Fischer, a deranged genius
THE king is dead, the game over. Bobby Fischer perhaps
the greatest player in the history of chess has died of
kidney failure in his adoptive home, Iceland.
But the chess genius really died more than 30 years ago. He had
not played at a top level since he sensationally beat Boris Spassky
in their world championship match in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik,
in 1972. It was the most famous chess event ever played.
Fischer was always headline news. Tragically, after 1972, he
became a recluse, rootless, increasingly deranged, popping up
occasionally on unlikely radio stations to rail against the United
States and the Jews and the final straw for some to
applaud the attacks of September 11.
A former British chess champion, Bill Hartston, once said:
“Chess doesn’t drive people mad, it keeps mad people sane.”
Fischer embodied the truth of his remark. While he was playing
chess as a teenage
prodigy in Brooklyn, then taking on the might of the Soviet
Union, he inhabited a world he understood, the 64 squares that were
his home. “Chess is better than sex,” he was once reported to have
said.
When he found refuge in Iceland in 2005 he had been
imprisoned in Japan awaiting extradition to the US I went to
Reykjavik to join the welcoming committee. Naivety, unworldliness
and difficulty in coping with the world summed up Fischer.
While he had chess and was feted as the West’s great hope of
unlocking the Soviet stranglehold, he was OK. Without chess he was
anchorless and raged against the world, at times coming close to
madness.
I saw this at first hand on that trip to Iceland when he gave a
press conference. A journalist called Jeremy Schaap, whose father
had been a friend of Fischer in Brooklyn in the 1950s, was
there.
When he asked a question and mentioned his father, Fischer
suddenly turned. “I hate to rap people personally, but his father
many years ago befriended me %26#133;acted kind of like a father
figure, and then later, like a typical Jewish snake, he had the
most vicious things to say about me.” Fischer pressed on, his mania
growing, all paranoia and the Jewish conspiracy.
Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943 to a German father and a
mother of Jewish extraction. His parents divorced while he was an
infant, and his mother moved to Brooklyn.
The young Bobby buried himself in the game, and by 13 he became
the youngest player to win the US junior championship. A year
later, he was US chess champion, and by the age of 15, the youngest
person ever to hold the title of grandmaster.
In 1970 he won 20 games in a row against the best grandmasters
in the world.
It was the 1972 match in Reykjavik that sealed Fischer’s fame.
He triumphed brilliantly, the first game he had ever won against
Spassky. It should have been the beginning of a wonderful reign. In
fact, it was the end. Fischer did not play in any of the great
tournaments after 1972.
After that his wanderings became ever more self-defeating. He
moved to the west coast and a spell with a Californian religious
cult. The US sued him for unpaid taxes.
He returned to the board in 1992 to play an exhibition match
against his old foe, Spassky, in Yugoslavia. This at the height of
the civil war in the Balkans. After this match, he never returned
to the US.
GUARDIAN
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Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 12:16 am under