Fischer Obituary in Economist (excellent read)
- From: raylopez99 <raylopez99@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:42:15 -0800 (PST)
Wonder how that hero from the book that coincidentally mirrors
Fischer's life died? You know the one, where the protagonist lives in
a house like a rook?
RL
Bobby Fischer
Jan 24th 2008
From The Economist print editionBobby Fischer, an unsettling chess-player, died on January 17th, aged
64
PEOPLE were always coming to get Bobby Fischer. And he was ready for
them. In a locked suitcase he kept bottles and bottles of vitamin
pills and herbal potions and a large orange-juicer, in case they tried
to put toxins in his food. His most precious memorabilia--match
notebooks, photo albums, letters from President Nixon--were kept in a
filing cabinet in a safe behind two combination locks in a ten-by-ten
storage room in Pasadena, California. In the end, as he railed to
radio talk-show hosts in Hungary and the Philippines, even all this
couldn't keep him safe from Russians, or Jews, or "CIA rats who work
for the Jews". But he had tried.
They tried to disrupt his chess games, too. As he wrestled for the
world championship against Boris Spassky at Reykjavik in 1972 they
poked whirring TV cameras over his shoulder. They made the board too
shiny, reflecting the lights, and fidgeted and coughed until he
cleared out the first seven rows of the audience. By the third game he
insisted on retreating to a tiny back room, where he could think. He
was always better in dingy, womb-like spaces: the cabinet room of the
Marshall Chess Club in New York City, where as a boy he skipped school
to spend his mornings reading through old file-cards of 19th-century
games; a particular table in the New York Public Library, where he sat
for hours immersed in chess history, openings and strategy; or the
walk-up family flat in Brooklyn where, once his mother and sister had
moved out, he set up continuous chess games beside each bed, ignoring
the outside sunshine to compete against himself. If you could see
inside his brain, as his enemies no doubt hoped to, you would find it
primed to attack and defend in every way possible, with a straight-
moving rook or a sidling bishop, or with both in his favourite Ruy
Lopez opening, or with the queen swallowing an early pawn in the
"poisoned" version of the Sicilian, or a thousand others. At
Reykjavik, when Mr Spassky was advised between games by 35 Russian
grand masters, Mr Fischer had a notebook and his own long, lugubrious,
clever head. And he won.
That made him a cold-war hero. The quirky individual had outplayed the
state machine, and America had thrashed the Soviet Union at its own
favourite game. But Mr Fischer, for all his elegant suits and
childhood genius, his grandmastership at 15 and his 20-game winning
streak at championship level in 1968-71, was always an unsettling
poster-boy. His objective, he told everyone, was not just to win. It
was to crush the other man's mind until he squirmed. And, in proper
capitalist style, to get rich. At his insistence, the championship
money was raised from $1,400 to $250,000; from the rematch with Mr
Spassky in 1992, which he also won, he took away $3.5m. Since few
venues, even Qatar or Caesar's Palace, offered him enough to make
public playing worth his while, he spent the years after 1975 (when he
forfeited his world title by refusing to defend it) largely wandering
the world like a tramp, castigating his enemies. Only cold, eccentric
Iceland welcomed him.
A house like a rook
What exactly was wrong with Bobby Fischer was a subject of much
debate. The combination of high intelligence and social dysfunction
suggested autism; but he had been a normal boy in many respects,
enjoying Superman comics and going to hockey games. He had got mixed
up in the 1960s with the Worldwide Church of God, a crazed millenarian
outfit, and perhaps had learned from them to hate and revile the Jews;
though he was Jewish himself, with a Jewish mother who had tried
psychologists and the columns of the local paper to cure him of too
much chess, but who still couldn't stop the pocket set coming out at
the dinner table.
Possibly--some said--he had been unhinged by the American government's
stern pursuit of him after the 1992 rematch, which was played
illegally in the former Yugoslavia. He cursed "stinking" America to
his death, and welcomed the 2001 terrorist attacks as "wonderful news"--
at which much of the good he had done for chess in his country, from
inspiring clubs to instructing players to simply making the game, for
the first time, cool, drained away like water into sand.
Perhaps, in the end, the trouble was this: that chess, as he once
said, was life, and there was nothing more. Mr Fischer was not good at
anything else, had not persevered in school, had never done another
job, had never married, but had pinned every urgent minute of his
existence to 32 pieces and 64 black and white squares. He dreamed of a
house in Beverly Hills that would be built in the shape of a rook.
Within this landscape, to be sure, he was one of the world's most
creative players; no one was more scathing about the dullness of chess
games that were simply feats of memorising tactics. Most world-
championship games, he claimed, were pre-arranged, proof that the "old
chess" was dead, and rotten to the core. He invented a new version,
Fischer Random, in which the back pieces were lined up any old how,
throwing all that careful book-learning to the winds. Yet the grid
remained and the rules remained: attack, defend, capture, sacrifice.
Win at all costs. From this grid, and from this war, Mr Fischer could
never escape.
.
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