Henrique Mecking

◇Santa Cruz do Sul and the national title

Henrique da Costa Mecking was born in Santa Cruz do Sul on 23 January 1952. In his introduction to Mequinho: O Xadrez de um Grande Mestre (2010), the collection of his games he wrote with Adriano Caldeira, he says his mother taught him chess at five. In São Lourenço do Sul his teacher was the police chief João Manuel Mena Barreto, who taught him endgames and told him he had the talent to become world champion. He won his state championship at eleven. In 1965, aged 13, he won the Brazilian championship in Rio de Janeiro by two and a half points: after losing in the fifth round he had 3 points from 5 games, and he then drew one game and won his last ten. Mecking recalled that after he beat the tall, heavily built Olício Gadia, a Rio newspaper reported the game as David beating Goliath. He won the title again in 1967.

Four players, Mecking, Oscar Panno, Julio Bolbochán and Alberto Foguelman, shared first place in the 1966 South American Zonal at Termas de Río Hondo, and only three could go on to the Interzonal. Mecking won the play-off in Buenos Aires in early 1967, and the qualification brought him the International Master title, confirmed at the FIDE Congress in Venice that October. At Sousse later in 1967 he played his first Interzonal at 15, beating Viktor Korchnoi and Aivars Gipslis.

◇Grandmaster

His talent had already impressed Wolfgang Unzicker at the Lugano Olympiad in 1968. After losing to the sixteen-year-old Brazilian, Unzicker compared him to Morphy and Fischer. Kasparov records the remark in Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors, Part IV, immediately before Game 88.

After a second Interzonal at Palma de Mallorca in 1970, where he beat the former World Champion Vasily Smyslov, Mecking won the Boris Kostić Memorial at Vršac in 1971 and finished third with Robert Byrne at Hastings 1971/72, behind the joint winners Anatoly Karpov and Korchnoi. Mecking recalled that Hastings, which ended on 21 January 1972, two days before his 20th birthday, earned him the grandmaster title, ratified after he had turned 20. He was the first Brazilian grandmaster.

◇Two Interzonals

At Petrópolis in 1973 Mecking won the Interzonal with 12 points from 17 games, without a loss, ahead of a field that included Paul Keres and David Bronstein. In the Candidates quarter-final at Augusta in 1974 he lost to Korchnoi 5½–7½. In 1975 he twice shared second place behind Ljubomir Ljubojević, at Las Palmas, where he beat Mikhail Tal, and at Manila.

After his 1973 Interzonal win, Mecking announced that only he and Karpov could take Fischer's world title. Kasparov preserves the claim in Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors, Part V (p. 226). After Fischer lost the title in 1975 by refusing to play Karpov, Mecking tried to arrange a match with Fischer himself; he writes that he spent several days in Caracas with Florencio Campomanes, later president of FIDE, but the match never took place.

In Brazil he was a popular figure in the 1970s. In his preface to the book, Caldeira recalls Mecking's appearance on Chacrinha's television show, his picture on the cover of the magazine Veja on 22 August 1973, a mention in a Raul Seixas song, and a Mequinho chess set made by the toy company Gulliver.

He won the Manila Interzonal of 1976 with 13 points from 19 games; his only loss was to Boris Spassky. In the 1977 Candidates quarter-final at Lucerne he lost to Lev Polugaevsky 5½–6½. Mecking recalled that his second, Sergio Mariotti, stayed only until the second game and was replaced by Juan Manuel Bellón, and that his illness was already beginning: the first sign was a weakened voice, and a month later it broke out fully. His rating reached 2635 in January 1977, and a year later he was third in the world, behind Karpov and Korchnoi.

◇Illness and return

In 1978 Luiz Tavares da Silva, a former president of the Brazilian Chess Confederation, arranged his admission to a hospital in Houston, where the illness was diagnosed as myasthenia gravis. Mecking began the Rio de Janeiro Interzonal of 1979 with a draw against Borislav Ivkov and then withdrew, seriously ill. The illness was so severe that it was widely believed he would die, and he did not play chess in the 1980s. He is a convert to Catholicism, to which he credits the improvement in his health, and a member of the Catholic charismatic renewal.

He came back in 1991 with a match against Predrag Nikolić, followed in 1992 by a match against Yasser Seirawan, but he did not again come close to the Candidates. After the 1995 zonal in São Paulo, where he failed to qualify for the Interzonal, he stopped playing for another five years; he writes that he was thinking of becoming a priest and had finished seminary in 1992. He returned in 2000 with a match against Giovanni Vescovi in São Paulo.

◇Later career

Mecking played for Brazil at the Olympiads of 1968, 1974, 2002 and 2004. In 2006 he won the Lodi Open in Italy, and in 2008 he played the Kings Tournament at Bazna, where he beat Jan Timman. In September 2009 he drew a four-game match with Alexandr Fier, then Brazil's top-rated player, 2–2 in São Paulo, and in 2011 he returned to the Brazilian championship and finished third.