Shelby Lyman, 82, Dies; Unlikely Star of a Fischer-Spassky Broadcast

The Fischer-Spassky match was one of the most ballyhooed competitive events of the 1970s, a Cold War confrontation in Reykjavik, Iceland, between the two most brilliant chess players in the world, the elegant Russian grandmaster Spassky and the enigmatic American Fischer. It was the first professional match to offer a prize fund of $250,000 — an unheard-of amount then (the equivalent of more than $1.5 million today).

The match, beginning in July, was not scheduled to be televised live. But at PBS, seeking to capitalize on the event nonetheless — and to fill airtime during the slow summer months — producer Michael Chase conceived of a program that would follow the match, move by move, from afar. And he thought that Lyman, a top American player who had taught the game to Chase, would be the ideal person to host it.

The idea was to direct the program primarily to the public television viewership in New York, where Fischer, who had scraped his way out Brooklyn to become the most powerful player his country had ever produced, was a hometown hero. Then it would be made available to public TV outlets across the country.

Lyman set to work in a public TV studio in Albany, installing two upright demonstration chess boards — one to show the current position of the game in progress, the other to analyze it. A few chairs were reserved for guests, who in the early going were sometimes recruited from the local area based on whether they knew how to play the game.

A phone line was set up to relay moves from the match. Every time there was a move — 30 minutes might pass between one and the next — a bell would ding in the studio. Then a woman would come on to the set with a piece of paper listing the move.

No one expected the show to be a hit. It was chess, after all. But, astonishingly, it became the highest-rated program in public television history up to then.

On the first day of the show — July 11, 1972, when the match began — the plan was to go on for two hours, followed by updates. That plan changed quickly.

So many people called to praise the broadcast, Lyman told The New York Times in 2008, that “we pre-empted ‘Sesame Street,’ and we became a five-hour, move-by-move show.”

“And we did that for the next 21 games,” he said.

Though he was an accomplished player — he had been ranked as high as No. 18 in the country — the 35-year-old Lyman was an unlikely choice for television, a frizzy-haired, doughy-faced guide who had come to the show with zero TV experience. Yet he soon attracted a following, not least because of his unpolished manner — charmingly insouciant and sometimes bumbling.

During the broadcasts, Lyman, wearing a black suit in a hot studio, would run back and forth between the two boards with large cutouts of chess pieces stuffed into his pockets. Often as not, the pieces would tumble to the floor, and Lyman would stoop to retrieve them, all the while trying to maintain eye contact with the camera.

In the meantime, he would be receiving instructions from Chase, the impresario, through an earphone. Sometimes Lyman would look up, startled, as if he were searching for the disembodied voice, and bark out, “What’s that, Mike?”

Within a week the show was regularly drawing 1 million viewers in New York City and another million or more from around the country. At one point, The New York Post did an informal survey of bars around New York City to see what they were watching. All but one were tuned to chess.

And much to the satisfaction of New Yorkers, if not Americans everywhere, Fischer won the match and, from Mayor John V. Lindsay, received the key to the city.

Shelbourne Richard Lyman, who preferred to go by Shelby, was born on Oct. 22, 1936, to Rachel and Louis Lyman in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where his father was an intern. He grew up in the Dorchester section of Boston and went to Boston Latin School and then Harvard University, graduating in 1961 with a degree in social relations that covered psychology, anthropology and sociology.

He moved back to New York City after graduation, where he worked for 3 1/2 years as a lecturer in sociology at City College before becoming a full-time chess teacher.

Shelby had learned chess at age 9 from his uncle Harry Lyman, who had been New England champion. By his midteens, Shelby had won the Boston Championship. At 27, he won the championship of the Marshall Chess Club in New York, one of the country’s oldest and strongest clubs.

The PBS show did not make him rich; indeed, he wasn’t paid at all, though his expenses were covered. His plans to write books and otherwise profit from his celebrity mostly fizzled out as the Bobby Fischer-inspired chess mania subsided in the United States, partly a result of Fischer’s decision to go into self-imposed exile and not play again publicly for another 20 years. Lyman was able to make a living by writing a syndicated chess column that ran in as many as 82 newspapers at its peak.

He did get a chance to reprise his role as a chess commentator on public television in 1986, when he handled the broadcast for the world chess championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, which Kasparov narrowly won.

In addition to his wife, Lyman’s survivors include three stepchildren, Charles, Corey and Casey Goff. A first marriage ended in annulment; a second, to Marcy May, ended in divorce.

If the show did not bring Lyman lasting fame, it did give him a taste of at least temporary stardom. Bruce Pandolfini, a chess master and teacher who was recruited to provide expert analysis on the broadcast, recalled having dinner with Lyman in a New York City restaurant one evening when suddenly a man rushed over exclaiming, “Shelby Lyman? I am so glad to meet you.”

Lyman replied, “Do I know you?”

He did not recognize the actor Dustin Hoffman.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Shelby Lyman, 82, Dies; Unlikely Star of a Fischer-Spassky Broadcast

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