Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64

[7/4]

January 18, 2008

Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64

By MODEM

Bobby Fischer, the iconoclastic genius who was one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, has died, a close family friend, Gardar Sverrisson, confirmed Friday.

He was 64 and died on Thursday in a hospital in Reykjavík, Iceland. No cause of death was given but he had suffered for some time from an unspecified illness.

Mr. Sverrisson, who lived in the same apartment building in Reykjavik as Mr. Fischer, said: “He was a close family friend and we all miss him very much.”

Mr. Fischer, the most powerful American player in history, had moved to Iceland in 2005. He had emerged briefly in 1992 from a mysterious seclusion that had lasted two decades and defied an American ban on conducting business in wartorn Yugoslavia to play a $5 million match against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky.

After he won handily, he dropped out of sight again, living alone. He avoided arrest on American charges over his Yugoslavia appearance and stayed in touch with his few friends in the United States by telephone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection.

He lived in Budapest -- and possibly the Philippines and Switzerland -- and emerged now and then on radio stations in Iceland, Hungary and the Philippines to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and against Jews.

Mr. Fischer’s 1992 victory against Mr. Spassky was a sad reprise of his most glorious triumph. It was in summer 1972, in a match played in Reykjavik, that Mr. Fischer wrested the world championship from Mr. Spassky, becoming the first — and as yet only — American to win the title, which Russian-born players had held for more than four decades.

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an icon, an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, in his 1973 book, “Grandmasters of Chess.”

In July 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane from Japan to Manila and was accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months while the various governments, as well as a staunch group of supporters in the chess world, tried to resolve the issue.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews he gave to a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were ”wonderful news,” adding he was wishing for a scenario “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and secure hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

The world championship match against the elegant Spassky was an unforgettable spectacle, the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place. Mr. Fischer’s characteristic petulance, loutishness and sense of outrage were the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whirr of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted the remaining games be played in an isolated room the size of a janitor’s closet. There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point, a draw a half-point for each player.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

Through July and most of August, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television. All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer the rebel, the enfant-terrible, the tantrum-thrower, the uncompromising savage of the chess board, had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States, the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when it was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone ever associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize was $1,400.

Mr. Fischer’s victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph for Democracy over Communism, and it turned the new champion into an unlikely American hero. He was invited to the White House by President Richard M. Nixon, interviewed on television, hounded by journalists, wooed unsuccessfully by commercial interests. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons, as scores of poverty-stricken chess players benefited from the cachet that Mr. Fischer had conferred on them.

“That’s really how chess teaching began,” recalled Bruce Pandolfini, whose career as a teacher and writer was launched after he appeared with Mr. Lyman on public television. “Chess teachers didn’t really exist before 1972, not in any real numbers, but people started calling in to PBS, and they gave me a list of names, about 300 people. I charged $15 an hour and I encouraged others to do the same. I went from shelving books at the Strand bookstore to being a well-paid chess teacher.”

But Mr. Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird, contrarian solitude he more or less maintained for the remainder of his life. Over the years, he turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas and even larger sums from dictators like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran to compete in their countries. He said the money wasn’t enough.

At the same time, he tithed the Worldwide Church of God, a fringe church he had become involved with beginning in the early 1960’s. The church, now defunct, followed Hebrew dietary laws and Sabbath proscriptions and believed in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. For a time, Mr. Fischer lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or nearby Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of Mr. Fischer’s finances was never very clear.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was playing, that he was training, that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock, which automatically rewarded players for moving quickly toward the end of the game, restoring time each time a move is made. He began railing to other chess players that computers, with their ability to analyze deeply into a position, had ruined the mystery of chess, making it knowable. He advocated a variation on the game in which the pieces on the back rank, at the start, are lined up randomly rather than in their prescribed formation. But he did not emerge publicly until 1992, when he accepted the offer to play against Mr. Spassky again on an island in the Adriatic.

A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 — Mr. Fischer was a hugely demanding personality (some said charismatic, some merely infuriating) who felt his prowess as a chess player entitled him to exorbitant privilege. For much of his life, he fought imperiously on behalf of that entitlement, demanding uncompromising loyalty from his supporters, concessions from his opponents, special treatment from tournament organizers and unalloyed respect from the world at large. It was an outlook that became ever more skewed as his life went on. In the end his self-involvement was his undoing, isolating him from all but the most obsequious chess-world worshipers.

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. His father, a German-born physicist named Gerard, Gerhard or Gerhardt Fischer — his name appears variously spelled — and his mother, the former Regina Wender, divorced when Bobby was 2. Shortly thereafter, the elder Fischer left the United States and his family for good, and Bobby and his older sister, Joan, were reared by their mother, a Swiss-born registered nurse and schoolteacher.

Regina Fischer moved her young family first to California and then to Arizona before settling in a Brooklyn walkup, where Bobby grew up. The strong-willed Mrs. Fischer, who would later study medicine and become a political activist on behalf of pacifist causes both in the United States and Europe, had an uneven influence on her willful son.

When he was a teenager, she tried to dissuade him from concentrating solely on chess. “She keeps in my hair and I don’t like people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her,” Mr. Fischer once told a reporter. But she also helped raise money for her son to compete in international tournaments and even picketed the White House in an appeal for aid to the American delegation at the 1960 Chess Olympics. Still, after the Spassky championship match, when her son spoke of his admiration for Mr. Nixon, she campaigned vigorously for Senator George S. McGovern, Mr. Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 Presidential election.

Mrs. Fischer was Jewish; her son developed a hatred against Jews that became more virulent as he grew older. Nonetheless, mother and son evidently kept in touch over the years, and when she died in 1997, Mr. Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister died soon afterward, and acquaintances of Mr. Fischer speculated that the two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. Having never married or had children, Bobby Fischer leaves no immediate survivors.

It was his sister Joan who bought Bobby, then age 6, his first chess set, and taught him the basic moves. By the age of 8 he was taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club and by age 12 he was holding his own among America’s strongest players, who gathered at the Manhattan Chess Club and the Marshall Chess Club. His adult opponents called him “the Boy Robot” and, for his unwavering wardrobe and insatiable will to win, “the Corduroy Killer.”

He was fiercely competitive — some said he was driven by an abject fear of losing. At the chessboard he possessed the pitilessness of a tyrant — “I love to see them squirm,” he once said of his opponents. From early on, he buttressed his penchant for original thinking with monumental study, and he became known for his mastery of the game’s literature. “Practice! Study! Talent!” was his formula for success. In a short time he would become incomparable at all phases of chess, from openings to endgames, and though renowned as an attacker, he was, like Garry Kasparov after him, an underrated, even brilliant defensive strategist.

He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but, indifferent to study and classes because they took time away from chess, he dropped out at 16. Mr. Pandolfini remembered: “When I was a kid, I’d go to the Marshall early in the morning, and Fischer would be there. There was a cabinet of filed games from the 19th century, thousands of games that someone, maybe a lot of people, had put on index cards and diagrammed by hand, and Fischer would be playing them, one at a time. I couldn’t understand why he was doing it. These were games using discarded ideas — the King’s Gambit and so on.”

The King’s Gambit — an opening strategy in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack — had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic, seductive only to the blindly attack-minded.

