, the former world champion who was Bobbv's opponent in the Buenos Aires semifinal match, had to check into a hospital at one point. Watches 'Em Squirm And Bent Larson, whose personal dislike for Fischer is no apparently found it psychologically torturing to sit across the board from this arrogant young man who "likes to see 'em squirm." Spassky may feel extra pressure because of his deliberate and classically correct playing style. Although Fischer's games have apparent clearness of a stream of fresh running water, they often have concealed within them Byzantine twists that only Bobby foiesecs.

Chess is a game nf legerdemain: your opponent can see all of your pieces, and you can see all of his, so you don't conceal pieces but ideas. A winning chess combination Is, at its most basic level, a ruthless demonstration of the logical superiority of your ideas. And Fischer is able to bury his ideas so deeply into his middle-game posi- charge of the case, was ordered to inform the judge that a "general understanding" had been reached to settle. Lord listened to the Justice Department's proposal. Prosecution would be dropped, Bernstein reported, in return for a $14.3 million payment by the drug firms.

The money would go to the U. S. Treasury; the overcharged customers would get nothing. Under this arrangement, not only would the patent-fraud case be dropped but the drug firms would be fined only a fraction of what they would risk losing in court. 'Rug Fulkd Out Lord replied: "It stings me just a little bit when the rug is pulled out from under me He indicated that the 1 1 1 would make it next to impossible for the victims to reclaim the millions they overpaid for tetracycline.

From competent sources, we have learned that the orders for a settlement came from then Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, who is now President Nixon's campaign manager. Richard Klcindienst, the new attorney general, had nothing to do with ordering the settlement. But the compromise hasn't yet reached the state of a final, formal announcement.

Final approval would now be up to Kleindicnst. A federal criminal case against Pfizer, meanwhile, is still pending after a conviction was reversed on technical grounds. Some consumer men are worried the Justice Department will try to kill these charges, too. Footnote: Mitchell and McLaren failed to return our calls. Kleindicnst told my associate, Lcs Whitten, that he had "no recollection" of the case.

Washington Whirl SPIRIT OF '76 Jack LeVant, the executive director of the American Revo-lution Bicentennial Commission, has found an ideal spot to reflect upon the hardships of Valley Forge and the frigid Delaware crossing. WASHINGTON The U. S. Justice Department is quietly preparing to settle another multimillion-dollar antitrust case which, like the celebrated ITT case, will benefit contributors to the Republican cause. ITT got a favorable settlement from the Justice artment after offering to help finance the Republican convention.

Now, department is about to let five bie drug Merry Go Round Sv I Jack Andtrsonl firms Pfizer, American Cyanamid, Bris-' tol-Meyers, Squibb and Upjohn-off the antitrust hook. Their corporate officers have filled the Nixon campaign chests with thousands of dollars. The ordinary taxpayers stand to lose hundreds of millions in overcharges for the drug, tetracycline. The Justice Department in 1969 charged Pfizer with "fraud" in obtaining its tetracycline patent. The other pharmaceutical firms were accused, in a civil suit, of unethicm practices and "unlawful conspiracies" in selling the antibiotic.

Fact Repayment If the fraud charge can be proved, the drug firms could be forced to pay back huge sums to consumers, medical groups, states and even foreign governments. But a few months ago, whispers of a settlement reached the ears of Federal Judge Miles Lord, the St. Paul, jurist hearing the case. Disturbed, he took the extraordinary step of speaking personally with Richard McLaren, then the Justice Department antitrust chief, about the rumors. Lord's concern turned out to be well-founded.

Not long afterward, Lewis Bern- stein, the Justice Department attorney in By Roger Ebert Nobody knows very much about him, and the few facts have been repeated time and again: He was born in Chicago, raised in several places but mostly in Brooklyn, learned chess from his sister when he was 6. He lives alone in hotel rooms, relentlessly studying the literature of chess. He has no close friends. He is 29 years old and for a long time now he has been considered the best chess player of all time. Sunday, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Bobby Fischer will find himself seated across a chess board from a stocky, fierce-looking Armenian named Boris Spassky.

