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Bobby Fischer, an unsettling chess-player, died on January 17^th aged 64
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Ai điếu Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer, an unsettling chess-player, died on January 17^th 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 Reykjaavik 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 19thhcentury 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 favorite 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 favorite game. But Mr. Fischer, for all his elegant suits and childhood genius, his grand mastership at 15 and his 2o-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 memorizing 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.

The Economist 26 Jan, 2008
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APPRECIATION

The Chessman.

Yes, he had deep flaws. But Bobby Fischer should be remembered for his genius

BY GARRY KASPAROV

IT IS HARD TO SAY EXACTLY when I first heard the name Bobby Fischer, but it was quite early in my life. When he was battling Boris Spas sky for the world title in 1972, I was a 9-year-old club player in my native Baku in the Soviet Union. I followed the games avidly. The newspapers had extensive daily coverage of the match, although that waned as it became clear the Soviet champion was headed for defeat. Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games was one of my first chess books. (It had been translated into Russian and sold in the U.S.S.R. with no respect for copyright or royalties, infuriating its author.)

As I improved during the 1970S, my coach, Alexander Nikitin, made charts to track my progress and to set goals for me. A rating above 2500 was grand master; 2600 meant membership in the Top 10; 2700 was world-champion territory. And even above that was Bobby Fischer, at the very top with 2785. I became world champion in 1985, but true to Nikitin's vision, I had an even loftier goal; it took me four full years to surpass Fischer's rating record.

It was Fischer's attitude on and off the board that infused his play with unrivaled power. Before Fischer, no one was ready to fight to the death in every game. No one was willing to work around the clock to push chess to a new level. But Fischer was, and he became the detonator of an avalanche of new chess ideas, a revolutionary whose revolution is still in progress.

At Fischer's peak, even his adversaries had to admire his game. At the hallowed Moscow Central Chess Club, top Soviet players gathered to analyze Fischer's crushing 1971 match defeat of one of their colleagues, Mark Taimanov. Someone suggested that Taimanov could have gained the upper hand with a queen move, to which David Bronstein, a world-championship challenger in 1951, replied, "Ah, but we don't know what Fischer would have done."

Not long afterward, the grim Soviet sports authorities dragged in Taimanov and his Briefing peers to discuss Taimanov's inability to defeat the American. How had he failed? Was he not a worthy representative of the state? Spassky finally spoke up: "When we all lose to Fischer, will we be interrogated here as well?"

By World War II, the once strong U.S. chess tradition had largely faded. There was little chess culture, few schools to nurture and train young talent. So for an American player to reach world-championship level in the 1950S required an obsessive degree of personal dedication. Fischer's triumph over the Soviet chess machine, culminating in his 1972 victory over Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, demanded even more.

Fischer declined to defend his title in 1975, and by forfeit, it passed back into the embrace of the Soviets, in the person of Anatoly Kasparov. According to all accounts, Fischer had descended into isolation and anger after winning that final match game against Spassky. Fischer didn't play again until a brief and disturbing reappearance in 1992, after which his genius never again touched a piece in public. Having conquered the chess Olympus, he was unable to find a new target for his power and passion.

I am often asked if I ever met or played Bobby Fischer. The answer is no, I never had that opportunity. But even though he saw me as a member of the evil chess establishment that he felt had robbed and cheated him, I am sorry I never had a chance to thank him personally for what he did for our sport.

Much has already been written about Fischer's disappearance and apparent mental instability. Some are quick to place the blame on chess itself for his decline, which would be a foolish blunder. Pushing too hard in any endeavor brings great risk. I prefer to remember his global achievements instead of his inner tragedies. It is with justice that Fischer spent his final days in Iceland, the place of his greatest triumph. There he was always loved and seen in the best possible way: as a chess player

Kasparov, author of How Life Imitates Chess, was the world's top-ranked player from 1985 until he retired from the game in 2005
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Critic's Gambit

FIELDS OF FORCE by GEORGE STEINER 86 pages. Viking Press. $8.95.
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  "Chess," as George Steiner indicates in this little antidote to Reykjavik's hyperbolic summer of '72, "may well be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. Bobby Fischer's assertion that it is 'everything' is merely necessary monomania. As for the maniac: "A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality."

In Fields of Force the symptoms are recalled with an intelligence that, like the champion's, has little room for compassion. Fischer's unstable personality, a fusion of Garbo and Barnum, is examined in all its two dimensions. The aging Wunderkind remains a prodigy, perhaps the most powerful grand master the world has ever witnessed. But from the opening gambit it is obvious that the author's affections are with Boris Spassky.

To be sure, Steiner admits, Bobby inoculated the world with chess fever singlehanded. Piling demands upon tantrums, he elevated the first prize from $3,000 to $2 million and transformed a board game into a blood sport. But Steiner, a literary critic first and a chess patzer second, is appalled by Fischer's xenophobic rancor, his avarice and below all, his literary taste (Fu Manchu, Tarzan and Playboy).