Bobby Fischer, along with his contemporaries, favored other strategies, known by names like the Sicilian Defense (the epitome of a sharp counterattack by Black) or the Ruy Lopez (a slowly building game of maneuver for White). “But Fischer’s argument was that the old ideas were not necessarily bad ideas,” Mr. Pandolfini said. “They had merely fallen out of favor, and by injecting new thinking into an old idea, you created state-of-the-art logic.”

Edited January 22, 2008 by 7/4

[Brownian Motion]

His great gifts as a chess player were balanced by his deficiencies as a human being.

[ghost of miles]

Fischer was a hero to me and my friends when we were kids; we were definitely a part of that generation inspired by the '72 match with Spassky (I was 6, but I remember watching it on my grandparents' little vacation-trailer TV while we were camping at the Straits of Mackinac that summer). We had a very good chess team at my junior-high and won the Indiana State tournament in 1979--ended up finishing 4th in the Nationals that year (we were leading after the first day, but stayed up late raising hell that night and didn't do as well the second day). By then Fischer had kind of become the J.D. Salinger of chess--and the subsequent stories that came out in years following always made me a bit sad that he had evidently gone down the path of madness.

[Jim Alfredson]

Sounds like a case study for a psychoanalyst.

[Noj]

Sounds like a case study for a psychoanalyst.

What are you trying to say about ghost of miles, Jim?

[sidewinder]

Brought back memories hearing this. Listening to radio news back in 1972 over breakfast and hearing the latest twist on the Fischer/Spassky saga. HUGE news back then - and very much part of the 'Cold War'.

Edited January 18, 2008 by sidewinder

[Randy Twizzle]

From the December 2002 Atlantic Monthly

Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame

[connoisseur series500]

Surprising news this morning. We knew Bobby had been spending a lot of time in an Icelandic hospital for kidney failure, but who would have known that he would die--quite fittingly at the age of 64, which is the exact number of squares on the chessboard?

Bobby Fisher was one of my childhood heroes. I had known the rules of chess and sometimes played with my Dad, but when Bobby and Boris Spassky faced off in 1972, it ushered a chess boom across America. People took up the game and everyone was buying chess sets, books, and clocks. Chess tournaments benefitted from record turnouts. The USCF membership roster shot up from 50,000 range to 200,000 virtually overnight.

The next major event was the San Antonio tournament in 1972 which attracted several of the best international players including a young Anatoly Karpov. Fischer didn't play, but he did make a brief and grand entrance into the tournament hall to watch things. Then as 1973 and 1974 rolled along and it became apparent that Anatoly Karpov was the best player outside of Bobby, we began to realize that Fischer had played his last official tournament game of chess. His demands as champion was a mix of sound and rational proposals along with certain provisions which would favor the incumbent titleholder. At the same time, nothing was outrageous, but the Soviets were in no mood for compromises. They felt the title had slipped away from them when Spassky made concessions to keep his match going with Fischer, even when he could have walked away a 2-0 victor. Fischer had suddenly made more demands in that match and was willing to walk away unless Spassky agreed to certain things. Boris, ever the gentleman, agreed and the rest was history. The then President of FIDE, Max Euwe tried desperately to unite the Soviets and Bobby, but couldn't bridge the unbridgeable. Bobby was willing to step away from FIDE-sponsored match and in effect give up his title rather than defend it against Anatoly Karpov under the current system. Karpov later proved to be a great champion himself, but played under Fischer's shadow for many years.

What made Bobby Fischer so great? His achievements were huge. Prior to the 1940s, the best chess players were lonely alienated geniuses (such as Alexander Alekhine) mixed in with gifted amateurs. The Soviets took the game to new heights in the 1940s when Botvinnik, Smyslov, Bronstein, Keres, Boleslavsky, Kotov and many others dominated the scene. The Soviet "school of chess" was created; and Soviet players dominated the game up till Fischer's time. They instituted systematic analysis, and many of their best players played a dynamic game of chess with a fine sense of initiative. As a boy, Bobby realized the gap between the Soviet players and the rest of the world, and taught himself enough Russian, so he could read their chess literature. He studied 14 hours per day and the world had not seen such a chess fanatic since the days of Alexander Alekhine, who died a lonely man in a hotel room in 1946 with a chess board in his lap.

Bobby Fischer developed a marvelous technique which was unmatched. He could play any kind of game and was well rounded, but it was in the technical aspects of the game where he was unmatched. Several of the Soviets could still best him in dynamic razor sharp lines, but Bobby proved to be stronger overall. If I was to describe his chess abilities to a nonchessplayer, I would say that his style was like Marvin Hagler's in boxing. Like Fischer, Hagler was good in all the elements of his field. His technique was irreproachable. Fischer was that way in chess. He was absolute perfection over the board. That he was able to end the Soviet chess hegemony; and that he was able to accomplish this singlehandedly, represents an achievement so grand that time can never diminish it.

His years as a recluse (over the last 35 years or so) were tragic and mortifying. Although his mother was Jewish, he let loose his raging anti-semitism (which had been there even as a kid,) and he became a ridiculous and lonely misanthrope. Chess had kept him somewhat sane, and once he quit the game, he lost all connection with reality. I had always hoped that he would write a chess book or publish some chess articles; but he ran away from the game as intensely as he had once studied and played it. He turned down all kind of offers to write books or form business partnerships. There was the story about Pepsi (or Coke) approaching him for a multi-million dollar promotional offer after he had won the title in 1972. Bobby told the Pepsi representative that their drink rotted people's teeth and he would have nothing to do with them. He was childlike in his sense of right and wrong.

I cannot relate to the trash he broadcasted over the radio waves or which was printed in the press over the last few decades. That man has nothing to do with him. It was the early and young Bobby who was a major influence to me. His achievements will never dim. I'm crying a little right now. RIP....

[Joe G]

Paul - what a post, my friend!

[connoisseur series500]

Bobby, as I prefer to remember him, before being overtaken by madness.

[Chuck Nessa]

Looks like it's already there.

[connoisseur series500]

Looks like it's already there.

True enough, but it was a happy madness then.

[alocispepraluger102]

the organissimo 'post of the year'.

thank you, paul.

[BruceH]

I read that Atlantic article when it came out. What a sad shambles his life became.

[T.D.]

Also worth reading is the 1962 Harper's Magazine interview of a much younger Fischer, by Ralph Ginzburg. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find an online text.)

[BERIGAN]

As others have said, excellent post Paul! Makes one wonder, if one has to lose one's grip with sanity to become the absolute best at that sport....

[Brownian Motion]

The New York Times

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January 19, 2008

An Appraisal

Fischer vs. the World: A Chess Giant’s Endgame

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess. These are abstract, almost invented realms, closed systems bounded by rules of custom or principle. Here, the child learns, is how elements combine and transform; here are the laws that govern their interactions; and here are the possibilities that emerge as you play with signs, symbols, sounds or pieces. Nothing else need be known or understood — at least at first. A child’s gifts in such realms can seem otherworldly, the achievements effortlessly magical. But as Bobby Fischer’s death on Thursday might remind us, even abstract gifts can exact a terrible price.

In 1956 Mr. Fischer, at 13, displayed powers that were not only prodigious but also uncanny. A game he played against Donald Byrne, one of the top 10 players in the United States, became known as “the Game of the Century,” so packed was it with brilliance and daring (and Mr. Fischer’s sacrifice of a queen). “I just got good,” he explained — as indeed he did, winning 8 of the 10 United States Championship tournaments held after 1958 and then, of course, in 1972, breaking the long hold that Soviet chess had on the international championship.