This Armenian (he is almost always described as a "wily Armenian, because sports-page adjectives are in short supply for chess) is the chess champion of the world. And it will be Bobby Fischer's mission to reduce the number of Armenian chess champions to zero while raising the number in the United States to one. Bobby could have had a crack at the title several times during the pst He chose the sunny beaches of Jamaica, where he contemplated the rigors of 1776 in splendid luxury. The cost to the taxpayers: $121 a day. All told, LeVant has run up $8,450 in travel bills in his efforts to revive the Spirit of '76.

Reached in a hospital, where he is recovering from a back problem, he complained that our questions about travels were "threatening." Then, he clammed up, citing "doctors' orders." DRUG STORY We recently reported that the Record Club of America, the nation's largest disc club, was marketing marijuana aids and other drug paraphernalia along with its records and tapes. The moment Vice President George Port learned of our story, he conferred with his aides by telephone at 3 a. re-evaluated the drug-oriented catalogue and decided the Record Club would drop it completely. Soviets Shut 'China Zone' London Exoroii Sorvlc MOSCOW Russia has mysteriously sealed off a vast area of its land east of the River Volga. Foreign residents in Moscow diplomats and journalists have been told they cannot travel to the area, which includes such normally "open" towns as Irkutsk, Novosibirsk and Alma-ata.

'Try again in the middle of Westerners arc told. No reason is given for the travel ban. But rumors are buzzing in Moscow of big troop movements in the eastern sector of the Soviet Union, especially along the Chinese border. Some diplomats here predict that the Russians are strengthening their eastern forces because of rumors of the ill-health of China's Chairman Mao Tse-tung and hints of an upheaval in the Chinese leadership. magnets known; also those sturdy little magnates in our electric can openers.

Some of the alloys have low electrical resistance, and thus are good for transmitting electricity, but others with high resistance are employed in electric cooking and heating devices. Their tricks seem almost endless. They handle caustics and acids that can dissolve rocks as though they were lumps of sugar. They produce steels much stronger than steel alone, thus vast quantities of nickel are used by the steel industry. Why bring up the subject of nickel at this time, you may be wondering? Well, a person in Sudburgy for a few days, as I am while Peg Love recovers from a sudden illness, can hardly avoid learning something about nickel.

In Sudbury nickel is even more important than steel is In Pittsburgh. The city calls itself "The Nickel Capital of the World," and undoubtedly is. Vast underground workings are located around the community. The grey-black ore taken from them also contains copper, which the finders of the rich ore vein actually wanted, plus smaller quantities of 14 other elements, including gold and silver. International Nickel Co.

(INCO) has a huge ore reduction plant just west of Sudbury. A feature of this plant is a stack 1.250 feet high, or almost a quarter of a mile. Since we have been here, its top has usually been lost in the clouds. A tourist attraction is the dumping of molten slag from the smelters, almost exactly as steel slag was dumped over the sides of the great man-made moiin- -UPI Toleohotos pionship approaches, it is amusing to see the American news media gearing up for it. We have never been quite able to figure out how to cover thess.

It is a sport, but doesn't go into the spori pages. It is a game millions of Americans play, and yet American newspapers cannot quite bring themselves to believe that many readers understand chess notation. Live Broadcast Boggles Radio and television find it even hard to cover chess, because the printed record of the moves in a game is the only really satisfactory way of presenting it. The concept of a live radio broadcast of a chess match is mind-boggling, and perhaps only Bob and Ray could handle it lovely day here in Reykjavik, with sunny skies, and Cub Scout Pack 14 is in the stands for Bobby Fischer Recognition Day What will finally happen, I suppose, Is that Spassky and Fischer will have their rendezvous with destiny and a lot of people will not understand why it was so momentous. Chess is a game of the imagination, 'and its most exciting moments do not happen on the board but in the minds of its players.

When Fischer finally makes his move, that is what we see. But the game's passion is to be found in the secret places of his mind, where he considers all of the possible moves on the board, and rejects them, all but one. That moment of decision is private, and only a chess player can fully understand it. Chicago Sun-Time Servict Fischer Hides, May Seek Bigger Purse By PHILIP FINN NEW YORK Bobby Fischer, the 29-year-old grand master of chess and mystery, has been in "hiding" in New York while a row about him boils in Iceland. The Brooklyn-born genius booked into room 1003 at the elegant Yale Club on Tuesday and has rarely ventured out.