On the far side of the board, matters are more elevated: Steiner's Reykjavik encounter with the Russian was "a privilege. He is an individual of great charm and impeccable courtesy. In contrast to Fischer, Spassky's literacy is wide and his political awareness is at once subtle and adult." Yet as the admirer acknowledges, that cultivation may have undone Spassky. Despite the Russian's domination of the game for a decade, the Boris of Iceland displayed a literal and philosophical resignation in the face of Fischer's predatory inventions. The result was less drama than ritual: civilization vanquished by barbarism. Or was it decadence defeated by energy? Or was it an unconscious harbinger of detente?

As Steiner comes to acknowledge, the event that Fischer called "this little thing between me and Spassky" was not so minor after all. "To an extraordinary number of human beings," he concludes, "the events of that summer communicated a rare sense of intensity... for several months, a totally esoteric, essentially trivial endeavor, associated with pimply, myopic youths and vaguely comical old men on park benches, held the world enthralled."

There is no proper way to re-create that intensity on the board; despite the book's schematics, the actual play at Reykjavik was not the stuff of legend. It is the text that manages to capture the historic and psychological undercurrents that made everyone believe for a moment that chess was indeed "everything." Steiner calls his own chess prowess "risible." His book, however, is deadly serious. The men he moves are real.

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Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik (1974)
Author Info:
George Steiner
[Francis George Steiner]
04/23/1929-
Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
    -George Steiner, Fields of Force
Today, it is hard to imagine the sensation of Mr. Fischer's success when he wrested the world championship away from Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972. In the middle of the Cold War, the Brooklyn-raised iconoclast took the crown from the well-oiled Soviet machine that had dominated the chess world for decades. And this after he barely showed up for the match at all, and then lost the first game and forfeited the second!
Partially due to Mr. Fischer's outrageous behavior leading up to and during the "match of the century," the international media coverage was incredible. The games were shown live around the world. I was nine years old and already a strong club player when the Fischer-Spassky match took place, and I followed the games avidly. Fischer, who had crushed two other Soviet grandmasters on his march to the title match, nonetheless had many fans in the Soviet Union. They respected his chess, of course, but many quietly enjoyed his individuality and independence.
After the match ended in a convincing victory for the American, the world was at his feet. Chess was on the cusp of becoming a commercially successful sport for the first time. Mr. Fischer's play, nationality and natural charisma created a unique opportunity. He was a national hero whose popularity rivaled that of Muhammad Ali. (Would the secretary of state have called Ali before a fight the way Henry Kissinger called Mr. Fischer?) Sales of chess sets and books boomed, and tournament prize funds soared. With Bobby Fischer in the lead, chess was headed for the popularity of golf and tennis. [...]
Opportunities abounded, but Mr. Fischer's was a purely destructive force. He demolished the Soviet chess machine but could build nothing in its place. He was the ideal challenger--but a disastrous champion.
The conventional wisdom says that Bobby Fischer was a guileless and petulant child who just wanted his own way. I believe he was conscious of all his actions and the psychological effect his behavior had on his opponents. The gentlemanly Mr. Spassky was ill-prepared to deal with the belligerent American in Reykjavik. In 1975, Mr. Fischer's challenger was the young Mr. Karpov, whom I would later meet in five consecutive world championship matches.
Unable to even contemplate defeat, Mr. Fischer left chess. Bereft of the only thing he had ever wanted to do in his life, he turned his destructive energies inward, espousing a virulent anti-Semitism--despite his own Jewish heritage.
    -Fischer's Price: Chess may have been the only thing that kept the champion in touch with reality (Garry Kasparov, July 19, 2004 , Opinion Journal)
George Steiner is a critic whose reputation is the subject of considerable controversy, chiefly over the question of whether he knows as much as he leads his readers to believe he does. He is, as well, the author of the cringe-inducing novel, The Portage to San Cristobel of A.H., in which he, one assumes accidentally, makes Adolph Hitler something of a sympathetic character. This book, which he appears to be long out of print, is rather a curiosity, but one that invokes both these controversies at least tangentially. Published as The Sporting Scene: White Knights of Reykjavik in Britain, it collects Mr. Steiner's New Yorker coverage of the notorious Fischer/Spassky World Chess Championship of 1972. The author does manage to give the impression that he knows more about chess than any man who's ever lived, and that Fischer and Spassky would have been hard pressed to beat him. He is also, understandably, fascinated by the horrible behavior, cheap gamesmanship, egomania, and greed of Bobby Fischer. It could not have been known at the time just how disturbed Mr. Fischer really was--or perhaps he was not yet truly insane--but reading about him in retrospect it's clear that everyone, including Mr. Steiner, cut him way too much slack. It is sort of creepy to watch as Mr. Fischer, an exploiter himself, is exploited for his entertainment value even as alarms should have been going off somewhere about how unbalanced his mind was.
At any rate, the book succeeds as sports reportage, capturing the manic nature of the confrontation, the Cold War atmospherics surrounding it, and something of the tortured personality of Bobby Fischer. It's richly illustrated with game positions, but an appendix with notations of the actual games would have been useful. David Edmonds and John Eidinow wrote Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time just a couple years ago and it has probably supplanted this book's place as regards the topic, but this one still seems worth reading if for no other reason that Mr. Steiner was there to experience the tumultuous match personally.
(Reviewed:19-Nov-05)