“All I want to do, ever,” he said, “is play chess.” And many thought him the best player — ever. Garry Kasparov once said that he imagined Mr. Fischer as a kind of centaur, a human player mythologically combined with the very essence of chess itself.

But of course accompanying Mr. Fischer’s triumphs were signs of something else. His aggressive declarations and grandiose pronouncements were once restricted to his chosen playing field. (“Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.”) Eventually, they grew in scope, evolving into ever more sweeping convictions about the wider world.

After his triumph against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, he all but abandoned chess, and seemed to replace the idea of a seated challenger pushing pieces on a 64-square board, with that of a demonic Jewish world conspiracy that was (as he said in radio broadcasts from the Philippines) perpetrated by a “filthy, lying bastard people” who kill Christian children (“their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies”) while exploiting that “money-making invention,” the Holocaust.

In this vision the circumscribed rules of chess were overturned, and in their place were imagined esoteric plottings of evil grandmasters. In a 2002 essay in The Atlantic Monthly Rene Chun chronicled Mr. Fischer’s “pathetic endgame.” He was reported to keep a locked suitcase with him, containing pills and home remedies:

“If the Commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them,” he said. He had his dental fillings removed, worrying about the secret signals and controlling forces that might be channeled through his jaw. The 9/11 attacks, he said, were “wonderful news.”

What was all this? “I don’t believe in psychology,” Mr. Fischer once said about chess competition. “I believe in good moves.” And yes, without the good moves, he would never have struck the fear in his opponents that he once did. But how did faith in good moves mutate into such perverse psychology? Was there any connection between his gifts in chess and his later delusions?

You might of course speculate that his perceptions were affected by never having seen his father, a physicist named Mr. Fischer, after he was 2. A revealing profile in Harper’s magazine in 1962 indicated that Mr. Fischer’s mother, Regina Wender, also had other preoccupations. Bobby’s sister described her as a “professional crusader.” Bobby had dropped out of high school and was a chess wunderkind with a world reputation, while, at the time of the profile, his mother was spending eight months walking to Moscow in a “pacifist” protest.

A few years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer, obtaining F.B.I. records under the Freedom of Information Act, also found compelling evidence that Bobby Fischer’s father was not the man named on his birth certificate, but a brilliant Hungarian scientist, Paul F. Nemenyi, with whom his mother had an affair. Mr. Nemenyi apparently paid to help support Bobby, and there is even the record of a complaint he made to a social worker about Bobby’s upbringing. If that identification is accurate, the paradoxes of Mr. Fischer’s virulent anti-Semitism become still more profound, since Mr. Nemenyi, like Ms. Wender, was Jewish.

Chess too can seem to encourage a streak of craziness. ( “I like to see ’em squirm,” Mr. Fischer proclaimed.) But for paranoia and posturing, nothing could come close to the 1972 championship match in Reykjavik. In recent years the argument has been made that the attention given to the confrontation between Mr. Fischer and Mr. Spassky had little to do with the cold war. Mr. Spassky himself was no party-line comrade, and Mr. Fischer, with all his idiosyncrasies, was far from a comfort to the United States State Department; moreover, by 1972, such confrontations no longer had the symbolic power they had during the era of Sputnik. But there is still no question that the contest drew its worldwide audience partly because it presented two conflicting national idols.

Mr. Fischer, with his demands about money, his finickiness about cameras and chairs and schedule, could seem an extreme example of the American individualist, while Mr. Spassky, with his back to the audience, his stone-faced demeanor and the state support for this national game behind him, seemed an incarnation of Soviet ideology. The Soviets also answered Mr. Fischer’s egomaniacal posturing with their own versions of conspiracy mongering, suggesting that Mr. Spassky’s performance was being deliberately sabotaged by American tampering with the players’ environments; the air had to be tested and the chairs X-rayed.

But there is still something about Mr. Fischer’s craziness that is closely connected with the essential nature of chess. The gift of early insight into chess or math or music is often also accompanied by a growing obsession with those activities, simply because of the wonders of connection and invention that unfold in the young mind. The world itself, with its more messy human interactions, its complicated histories, its emotional conflicts, can be put aside, and attention focused on an intricate bounded cosmos.

Perhaps we should be grateful that such gifts are so rare, for if they were not, how many of us would prefer to remain cocooned in these glass-bead games? At least in mathematics and music, we may be grateful too that ultimately, with the coming of maturity, the world starts to put constraints on abstract play. Great music attains its power not simply through manipulation and abstraction, but by creating analogies with experience; music is affected by life, not cut off from it. Mathematics also comes up against the demands of the world, as the field opens up to understanding; early insights are tested against the full scale of what has been already been done and what yet remains undone.

But chess, alone among this abstract triumvirate, is never tested or transformed. The only way expertise is ever tried is in victory or defeat. And if a player is as profoundly powerful as Mr. Fischer, defeat never creates a sense of limits. Seeing into a game and defeating an opponent — that defines the entire world.

So when it comes time to look at the wider world, it might seem a vast extension of the game, only ever so much more frightening because its conspiratorial strategies cannot be discovered in rule books, and its confrontations cannot be controlled by formal tournaments. That was the world that Bobby Fischer saw around him as he morphed from world champion chess player into world-class crank, never realizing that he had unwittingly blundered into checkmate.

[T.D.]

"Mr. Fischer, with his demands about money, his finickiness about cameras and chairs and schedule, could seem an extreme example of the American individualist, while Mr. Spassky, with his back to the audience, his stone-faced demeanor and the state support for this national game behind him, seemed an incarnation of Soviet ideology."

The passage about Spassky is dubious. Actually, Boris was quite simpatico and un-Soviet-like from the American perspective. For instance, he agreed to play Game 3, 1972 in a table tennis room (after Fischer's forfeit of Game 2), in order to keep the match going. Strategically, that was a huge mistake, and it seems unlike the "Soviet" negotiating methodology. Spassky later relocated to France and became a French citizen. However, in recent years the genial Boris has to some extent tarnished his image by making possibly anti-Semitic comments.

Edited January 19, 2008 by T.D.

[Brownian Motion]

Life is not a board game

Bobby Fischer could master chess - if fact, there still isn't a worthy successor. But the world has proved more unsettling, much as it was for his parents.

On Sept. 11, 2001, if Americans had not been too shaken to notice, they would have found Bobby Fischer at last.

The reclusive chess champion emerged to deliver a message, his voice crackling over the airwaves of an obscure Philippine radio station.

"This is wonderful news," said Fischer, who turns 60 on March 9. "It's time for the (([expletive))] U.S. to get its head kicked in."

Then he called for a military coup in the United States and a rounding up of Jews.

It was awful and sad, all at once. Three decades ago, Fischer wrested the world chess title from the Soviets, single-handedly winning one of the great cultural battles of the Cold War.

His name became part of the popular vocabulary - a kind of shorthand for brilliance. In chess clubs, young players wanted to be like Bobby. And why not?

Over the black-and-white board, Fischer's genius was unmatched. He could play two dozen opponents in high-speed games and then recite every move from memory - hundreds of moves in total. He racked up unprecedented strings of victories against top grandmaster competitors. Where prudent players settled for draws, he fought to win every time.

