Bobby Fischer
TWO GREAT sportsmen of the 20th century had always fascinated me for their idiosyncrasies and extraordinary IQ – John McEnroe, the popular American who won at SW19 in 1981, 1983 and 1984 and Bobby Fischer, the American chess prodigy who defeated the Soviet Union’s best player at the height of the Cold War to become the only United States world champion. After winning the great laurels he called it a day and spent the next three decades in self-imposed exile and died of kidney failure in Reykjavik, Iceland, hospital at an early age of 64.
Robert James Fischer was born on March 9, 1943, in Chicago. His parents divorced and Fischer’s mother Regina, who was of German Jewish descent, moved Bobby and his sister, Joan, to California, then to Arizona, and finally to New York. At Brooklyn, Bobby learned from his sister how to play chess at an age of six. He became a mature player at an early age of eight years. He was a high school drop-out and became the youngest US national champion at 14, and an international grandmaster a year later.
He was the greatest US player in the world of chess. While many world champions were guided and oriented by the team of chess strategist, Fischer worked as an individual practicing against himself. He was known for unpredictable tactics and flamboyant attacks. According to fellow grandmaster Garry Kasparov the gap between Fischer and his contemporaries was the largest ever. The popularity of chess in the US is widely attributed to Fischer’s compelling victory.
Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in a two-month long match; it was in Reykjavik in 1972. It was a match which had kept the world spell bound, transfixed and mesmerised and had since gone into folklore. He has his unique predilections and at one point, insisted the match be relocated to a room not much bigger than a closet because he was bothered by the sound of television cameras.
Fischer’s victory in that match was a revolutionary moment in the international sports. Fischer characterised ‘this little thing between me and Spassky’ as no less than ‘the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians’ and ‘a microcosm of the whole world political situation’.
Though an acknowledged American hero, Fischer never enjoyed the praise or hyperbole. He never employed claques and hated the empty admiration. Once he had told a reporter, “The creeps are beginning to gather.” Shelby Lyman, who hosted public television’s coverage of the Fischer-Spassky match, told Atlantic Monthly Magazine in 2002, “He was referring to press, lawyers, agents — everyone he thought was out to take advantage of him. After that his whole life was about avoiding the creeps.”
He was a great recalcitrant who he had grown more vitriolic in his denunciations of the US and its policies. After the attacks of September 11, he gave a radio interview praising the terrorists and urging the arrest of all US Jews.
People usually think of him in suits but in later life Fischer often sported a long, unkempt beard and baseball cap. In 1981, he was arrested after being mistaken for a bank robber in California.
Fischer was arrested in 2004 at a Japanese airport, and was accused of trying to leave the country on a revoked passport. He was detained for eight months. After considering his deportation to the US, the authorities released him to Iceland in 2005, after the country offered him citizenship.
Fischer died in January 2008. Since his death, there has been an ongoing fight over his estate involving competing claims by Marilyn Young, Jinky’s mother; Miyoko Watai, the head of the Japanese Chess Association, who said she married Fischer in 2004; and two of Fischer’s nephews, Alexander and Nicholas Targ. The estate is said to be worth at least two million dollar and Fischer left no will.The remains of Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion, were exhumed on Sunday (July 4) night in the cemetery of Laugardaelir Church in Iceland, according to a report in ‘The Reykjavik Grapevine’. The exhumation was ordered by the Supreme Court last month to determine if Fischer is the father of Jinky Young, a nine-year-old Filipino girl. He remained an enigma in life and a prodigy in death.