He has refused to comment or say anything about his forthcoming world championship match against Russia's Boris Spassky, scheduled to start in Reykjavik Sunday. He canceled scheduled flights there Tuesday and again Wednesday, and gave rise to speculation it was part of a war of nerves. But friends in New York and sources in Iceland indicate the chess man with the love of seclusion is hoping to get a better deal. He and Spassky are to share a purse of $125,000, the winner getting five-eighths after the 24-game match in a sports arena where tickets sell for $5. Fischer is believed 'to he seeking 3(J per cent from receipts from sales of television and film rights for the match.

Asked whether Fischer would keep his appointment with Spassky, a friend said: "I have no idea no one knows." London Exprttt Strvlct Off The Record 'Ajax Air Conditioning tions (or perhaps, to extract them from their subterranean hiding-places) that a positional player like Spassky, with his tendency to draw games, might find himself exhausted from forever waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is Fischer's willingness to take chances, and his ability to extract deep combinations from seemingly shallow positions, that make him a popular favorite in the Soviet Union. In a country where chess is the national sport, the national passion F.nd, some say, the national soul, there is an impatience with the conservative playing styles of many of the current Russian grandmasters. While Fischer was mowing down Larson, 6-0, with an unending flow of innovative chess, the Russians Petrosian and Korchnoi were bogged down in their quarterfinal match with eight drawn games in a row. This is also a record of sorts, but a sterile one.

And so the Russians like Fischer, the most popular American in the Soviet Union since Van Clibnrn. Maybe they don't like him personally, but they admire his style. Of the five games they have played previously, Spassky won three and there were two draws. But that doesn't necessarily mean much in terms of their championship match. Fischer is in the top of his form, and for the past year has played grandmaster-level chess with more success than any other player in the history of the game.

Spassky, however, came in third a year ago in a "Swiss system" tournament in Toronto (where players ranked as equal are played against each other). Interior First and second places were won by Pal Benko and Robert Byrne, two American grandmasters acknowledged to be Fischer's inferiors. And in this year's Alekhine Memorial Tournament in Moscow, Spassky finished in a discouraging tie for sixth place. Now he finds himself in Iceland as the sole remaining defender of Russian chess supremacy. Recently the Soviet government gave him a larger apartment and a car, and if he wins he will win $78,125, but if he loses, in Kotanowsky's words, "He has a great deal more to lose than Fischer." In the meantime, as the world cham- the city, home of the other giant nickel producer, the sulphur dioxide fumes from the pioneers' "bonfires" had a peculiar find unexpected effect.

They "preserved" whatever vegetation was left. So now you know all I do about nickel. The way they get the various metals out of the ore sounds interesting, but too complicated for an average mind like mine. I might point out, however, that the phenominal ore deposit here was discovered by accident, which often happens. Men building the Canadian Pacific Railway ran iijto it.

Canadian Jaunt Pays Off With Lesson On Value Of Nickel skins of moon shot booster rockets, which must withstand temperatures ranging from 297 degrees below zero to 1,200 degrees above zero. Nickel-bearing alloys that stretch with heat or shrink with cold make our thermostats work, but other alloys containing nickel make fine watch parts that don't change a millionth of an inch. Nickel alloys make the most' powerful dump wfier y'ant eo'ni gt act hill. By Gilbert Love SUDBURY, Ont. Thousands of persons connected with Pittsburgh's steel industry must know all about it, but I didn't know before coming here that the metal nickel is used in more than 3,000 alloys and coatings, many of them to do surprising tricks.

Stainless steel a mixture of nickel, chromium and iron makes the rustproof tablewear in our kitchens and the I 'Numismatic Park' atop Sudbury $aj 1 r1 Blackened hills near Sudbury burntd off by eary ore prospectors. tain along state Route 51 near Pleasant Hills. Another attraction is a "Numismatic Park" on top of an old slag dump at the city line. Displayed here are giant replicas of Canadian and U.S. coins.

Unfortunately, landscapes in and around Sudbury are dominated by blackened hills. Modern mining people explain that many early prospectors burned off the vegetation to get at the ore-bearing rocks. They completed the destruction of trees and grass by "roasting" their ore in huge "bonfires" to drive off the sulphur content. In the Falconbridge area northeast of.