To this day, chess enthusiasts study Fischer's games with the loving intensity of art historians examining the impressionists' brush strokes. American chess has spent decades hunting for a worthy heir, its obsession captured in the 1993 movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. No one has come close.

"There's nobody out there," says Jerry Hanken, a chess journalist.

The grade school prodigy featured in Searching, Josh Waitzkin, "was going to be the next Bobby Fischer," Hanken says. "Well, Josh Waitzkin is a hell of a good player, but. . . ."

Much of the Fischer story is well-known: his achievements, his games, his role as a Cold War hero, his abrupt disappearance from the game.

But Fischer's personal life and family history have been largely concealed; even the identity of Fischer's real father was kept secret. That biography gives insight into both his genius and his disturbance.

He comes from a family that included towering intellectuals and self-defeating iconoclasts, who were swept up in major currents of 20th-century history: the rise of fascism; the exodus of Jewish intellectuals from Europe; the Cold War sleuthing of an FBI determined to flush out Soviet spies.

Paul F. Nemenyi - Fischer's father, though not listed on the birth certificate - was a Hungarian scientist with a gift for spatial relations, a gift that was clearly passed on to his son.

Fischer's mother, Regina, spoke six languages and had studied medicine in Moscow during the Stalin era. A psychiatrist once diagnosed her as paranoid.

This is a story about who Fischer really is, about his parents, his origins, his life. The story begins with two Jewish immigrants. They would meet. They would have an affair. Together, they would produce a troubled little boy who would become the best chess player who ever lived.

It was 1942, and Regina Fischer was in Denver. Not for good, of course. It was only the latest stopping place for a restless woman who couldn't settle on a permanent home. She was taking classes at the University of Denver and working at a company that made chicken incubators. At 29, Regina had already lived in eight other cities, four other countries. This was her ninth job and her sixth university.

She was the mother of a 5-year-old girl, and she was alone.

Her husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, was thousands of miles away in Santiago, Chile, barred by immigration authorities from entering the U.S.

Into the void stepped Paul Nemenyi.

To Nemenyi, Regina would have had obvious appeal. She was dark-haired, with a face that could appear boyishly sexy or plain and serious. There was no intellectual subject she couldn't master.

Nemenyi himself was no heartthrob. He was 47, a Hungarian refugee and a theoretical engineer teaching at a nearby college. He made $165 a month and shuffled when he walked. An animal-rights supporter, he refused to wear wool to keep warm. Instead, he walked around in winter with his pajamas poking out from beneath his clothes.

Still, he had a compelling mind. "He was smart, very, very smart," recalls Charlotte Truesdell, who worked at a research laboratory with Nemenyi in the '40s. "He had a strange kind of memory. He remembered things by their shapes."

Regina and Nemenyi would have had much to talk about.

Regina, daughter of a Polish dress- cutter, had moved to the United States with her family as a baby, but returned to Europe as a young adult and studied medicine. Like Nemenyi, she lived in Berlin in the early '30s, when Hitler was coming to power. It was there that she met Fischer, with whom she moved to Moscow, where they lived for several years under Stalin.

In Colorado in 1942, Regina and Nemenyi were perhaps drawn together by their political beliefs. Nemenyi had told colleagues he preferred communism to capitalism; the FBI suspected Regina of communist sympathies.

Regina didn't share the story of what happened between them even with some members of her family. But it seems clear that in the summer of '42 a romance bloomed. The next year, Bobby was born.

There is a terse account of the liaison in the 900-page file that the FBI eventually compiled on Regina. The investigation began in 1942, when a baby-sitter found what she believed to be pro-communist letters belonging to Regina and turned them over to the FBI.

Nemenyi told one FBI informant, a social worker, that he met Regina at the University of Denver. But whatever follows in the file, as released under the Freedom of Information Act, is censored by the FBI. When the narrative again picks up, suddenly Bobby is in the picture. The file says, "He ((Nemenyi)) advised he helped support the boy."

But by the time of Bobby's birth, Regina had moved to Chicago, while Nemenyi was teaching in Rhode Island. She gave birth to her son alone, in a clinic for poor single mothers. And on the birth certificate, she listed Fischer as the father. She briefly considered putting her newborn son up for adoption. But in talking to a social worker - who would later share the story with the FBI - she broke down and cried, unable to go through with it.

Regina then moved into a Chicago home for fatherless families. Ever the nonconformist, she led a rebellion among the other mothers, encouraging them to question the institution's rules.

The home called the police, and Regina was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. She was acquitted.

A court-ordered psychological exam found her to be "paranoid" and "querulous."

That description might also fit her son.

Anyone can play chess. Few can play it well. The aim is simple: Put your opponent's king in check - under attack - in a spot where it can't escape. Checkmate.

At the highest levels, the game calls for enormous powers of memory and calculation. No luck is involved. Talented players can look at a 64-square board crammed with a couple of dozen black and white pieces that move in different ways and can visualize how things might look 10 and 20 moves later (knight takes pawn; bishop to bishop-five; rook to king-one, check; king to bishop-one; bishop to king-three; bishop takes queen . . .). Fischer didn't even need a board to play. He could glance at a score sheet of a completed game, play out the moves in his head, and then demonstrate a swifter way to win.

That's a different level of intelligence, a special sort of mind. A mind perhaps capable of overload.

Some of history's greatest players suffered disabling breakdowns. Paul Morphy, a 19th-century New Orleanian of immense natural talent, could play multiple opponents "blindfolded" - without sight of a board. He kept each game in his head and called out the moves.

Toward the end of his life, Morphy unraveled. He was often seen walking down Canal Street muttering to himself. He imagined that his father's estate was being drained by a relative, and would talk of little else. In an obituary, a newspaper speculated that his brain had overdosed on blindfold chess.

There is no known clinical diagnosis of Fischer. But a disturbance seems indisputable.

At the Marshall Chess Club in New York, chess is normally king. Sitting over inlaid chess tables, members come to play, to kibitz, to analyze games.

But in the late '50s, the club's board of governors held an unusual meeting. The subject was Bobby Fischer. He had moved to Brooklyn with his family in 1949, at the age of 6, the same year he learned the game from his sister, Joan.

At 11, by his own reckoning, he " just got good." His mother was often working double shifts as a private-duty nurse. Bobby spent countless hours at the home of Jack Collins, a chess teacher and mentor, whom he would even visit during his school lunch hour.

"Joan was there, but mostly Bobby was just on his own and Regina was working, working, working all the time," says Allen Kaufman, a New York chess master and childhood friend of Fischer's. "She would work 24 hours at a time, and so Bobby was left rattling around, mostly on his own."

At the Marshall Chess Club, no one doubted the teenager's talent. But his prickly behavior was alienating some of the wealthy sponsors whose support he would need to rise to the top.

"Some of what he did was so outrageous it was decided maybe he had emotional problems," says Kaufman, who attended the meeting. What to do? Board members talked about finding a psychiatrist. They considered Reuben Fine, himself one of the giants of the game. Then someone raised a question: What if therapy worked? What if treatment sapped Fischer's drive to win, depriving the United States of its first homegrown world champ?

Meeting adjourned. No one, Kaufman recalls, wanted to tamper with that finely tuned brain.

Bobby's family worried about him even earlier than that.

When Bobby was 3, Nemenyi visited a social worker to complain about the way Regina was raising him. By then, he and Regina had split, and he was living in Washington. Regina was "mentally upset," and Bobby was an "upset child," he told the caseworker, apparently without results. Two years later, Nemenyi sought help again, telling a social worker that his son was "not being brought up in desirable circumstances, due to the instability of the mother."

