Bobby Fischer, who died a melancholy exile's death Friday at age 64, was that most perplexing of human characters -- a protean genius and a repellent man. He was to American chess what Ezra Pound was to American poetry.
Nearly four decades ago, in the summer of 1972, Fischer was something more -- a participant in what then seemed to be the ultimate contest between American individualism and Soviet collectivism. When he went to Reykjavik, Iceland, to play Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky for the world championship, the 29-year-old Fischer was everything an American hero was supposed to be: the son of a hardworking single mother, a self-made grandmaster who had taught himself the game from the instructions that came with a chess set purchased in the candy store downstairs from his Brooklyn apartment.
Spassky was a quintessential representative of the vast Soviet chess establishment, which included institutes devoted to the study of the game and that treated its successful players as national heroes. He arrived in Iceland as the reigning world champion, accompanied by physical therapists, chefs, a tennis partner and dozens of coaches and grandmasters to help him analyze Fischer's every move.
The notoriously eccentric Fischer -- whose antipathy toward the Soviets was storied -- skipped the opening ceremony and had to be coaxed back into playing at all by a phone call from Henry Kissinger, who appealed to his patriotism. Fischer lost the first two games, then went on to crush Spassky in a match that ushered in a new global enthusiasm for chess.
It was a high-water mark for both Fischer and the illusion that sports could somehow become a nonviolent venue into which the competition between the world's political systems could be channeled. Shortly afterward, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and that illusion was dead forever.
Fischer gave up his title without ever defending it. Most of his remaining years were given over to crank religiosity and paranoid bigotry. Despite the fact that his mother and, probably, his biological father were Jews, Fischer became a Holocaust denier and an ever more virulent anti-Semite. He lived for many years in a series of increasingly shabby Pasadena apartments and hotel rooms near his church's headquarters. In 1981, he was arrested there because he matched a bank robber's description and refused to give police his name.
