It was 1972 and the height of the Cold War when a young American named Bobby Fischer and a Soviet citizen, Boris Spassky, faced each other across a chess board in an exhibition hall in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Grandmaster Robert Byrne was covering the event for the New York Daily News, after years of making his living as a professional chess player and a philosophy teacher. What Byrne, now a chess columnist for The New York Times, remembers about the Fischer-Spassky match was Fischer's eccentricity, his brilliant playing and the way the match captured the attention of the world.

At a press conference last week, Garry Kasparov called his rematch with Deep Blue the "most publicized chess event in history." Perhaps so. But previously, that title belonged to Fischer-Spassky.

"The fever caught everybody," Byrne, 69, recalls of the world championship match. "They were betting in the bars about which moves were going to be played next, even people who didn't know how to play chess."

At that time, Byrne says, chess opponents played on stage before an audience, with virtually nothing separating the players from the crowd. This drove the mercurial Fischer wild and led to his demand to have the first 20 rows of the audience emptied out. When that didn't work, he threatened to walk out and have the match cancelled. "He could hear a child wrinkle a candy wrapper 300 feet away," Byrne says. Fischer's team persuaded him to stay in the match by keeping him up all night and refusing to let him sleep until he agreed to stay. The next day, having had almost no sleep the night before, Fischer played against Spassky and won.

"Spassky was a talented player, but I knew Fischer would be too much for him," Byrne says.

In this week's match, Kasparov and an IBM Deep Blue team member have been playing in a soundproofed room while the audience watches the action 35 floors below on three video screens. Byrne is withholding judgment on who will win the match, except to say that "this machine is very strong."

Byrne started playing chess at the age of 8, inspired by the men he saw hunched over chess boards every day in a Brooklyn park. "I was curious," he says. "These people never talked to each other. They just played chess." He took classes at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, becoming one of the top American players in the late 1940s. In 1954, his younger brother, Donald, scored the highest of any U.S. team member in a historic chess match between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Donald died in 1976.

One of the ways chess has changed over the years, Byrne says, is that the stakes are higher. Kasparov will get $700,000 if he wins; in 1972, Fischer's win got him $156,000. But he thinks something has been overlooked in the man-vs.-machine nature of this contest. "It's a very bright team of IBM people who created Deep Blue," he says. "It's like the old song, 'You made me what I am today, I hope you're satisfied.'"

-- Julia Lawlor