Regina herself sought the help of social workers when Bobby was 14. She described him as "temperamental, unable to get along with others, without friends his age, and without any interests other than chess."

But this was not just another kid absorbed in a hobby. This was the best chess player in the country. Bobby won the U.S. chess championship in 1957 - the same year Regina complained of his obsession - edging out 46-year-old Samuel Reshevsky, one of the greatest players the game has seen.

A year earlier, Bobby had played a game of such depth and originality that it was dubbed "the game of the century." At 15, he would become a grandmaster, the youngest ever, and the best hope for dethroning the Soviets.

Social workers offered guidance, but Regina wouldn't take it, preferring to work things out her own way.

She did not succeed. Her relationship with Bobby got so bad that they could not live together. In 1960, she moved out, leaving her teenage son alone in a Brooklyn apartment that soon grew filthy - clogged tubs, roaches, dirty dishes.

The move would usher in one of the most productive periods in Regina's life. She remarried, and she at last got her medical degree, in East Germany. She used that degree to altruistic purpose, providing medical care on American Indian reservations in the Southwest and working as an emergency-room physician in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

To Bobby, her departure was a relief. In a 1962 interview with Harper's magazine, he complained that his mother was a " square." "I don't like people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her," he said.

There may have been friction, but there was also love. The same year Regina moved out, she went to Washington on a mission. Outside the wrought-iron gates of the White House, she staged a solitary five-hour protest, urging President Dwight D. Eisenhower to help send a U.S team to the chess olympics in East Germany.

Bobby would wind up leading a U.S. team to the tournament in Leipzig.

"She was a fierce lawyer and supporter and protagonist of Bobby," Kaufman says. "And in the beginning, that was very valuable. And then eventually it embarrassed Bobby. For that and other reasons, he broke with her."

By the end of her life, mother and son had reconciled. Susan Polgar, a Hungarian grandmaster whose family befriended Bobby in the early '90s, said at the time that the two were speaking regularly by phone.

Regina died in 1997, at 84, near her daughter in Palo Alto, Calif. (The FBI had closed her case years before, concluding she was not a spy. Agents never seemed quite sure of what to make of her.)

The complexity of the mother-son relationship emerged in the 1962 Harper's interview. At one point Bobby displayed the anti-Semitism that would become his fixation in middle age.

He said chess was peopled with too many Jews, who dressed poorly and detracted from the "class of the game."

The interviewer asked, "You're Jewish, aren't you?"

"Part Jewish. My mother is Jewish."

Actually, both parents were Jews.

On April 1, 1933, the Nazis came for Paul Nemenyi; it was also the day of a general boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in Berlin. The charges, when SS troops arrested him, were that Nemenyi had made " calumnious statements" against Hitler's government. He was jailed for a day, then released. Not enough evidence.

Still, Nemenyi would lose his university teaching job the following week, when Hitler purged the civil service of Jews.

Nemenyi, then 37, had already fled fascism in his homeland, Hungary, where anti-Semitic laws had been enacted. Now he would have to run again. He was being uprooted at a promising point in his career, having just published a groundbreaking textbook on mechanics that would be required reading in German universities.

Some of the other Hungarian refugees living in Berlin at the time would flee to America and become some of the most prominent scientists of the 20th century.

Nemenyi knew the giants, and they knew him, though he would never be as accomplished. They were all part of an elite intellectual circle being hounded out of Europe.

Nemenyi fled first to Denmark, then to Britain. In the fall of 1938, he sailed to the United States to find a job.

He headed to Princeton to consult with Albert Einstein. Nemenyi also gave his resume to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, a New York organization that tried to find work for the hundreds of academics fleeing Europe.

But his personality got in the way. "He is an unstable and undesirable person," one note in the committee's files reads.

Nemenyi finally found a job working for Einstein's son, Hans-Albert, at the University of Iowa's hydrology lab. It was the first in a string of short-term teaching jobs around the country.

Assimilation was rocky.

Nemenyi's fellow Hungarian, the great aeronautical scientist Theodore von Karman, proclaimed him a misfit.

"When he came to this country, he went to scientific meetings in an open shirt without a tie and was very much disappointed as I advised him to dress as anyone else," von Karman wrote of Nemenyi in one letter. "He told me that he thought this is a country of freedom, and the man is only judged according to his internal values and not his external appearance."

Life in America remained something of a disappointment. Nemenyi never landed a job at the most prestigious schools, never wrote the book he had planned on fluid mechanics.

He was a physicist and a theoretician. But when he met Regina in 1942, he had a temporary job teaching freshman math at the University of Colorado.

The Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned - and then rejected - an article from him on theoretical mechanics. Nemenyi would have the last word, though. One of his last published works was a 1951 review of the encyclopedia in The New Republic. He panned it as out-of-date.

On March 1, 1952, Nemenyi was living in Washington and working at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. He felt fine that morning. As was his habit, he went to the library to work.

Then he stopped in at a dance at the International Student House in Washington. There, he dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 56.

Nemenyi had with him an envelope full of letters, which police later turned over to the FBI. One letter from a female friend cautioned him not to spend too much time worrying about Peter - his older son, from an early marriage - and Bobby. "I am sorry that you have so many sorrows with your children," she wrote.

The father would never know what his children would go on to achieve or how sad their lives would become.

After Paul's death, Regina Fischer's life was desperate. He had been paying for 8-year-old Bobby's education and sending $20 a week. She had long since divorced Gerhardt Fischer, who had never lived with her in the United States. She was in nursing school in Brooklyn, broke and facing eviction.

Regina wrote to Peter Nemenyi, who was then getting his doctorate in math at Princeton. She asked if any money had been set aside for Bobby.

"Bobby has not had a decent meal at home this past month and was sick two days with fever and sore throat, and of course a doctor or medicine was out of the question," she wrote. "I don't think Paul would have wanted to leave Bobby this way and would ask you most urgently to let me know if Paul left anything for Bobby."

It is unclear what Bobby knew at that point about his relationship to Paul Nemenyi. It is clear that they knew each other. Regina told Peter in her letter, "Bobby is still expecting Paul."

Regina didn't want to be the one to tell Bobby of Nemenyi's death. She hoped Peter would do it. But Peter was uncomfortable with that, so he wrote to a family doctor for advice.

"I take it you know that Paul was Bobby Fischer's father," he wrote, saying that he didn't feel "qualified" to break the news, having met the boy only a couple of times.

"The matter is further complicated by the false pretenses about Bobby's identity and the parents' differences of opinion over this question," Peter wrote.

Bobby's paternity would remain a family secret until The Inquirer reported details of the FBI's file on Regina Fischer in November.

Friends within the small circle of people who were aware say that as Bobby's celebrity grew, Peter became embarrassed by his half-brother. The author of a respected textbook on statistics, Peter exhibited the family gift for logical thinking. But the similarities with Bobby stopped there.

Peter Nemenyi fought to defend minority rights. In the 1960s he was beaten and arrested while integrating coffee shops and helping black voters in Mississippi.

His end was unhappy. Sick with prostate cancer, he killed himself last year. He had been living alone in a Durham, N.C., apartment crammed with statistics papers. Friends say they often spotted him pushing a collection of shopping baskets around town, wearing oven mitts for gloves.

