You have to be a little crazy to be passionate about chess. Spending endless hours memorizing variations of the Nimzo-Indian Defense and more endless hours moving little pieces of wood around on a board isn't a pursuit for the completely rational.
Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest players of all time and considered by many to be the greatest American player ever, took both chess and craziness to new levels. He died last week at age 64 in Reykjavik, Iceland, where his own eccentricity had exiled him.
The Chicago-born Fischer got his first chess set at age 6, and the achievements came quickly - youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Chess Championship (1956), youngest ever to be ranked as a Grandmaster (1958), youngest ever to win the U.S. Chess Championship (1958).
But it was the world championship match against Soviet star Boris Spassky that captured the imagination of Fischer's fellow Americans and established his place as an icon not just in the rarefied world of high-level chess but in popular culture. Through July and into August of 1972, instead of baseball games, TV sets in bars across America were tuned to PBS to watch the play-by-play of the match from Reykjavik.
Fischer reamed the Russian, 12 points to 8 - roughly the equivalent of one football team beating another by 42-14. The victory, at a time when the US and USSR were still hotly engaged in the Cold War, made Fischer both a celebrity and a national hero. He met President Nixon at the White House. He was on the cover of Life and Sports Illustrated.
But chess prodigies tend to burn out early, and Fischer followed the pattern. Withdrawing behind a wall of reclusiveness and hostility, he refused huge financial offers to play Spassky again while becoming involved with fringe religions and, reportedly, neo-Nazi ideology. Voluntarily exiling himself from his native country, Fischer lived in obscurity in Japan, Hungary, the Philippines and Switzerland before finally renouncing his U.S. citizenship and moving to Iceland in 2005. He surfaced from time to time in radio broadcasts in which he railed against the United States and "the international Jewish conspiracy." (His mother was a Jew.) On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk show host in the Philippines that the terrorist attack was "wonderful news" and called for President Bush's death - remarks that got him booted out of the United States Chess Federation.
But in the end it will be for his contributions to the game, not his crazed rants, that Fischer will be remembered. "After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art," chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini told the Times, "hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being."
