Bobby Fischer: The Times obituary
from Times Online, January 18, 2008, by GM Raymond Keene
Bobby Fischer, the brash, unschooled chess genius from Brooklyn who toppled the might of the Soviet chess system before his 30th birthday, is the only North American World Champion and was the only non-Soviet or non-Russian title holder between the Second World War and the victory of Indian Viswanathan Anand in October last year.
Fischer's taking of the World Championship from Boris Spassky in 1972 was hailed as a symbolic moment for American hopes in the Cold War, and in many ways, Fischer's story epitomized the self-reliant, frontier ideals of Americans. (It also inspired Chess, the musical).
Yet Fischer was a deeply disturbed man, and the dream evaporated after his victory in Reykjavik. Dramatically, Fischer renounced chess after failing to agree terms for his defense of the title and did not play a single competitive game for 20 years. Instead he descended into paronaoia, characterized by hate-filled and poisonously anti-Semitic outbursts against his own country.
Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943 to a Jewish mother and a German father (though his actual paternity has been a subject of speculation). His parents split when he was 2, and he moved with his mother and sister to New York. He took up chess aged 6 and soon became obsessed with the game, eventually dropping out of high school.
He won the US Championship at 14, thus qualifying for the World Championship Candidates Tournament of 1958, and becoming at the age of 15, the youngest Grandmaster in the world in the process. He performed very creditably, but the top Soviet players who dominated world chess had no problem handling him, and he was crushed 7-1 in his games against Tal and Petrosian.
His reaction in the renewed failure in 1962 qualifying event in Curacao was passionate, accusing the elite contenders of playing as a team, and refusing to countenance participation until the tournament system had been replaced by a series of matches and tournament thereafter often featured similarly brusque demands, and his career was interrupted more than once by long periods of withdrawals from international chess.
When he did play, it was obvious that a remarkable talent had emerged. His sharp, clear and vigorous style, his breathtaking speed of play and massive determination at the board made him a legend even before he won the world title.
He first sprang to prominence, when he won a brilliant game at the age of 13 in 1956 against the American master Donald Byrne. This game involved an amazing queen sacrifice, it went round the world and became known as the game of the century. It propelled Fischer's career in a way that no amount of first prizes in tournaments could possibly have done. He once won the US Championship with an 11-0 score and, in the Candidates' Matches of 1970-1, he succeeded in winning his first two matches against Taimanov and Larsen by six games to nil.
Fischer's World Championship match with Spassky was also characterized by his detailed demands and his near-refusal to play. After nerve-wrenching brinkmanship, Fischer condescended to sit at the board, persuaded by a personal telephone appeal from Henry Kissinger and the injection of considerable last-minute extra funds by British millionaire Jim Slater.
He began to play magnificent chess, which he backed up with an extraordinary battery of off-the-board protests that must have put great psychological pressures on both players. Fischer did not turn up for the second game, which was awarded to Spassky by forfeit; for the third game, Fischer insisted on the exclusion of all TV and film cameras and that the game should be conducted in a small closed room.
Has Spassky refused, the subsequent history of world chess might have been very different; Fischer won his first ever game against Spassky and quickly went on to establish a lead in the match. The Russians ultimately and belatedly retaliated by having the hall swept of electronic and chemical equipment and X-raying the players' chairs. The result of this exercise in paranoia was the discovery of two dead flies in the light fitting.
The match ended in an emphatic victory for Fischer, yet, after his recent Candidates performances, the 12.5-8.5 score actually lost him rating points.
The 6th game was widely regarded as the most elegant. The Argentine connoisseur Grandmaster Miguel Najdorf compared it to a symphony by Mozart. Harry Golombek, chess correspondent of The Times, who was present at the match added: "One very nice touch was that Spassky joined in the applause at the end.
Fischer being human was affected by this, but as he subsequently told a friend, he had to hurry away to hide his feelings. "What a gentleman Spassky is,' Fischer is reported to have said. However, he wanted to restrain such feelings for fear that they would interfere with the tigerish quality which he regarded as essential for crushing an opponent."
Fischer's demands performed one lasting service to the followers of chess and to his fellow-professionals. The vast prize of modern prize funds is a direct result of his insistence that chess players should be paid on a scale comparable with champions in other sports. And his cult of invincibility created a massive upsurge in the popularity of chess, particularly in the West, having shown that the Soviet stranglehold on the game could be broken.
The contest seemed to have strangely traumatic effects on both players: Spassky subsequently disappeared into a shell of caution, Fischer into self-imposed exile, like that of Paul Morphy, the earlier American genius. He forfeited his title after refusing to defend it against Anatoly Karpov in 1975.
He lived a peripatetic existence, abandoning conventional chess and promoting both his own form of the game, involving a semi-random arrangement of the pieces on the first rank, and a method of time control involving time being added after each move: the later has achieved greater currency in chess circles.
He did not even visit a chess club, or chess event as a spectator until his profitable but competitively meaningless "return match" with Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992. But Yugoslavia was then the subject of US sanctions, and Fischer was threatened with prison if he took part - a warning he literally spat on at a press conference. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he never returned to the US.
Fischer occasionally surfaced elsewhere, condemning the "stinking Jews" whom he accused of plotting to dominate the world (the Holocaust was dismissed as "a money-making invention"), and the "brutal, evil dictatorship" of the US. On Filipino radio in 2001 he hailed the attacks of September 11 as "wonderful news. It is time to finish off the US once and for all."
In 2004 he attempted to fly out of Japan, where he had been living with his long-term Japanese partner, Miyoko Watai, head of the Japan Chess Association. The US authorities had, however, revoked Fischer's passport, apparently without telling him, and he was detained at Narita airport. He was held for almost nine months while the US attempted to have him extradited.
The Icelandic government, with fond memories of 1972, offered him residency. This was not enough for the Japanese, but after Iceland's parliament unanimously voted to give him full citizenship, he was flown to Reykjavik, where his arrival was broadcast live and crowds turned out to greet him. Iceland's welcoming of Fischer drew international criticism, but the Icelandic ambassador to the US said the decision was a humanitarian one, unrelated to Fischer's noxious views. Fischer, he said, should be "considered the subject of pity, rather than hatred."
Bobby Fischer, chess champion, was born on March 9, 1943. He died of kidney failure on January 17, 2008, aged 64.
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