Peter Nemenyi stored his personal papers in a Wisconsin state archive. The files include statistics papers, address books, tax returns, and memorabilia from his civil rights days.

His papers include a lone newspaper clipping about Bobby, one that proved prophetic. It was an article from 1959 about his half-brother's threat to boycott the U.S. championship in a disagreement over the pairings.

That was an early example of what would become a destructive pattern in Bobby's life - the escalation of a minor dispute into a crisis that threatened to pull him away from the board.

Throughout the 1960s, Bobby Fischer sputtered.

He dropped out of high school and stayed in New York for a time, later moving to Los Angeles. He never held a job, instead becoming a professional chess player in a country where top tournament prizes were a few hundred dollars at best. He relied on friends and got money from his mother.

There was brilliant play, but there were also unexplained disappearances and a persistent fear of being cheated. Fischer played only one tournament game in 1964, and again only one in 1969 - long absences for a chess player in his prime. In 1967, he entered a tournament that was a stepping-stone to the world championship. He was in first place midway through, but then dropped out in a dispute with the organizers.

Still, when he was in top form he was dazzling. He hated the quick draws that are so common in chess. When he played, he played to win. He took the 1963-64 U.S. championship with a perfect 11-0 score. No one had done that before, and no one has since.

"When he was at the board playing, it was like God was playing," says Shelby Lyman, who narrated the eventual, inevitable world championship match for public television. "The purity of his thought, the search for truth, the ability to go to the core of a problem. Bobby never looked for an easy move that would blow away his opponent. He looked for the truth in chess."

He was hard to figure: friendly at times, rude at others. In the Harper's interview, he described women as "stupid."

But Lyman remembers a warmer Fischer in New York chess circles in the '60s.

The Chess and Checker Club on Times Square was like a set from Guys and Dolls. No guns, but lots of betting. Bobby was a regular. Sometimes he would go in and play a quick game just to win money to buy a movie ticket.

One day he took on a talented young player, spotting him a pawn and giving him twice as much time on the clock to complete his moves. A couple of dozen people gathered. Wagers were flying. Fischer handled the action himself. He won game after game, Lyman says, sticking his money in "six different pockets." Finally, his opponent won one - "and you should have seen Bobby go through those pockets to pay everyone off. He was practically looking in his fly. But he did it so good-humoredly."

Lyman recalls spending an afternoon with Fischer in 1965, after Fischer drew a tournament game he was playing by teletype at the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan. Fischer's opponent was in Havana.

Fischer and Lyman then sat down at a board and played back the moves.

"He was very diplomatic. He listened to what I said, and he agreed. Then he asked, 'Would you like to get coffee?' I said sure."

They left the old brownstone and walked through Greenwich Village.

"I thought, 'This guy was the luckiest guy in the world,' " Lyman says. "He was young, handsome and going to be world champion. He had everything.

"He asked me all these naive questions. He was very enthusiastic. He asked me if he should go to college. People were stupidly pushing him to go. I said, 'Don't be ridiculous. Win the world championship.' And he asked me about dancing. 'Was it just for girls?' Things like that. He had the naivete of a genius. He looked at everything freshly."

In 1970, Fischer returned to tournament chess, beginning a remarkable run that would close with his defeat of the world champion, Boris Spassky, in the title match two years later.

Fischer had been eyeing the world championship since he was a teenager. But when the chance came in 1972, he did everything he could to spoil it. On a night when he was supposed to leave for the contest in Reykjavik, he abruptly fled JFK Airport, the press on his heels.

Once in Iceland, he complained about the lighting and the crowd noise. After throwing away an easy draw in the first game, he forfeited the second in a dispute over the cameras. The third game was played in a tiny Ping-Pong room off the main stage. There he staged his comeback, springing an opening surprise and beating Spassky for the first time. The Russian never recovered.

The world was riveted that summer, a remarkable time that saw the Watergate break-in, the nomination of George McGovern by the Democrats, the renomination of Richard M. Nixon, the withdrawal of the last U.S. ground forces from Vietnam, the horror of the Munich Olympics. And the peculiar son of Regina Fischer and Paul Nemenyi transforming chess.

In the United States, interest in the game boomed. "Chess was the thing," says Steve Doyle, a national tournament director. "It was the hula hoop of its day. The pet rock. Everyone was buying coffee-table books on chess and onyx chess sets. It was everywhere. And in a couple of years, the whole fad passed."

As did Fischer.

Bobby Fischer had promised to be an active champ. Then he dropped out. He refused to defend his title in 1975, though the prize fund had ballooned into the millions.

"Assuming he won the match, he would have won $50 million in today's dollars," says Leroy Dubeck, a past president of the U.S. Chess Federation and a physics professor at Temple University.

But Dubeck says no amount of money would have lured Fischer to the board, because "he simply didn't want to play."

Stripped of his title, Fischer disappeared. He lived a secretive life in Southern California under the pseudonym Robert James (using his middle name for his last).

He had led U.S. chess out of obscurity. Players were desperate for the messiah's reappearance.

"As it is, he changed the face of chess," says Kaufman, the New York chess master who knew Fischer as a teen. "Imagine if he had played another 10 years. Imagine if Mozart had lived to 46. It would have changed things enormously. Thousands and thousands of more chess players. More money in chess. More clubs and organizations."

"Those of us who were his contemporaries see it as one of the great sadnesses of our lives," Kaufman says. "Not even bitterness. Just profound sadness."

Alex Yermolinsky, a San Francisco grandmaster, calls Fischer's abrupt retirement "probably the worst thing that could happen to chess."

"I can't say chess started dying after this," Yermolinsky says, "but something was lost."

What? Maybe 1,000 or more Bobby Fischer tournament games, new contributions he could have made to chess theory, and the prestige of having an American as world champion. No one has risen to succeed him. Waitzkin, the prodigy in Searching for Bobby Fischer, never even became a grandmaster.

Just last month, the U.S. championship was played to no great notice, and was won by a Latvian-born Pittsburgh resident, Alexander Shabalov, who is probably destined to a life of continued obscurity; the prize was a modest $25,000.

In 1992, Fischer surfaced. He was 49 - past his prime. He and Spassky played an exhibition match in Yugoslavia that drew worldwide attention. Fischer won again, though he was clearly off form.

The United States alleged that Fischer, in playing the match, was violating a presidential order imposing sanctions against Yugoslavia. He was indicted. He became a fugitive and has never returned to face the charges, which still stand. In recent years, he has hopscotched between Japan, Hungary and the Philippines.

Bobby Fischer never liked the media. But in January 1999 he made his debut in a medium that he came to love: talk radio. It was the first in a string of interviews with a Philippine radio host, Pablo Mercado. Both men got something from it. Mercado got an exclusive with the elusive Fischer. Fischer got a forum to rail against his villains. Topping the list were the Jews.

Within minutes of greeting the host, Fischer uncorked this thought: "Filthy bastards, they're trying to take over the world. . . . They invented the Holocaust. . . . They're a filthy, lying bastard people."

Bobby Ang, a former friend of Fischer's from the Philippines, sighs: "You ask Bobby about chess, he answers about Jews."

In his deepening isolation, Fischer has broken with friends. He has even broken with chess. He refuses to play the game in its classic form. Instead, he is pushing a variation in which the pieces are arranged randomly in the back row.

