Bobby Fischer square up

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Chess champion Bobby Fischer died

Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.

I first learned of Bobby Fischer when I was about 9 or 10 and someone bought me “The Jew in American Sport” that featured profiles of 3 chess players: Emanual Lasker, Sammy Reshevsky and Bobby Fischer. Given that Bobby Fischer first gained notice as a chess player when he was only a few years older than I was at the time, he became something of an idol. Of course my chess playing abilities were never championship caliber. But I don’t think that I comprehended that at the time. (See Just One Minute too.)

(It did happen that I had the opportunity to play Sammy Reshevsky at a demonstration as a freshman at YU. He played 30 students at once and won 29 games and drew one. Needless to say he beat me with ease. Bill Jempty, though, got a chance to get drubbed by Fischer. Of course, he’s also a more serious chess player than I am.)

In the Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer Bill Ordine writes about the state of sports and, I guess, detente at that time:

I was there for Fischer-Spassky. I was in the Navy, stationed at the NATO base in Keflavik doing pretty much what I still do. I was a Navy journalist. In between my normal duties, I occasionally got to go to the big city down the road. One of those days, I covered the chess match. I recall it went on forever and the hot dogs were made of lamb. And even with the confrontation being what it was — the young, brash American genius from Brooklyn against the established Soviet champion — it became increasingly difficult to root for Fischer as his eccentricities overwhelmed even an overwhelming sense of nationalism many of us felt at the height of the Cold War.

In short, Fischer was a jerk complaining about everything, making incessant demands. Spassky was gracious and urbane. Imagining what might happen to the Soviet back home if he lost, you could almost have some sympathy for him. In the end, Fischer prevailed and it was a great triumph for the U.S. But at the same time, the Summer Olympics were going on in Germany. The United States lost that controversial basketball game to the Soviets. And, of course, the Munich Massacre, where members of the Israeli delegation were killed, stunned the world and obliterated everything else going on in sports.

It’s funny that he was there. We flew over Iceland one of the days the match was going on; though I don’t know if a match was going at the time or if we even flew over Reykjavik. We were on our way back from Israel at the time.

A few years ago, amateur chess player and (one time) professional psychiatrist, Charles Krauthammer asked “Did Chess make him crazy?”

Why such proximity between genius and madness in chess? There are three possible explanations. One is that chess is a monomania. You study it intensively day and night from childhood if you are going to rise to the ranks of the greats, and that kind of singular focus constricts your reality and makes you more vulnerable to distortions of it. “A chess genius,” wrote George Steiner, “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.” Plausible, perhaps, but there are lots of folks who are monomaniacal in other “trivial” spheres and who come out psychically intact. Tiger Woods was raised from infancy to be a great golfer and is not just intact but graceful and charming. The ranks of great golfers, swimmers and Dominican shortstops are not more noticeably skewed to the deranged than the general population.

Well, then, this must be monomania of a certain sort. Chess is a particularly enclosed, self-referential activity. It’s not just that it lacks the fresh air of sport, but that it lacks connections to the real world outside–a tether to reality enjoyed by the monomaniacal students of other things, say, volcanic ash or the mating habits of the tsetse fly. As Stefan Zweig put it in his classic novella The Royal Game, chess is “thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance.”

But chess has a third–and unique–characteristic that is particularly fatal. It is not just monomaniacal and abstract, but its arena is a playing field on which the other guy really is after you. The essence of the game is constant struggle against an adversary who, by whatever means of deception and disguise, is entirely, relentlessly, unfailingly dedicated to your destruction. It is only a board, but it is a field of dreams for paranoia.

However in Bobby Fischer’s perfect death Gabriel Schoenfeld concludes not:

And while there have been several deranged grandmasters, whether the frequency of mental illness in this group is higher than the average rate among geniuses is doubtful.

But not before he recalls the contents of a disturbing letter that Fischer wrote to the Encyclopedia Judaica.

Two years later, he wrote to the Encylopedia Judaica asking for his entry to be removed (the underlinings are as in the original): Gentlemen:Knowing what I do about Judaism, I was naturally distressed to see that you have erroneously featured me as a Jew in ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA. Please do not make this mistake again in any future editions of your voluminous, pseudo-authoritative publication. I am not today, nor have I ever been a Jew, and as a matter of fact, I am uncircumcised.I suggest rather than fraudulently misrepresenting me to be a Jew, and dishonestly abusing my name and reputation as a kind of advertising gimmick to improve the image of your religion (Judaism), you try to promote your religion on its own merits — if indeed it has any!In closing, I trust that I am not being unrealistically optimistic, in thanking you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.

Truly yours,
Bobby Fischer
The World Chess Champion

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

Whatever the source of his madness, Bobby Fischer was once the best in his field.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.