Bobby Fischer's own record reads as a competitive chess biography: eleventh World Chess Champion, a record eight United States Championships beginning at age fourteen, one of them swept with a perfect 11-0 score. Read the same record as a sequence of public spectacles rather than a list of titles and a different shape appears. Fischer reached the 1972 World Championship by defeating Mark Taimanov 6-0 and Bent Larsen 6-0, back to back sweeps so lopsided they became stories in their own right, before beating Tigran Petrosian in a further match. By the time he reached Reykjavik, Iceland to face the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky, the match itself was already being publicized as a Cold War confrontation, and it drew more worldwide interest than any chess championship before or since. The chess itself decided the title, but the two shutout qualifying wins had already written the story the world was watching before a single game of the championship was played.