There are eerie parallels in the lives of Fischer and his chess forebear Paul Morphy, including claims of persecution and reclusiveness.

Toward the end of his life, Morphy, too, renounced chess. He refused even to let friends speak of the game in his presence.

In 1879, the American Chess Journal quoted one of Morphy's acquaintances: "The least encouragement will result in being compelled to listen for hours to the same old story that everybody knows by heart - that relating to his father's estate. He talks of nothing else and apparently thinks of nothing else."

The great minds that could produce such artistic compositions over the board would ultimately prove their undoing.

"It's a double tragedy," Kaufman says. "It's a tragedy for American chess and a tragedy for Bobby Fischer. He could have been on top of the world."

By Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson The Philadelphia Inquirer Sat, Feb. 08, 2003

Back to Bobby Fischer Articles

[connoisseur series500]

Excellent articles. Thanks for posting them.

[Brownian Motion]

Friends within the small circle of people who were aware say that as Bobby's celebrity grew, Peter became embarrassed by his half-brother. The author of a respected textbook on statistics, Peter exhibited the family gift for logical thinking. But the similarities with Bobby stopped there.

Peter Nemenyi fought to defend minority rights. In the 1960s he was beaten and arrested while integrating coffee shops and helping black voters in Mississippi.

His end was unhappy. Sick with prostate cancer, he killed himself last year. He had been living alone in a Durham, N.C., apartment crammed with statistics papers. Friends say they often spotted him pushing a collection of shopping baskets around town, wearing oven mitts for gloves.

Peter Nemenyi stored his personal papers in a Wisconsin state archive. The files include statistics papers, address books, tax returns, and memorabilia from his civil rights days.

Back to Bobby Fischer Articles

I lived in Durham in the 1980s, and I used to see Peter Nemenyi pushing his shopping cart around town. I don't think he had a car. He was a gentle soul, apparently quite mad in his own right, but friendly and always smiling. Those who knew him a little better said that he had lived an interesting life, but I'm not sure anyone knew that he was Bobby Fischer's brother. When I read this piece earlier today my jaw dropped.

[7/4]

January 21, 2008

Fischer’s Roots in City Tangle With His Legacy

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and SHARON OTTERMAN, NYTs

Before he became notorious for his anti-American and anti-Semitic ravings, and before he became an icon for dominating, and then dismissing, the cloistered world of chess, Robert James Fischer was just Bobby, another young New Yorker on the make.

His world was the city, and friends say that before he made comments supportive of the 2001 World Trade Center attack and before he lived in exile, New York had held him in thrall — from the streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he went to high school and rooted for the Dodgers, to the Upper East Side, where he ate on the cheap, to downtown, where he mastered the game.

Mr. Fischer died on Friday, far away from those places, of kidney failure at 64 in a hospital in Iceland.

Joseph Virovatz, 85, a retired physicist and Jewish Holocaust survivor, said he still remembered a day in 1961 when he, Mr. Fischer and Pal Benko, a chess grandmaster who, like Mr. Virovatz, emigrated from Hungary, were in Mr. Benko’s apartment on the Lower East Side.

“It was a beautiful, sunny day outside, but Bobby was sitting in the dark watching Westerns; he loved Westerns,” Mr. Virovatz said on Friday at the Village Chess Shop, where he was playing speed chess. “He was eating Hershey bars Benko had given him. He was aspiring to be a world champion, but he was broke.”

The three men began to spend evenings together. Often, they would eat at one of the Hungarian restaurants that used to line Second Avenue, what Mr. Virovatz called “Goulash Avenue.” A place called the Tip Top Restaurant was a favorite. Mr. Virovatz said he often wound up picking up his young friend’s tab.

Mr. Fischer would talk about chess, of course, but also about other things, like favorite volumes from his extensive comic book collection, which included a first-edition Superman.

Instead of holding a steady job, he said, Mr. Fischer would virtually encamp at a table at the New York Public Library.

“He would be spending 12 to 14 hours a day in the library studying the games of the old chess masters from the 1850s,” said Mr. Virovatz, who said he empathized with Mr. Fischer’s unhappiness in his later years, and thus took phone calls from him despite Mr. Fischer’s public anti-Semitic comments.

“He was an example of Yankee ingenuity; he largely taught himself.”

Although Mr. Fischer was born in Chicago, he learned the game of chess in Brooklyn and became a star in Manhattan, at the outdoor tables in Washington Square Park and at the Manhattan Chess Club, which was at 100 Central Park South when he became its youngest member as a 12-year-old in June 1955. The club moved around Manhattan before closing in 2002.

One of his early feats came at a simultaneous exhibition in 1955, when he defeated 12 chess players competing against him at the club.

Four years earlier he had been among a group of players who had challenged a chess master at a similar exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. After he was defeated in less than 15 minutes, he began to cry. But he had been noticed by Carmine Nigro, president of the Brooklyn Chess and Checkers Club, where Bobby soon was playing most Friday nights.

Part of Bobby’s training included accompanying Mr. Nigro to a tournament between the United States and the Soviet Union at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan in June 1954.

At one point, Bobby’s mother became so concerned about her son’s obsession with chess that she took him to the children’s psychiatric ward at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where the doctor pronounced him healthy, according to “Bobby Fischer Goes to War,” by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.

Bobby attended Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue, where he was said to be friendly with Barbra (then spelled “Barbara”) Streisand. He dropped out to concentrate on playing chess. The school is now closed.

Frank Brady, 73, the chairman of the mass communications department at St. John’s University and the president of the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, where Mr. Fischer would sometimes play, said he first met Mr. Fischer at a tournament when Bobby was about 10 and Brady was in his late teens.

The two played hundreds of matches — a few of which Mr. Brady said he won — but had virtually no contact after the early 1970s, when Mr. Fischer rose in prominence. Mr. Brady wrote a book, “Profile of a Prodigy,” about Mr. Fischer, which strained their friendship after Mr. Fischer became angry that his Jewish heritage had been mentioned, Mr. Brady said.

“About then is when Fischer started to go bad,” Mr. Brady said. “He began to see almost a kind of conspiracy against him. I wouldn’t call it clinical paranoia, but it was a kind of paranoia.”

In his later years, Mr. Fischer became nearly as well known for his anti-Semitic rants and problems with U.S. immigration officials as for his chess.

During a radio interview after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, “What goes around comes around, even for the United States.”

Mr. Fischer’s legacy in New York might be the most enduring among the prodigies of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, winner of seven national high school chess championships, including the last four. Eliot Weiss, the team’s coach, said that he owns many of Mr. Fischer’s chess books and that his teams learn chess by studying Mr. Fischer’s games. But he said he had mixed feelings about Mr. Fischer.

“His influence on chess is bipolar,” he said. “He was a genius and his contribution is unmatched, but he brought chess down to a horrible level in his later years.”

Mr. Virovatz said part of Mr. Fischer’s bitterness, particularly late in life, can be attributed to being forced to live outside the United States, where he faced arrest after playing a chess match in Yugoslavia in 1992 that violated an American law that prohibited conducting business with Yugoslavia while it waged war on Bosnia.

“If you can understand how upset he was to be rejected by his country, exiled, you can understand his belligerency, his ill feelings,” he said.

“He was a cold war hero. I don’t know who to blame. But since he was a genius, he should have been treated differently.”

David Gonzalez contributed reporting.

