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Petersburg) in the 1960 World Student Team Championship. Three years later, in a defining moment, he led the United States to an historic gold-medal winning performance ahead of the strongly-favoured Soviet Union in Leningrad (now St. In 1957, in Toronto, Canada, Lombardy became the first American to win the World Junior Chess Championship title, and doing so with a perfect score of 11/11, a record that still stands today. On the right Jerry Spann, Raymond Weinstein, and Bill Lombardy on their way to the historic 1960 World Student Team Championship | Photos: U.S. chess stars, only to then being eclipsed by Fischer and becoming his close confidant as he reached the summit.īill Lombardy’s first front cover for ‘Chess Review’ in October 1954, after becoming the youngest-ever New York state champion in 1954. Being Fischer’s senior by six years, it was Bill who proved to be the first to usher in that exciting new generation of U.S. "Lombardy might have been the greatest of his generation if Bobby hadn’t come along." And Brady wasn’t far from the truth here. "It’s kind of like Mozart and Salieri," once said Frank Brady, former president of the Marshall Chess Club and Fischer’s biographer. However, during an era that witnessed Fischer explode upon the scene, Lombardy found himself having to be content to play second fiddle with his teenage talents never being fully recognised - and although he was forever overshadowed by Fischer, Lombardy seemed quite content to be a privileged eyewitness to somebody transforming the sport forever, and recently that friendship and association was immortalised in a Hollywood movie. He soon took to the game and began frequenting chess clubs across the city, including a 1954 visit to the Manhattan Chess Club, where he first befriended an 11-year-old Bobby Fischer, and both standout prodigies were prepared for chess stardom by legendary chess coach Jack Collins. This article was reproduced from CHESS Magazine January/2018, with kind permission.īorn on 4th December 1937 to a Polish mother and an Italian father, Bill Lombardy grew up in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, New York, where he was taught to play chess at the age of 9 by a neighbourhood friend. Paying tribute to a great figure by John Henderson
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