Edited January 22, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

January 21, 2008

Bobby Fischer Buried in Iceland

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:40 p.m. ET

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) -- Reclusive chess genius Bobby Fischer was buried Monday in a private ceremony at a churchyard in southern Iceland, a television station reported.

Fischer, who died of kidney failure on Thursday at the age of 64, was interred at Laugardaelir church outside the town of Selfoss, Iceland's Channel 2 reported, citing the parish priest.

The Rev. Kristinn Agust Fridfinnsson told the TV station the ceremony was arranged so hastily he did not arrive until after the ceremony was over.

The funeral was attended by only a handful of people, including Fischer's longtime companion, Miyoko Watai, and friend and spokesman Gardar Sverrisson, the TV station reported.

Sverrisson did not return a call seeking comment late Monday.

A troubled chess genius, Fisher gained global fame in 1972 when he defeated the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky in Reykjavik to become the first officially recognized world champion born in the United States.

The showdown, played out at the height of the Cold War, took on mythic dimensions as a clash between the world's two superpowers.

Fischer lost his world title in 1975 after refusing to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. He dropped out of competitive chess and largely out of view, spending time in Hungary and the Philippines and emerging occasionally to make outspoken and often outrageous comments, sometimes attacking the United States.

Fischer -- born in Chicago and raised in New York -- was arrested in Japan in 2004 and threatened with extradition to the U.S. to face charges he broke international sanctions against the former Yugoslavia by going there to play a chess match in 1992.

Fischer renounced his U.S. citizenship and spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland -- a chess-mad nation of 300,000 -- granted him citizenship.

[connoisseur series500]

January 21, 2008

Fischer’s Roots in City Tangle With His Legacy

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and SHARON OTTERMAN, NYTs

Before he became notorious for his anti-American and anti-Semitic ravings, and before he became an icon for dominating, and then dismissing, the cloistered world of chess, Robert James Fischer was just Bobby, another young New Yorker on the make.

His world was the city, and friends say that before he made comments supportive of the 2001 World Trade Center attack and before he lived in exile, New York had held him in thrall — from the streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he went to high school and rooted for the Dodgers, to the Upper East Side, where he ate on the cheap, to downtown, where he mastered the game.

Mr. Fischer died on Friday, far away from those places, of kidney failure at 64 in a hospital in Iceland.

Joseph Virovatz, 85, a retired physicist and Jewish Holocaust survivor, said he still remembered a day in 1961 when he, Mr. Fischer and Pal Benko, a chess grandmaster who, like Mr. Virovatz, emigrated from Hungary, were in Mr. Benko’s apartment on the Lower East Side.

“It was a beautiful, sunny day outside, but Bobby was sitting in the dark watching Westerns; he loved Westerns,” Mr. Virovatz said on Friday at the Village Chess Shop, where he was playing speed chess. “He was eating Hershey bars Benko had given him. He was aspiring to be a world champion, but he was broke.”

The three men began to spend evenings together. Often, they would eat at one of the Hungarian restaurants that used to line Second Avenue, what Mr. Virovatz called “Goulash Avenue.” A place called the Tip Top Restaurant was a favorite. Mr. Virovatz said he often wound up picking up his young friend’s tab.

Mr. Fischer would talk about chess, of course, but also about other things, like favorite volumes from his extensive comic book collection, which included a first-edition Superman.

Instead of holding a steady job, he said, Mr. Fischer would virtually encamp at a table at the New York Public Library.

“He would be spending 12 to 14 hours a day in the library studying the games of the old chess masters from the 1850s,” said Mr. Virovatz, who said he empathized with Mr. Fischer’s unhappiness in his later years, and thus took phone calls from him despite Mr. Fischer’s public anti-Semitic comments.

“He was an example of Yankee ingenuity; he largely taught himself.”

Although Mr. Fischer was born in Chicago, he learned the game of chess in Brooklyn and became a star in Manhattan, at the outdoor tables in Washington Square Park and at the Manhattan Chess Club, which was at 100 Central Park South when he became its youngest member as a 12-year-old in June 1955. The club moved around Manhattan before closing in 2002.

One of his early feats came at a simultaneous exhibition in 1955, when he defeated 12 chess players competing against him at the club.

Four years earlier he had been among a group of players who had challenged a chess master at a similar exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. After he was defeated in less than 15 minutes, he began to cry. But he had been noticed by Carmine Nigro, president of the Brooklyn Chess and Checkers Club, where Bobby soon was playing most Friday nights.

Part of Bobby’s training included accompanying Mr. Nigro to a tournament between the United States and the Soviet Union at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan in June 1954.

At one point, Bobby’s mother became so concerned about her son’s obsession with chess that she took him to the children’s psychiatric ward at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where the doctor pronounced him healthy, according to “Bobby Fischer Goes to War,” by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.

Bobby attended Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue, where he was said to be friendly with Barbra (then spelled “Barbara”) Streisand. He dropped out to concentrate on playing chess. The school is now closed.

Frank Brady, 73, the chairman of the mass communications department at St. John’s University and the president of the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, where Mr. Fischer would sometimes play, said he first met Mr. Fischer at a tournament when Bobby was about 10 and Brady was in his late teens.

The two played hundreds of matches — a few of which Mr. Brady said he won — but had virtually no contact after the early 1970s, when Mr. Fischer rose in prominence. Mr. Brady wrote a book, “Profile of a Prodigy,” about Mr. Fischer, which strained their friendship after Mr. Fischer became angry that his Jewish heritage had been mentioned, Mr. Brady said.

“About then is when Fischer started to go bad,” Mr. Brady said. “He began to see almost a kind of conspiracy against him. I wouldn’t call it clinical paranoia, but it was a kind of paranoia.”

In his later years, Mr. Fischer became nearly as well known for his anti-Semitic rants and problems with U.S. immigration officials as for his chess.

During a radio interview after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, “What goes around comes around, even for the United States.”

Mr. Fischer’s legacy in New York might be the most enduring among the prodigies of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, winner of seven national high school chess championships, including the last four. Eliot Weiss, the team’s coach, said that he owns many of Mr. Fischer’s chess books and that his teams learn chess by studying Mr. Fischer’s games. But he said he had mixed feelings about Mr. Fischer.

“His influence on chess is bipolar,” he said. “He was a genius and his contribution is unmatched, but he brought chess down to a horrible level in his later years.”

Mr. Virovatz said part of Mr. Fischer’s bitterness, particularly late in life, can be attributed to being forced to live outside the United States, where he faced arrest after playing a chess match in Yugoslavia in 1992 that violated an American law that prohibited conducting business with Yugoslavia while it waged war on Bosnia.

“If you can understand how upset he was to be rejected by his country, exiled, you can understand his belligerency, his ill feelings,” he said.

“He was a cold war hero. I don’t know who to blame. But since he was a genius, he should have been treated differently.”

David Gonzalez contributed reporting.

What would have happened if Fischer had grown up in a small Midwestern town? He likely wouldn't have had the opportunity to develop his genius as fast. He still would have achieved great things, but it would have taken longer.

[PHILLYQ]

Bobby attended Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue, where he was said to be friendly with Barbra (then spelled “Barbara”) Streisand. He dropped out to concentrate on playing chess. The school is now closed.

The school was actually closed as Erasmus and reopened as a few small schools. My wife is a graduate and a sister also went there. here's abunch of other famous Erasmus graduates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Hall_High_School