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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Arguably the greatest chess player of all time (and one of the weirdest human beings) is detained in Japan, wanted by the U.S. Will he escape an ignominious fool's mate?
Jul 24, 2004 | Lost in last week's wall-to-wall Martha news cycle was an extraordinary item about the world's most famous chess player. Reports were conflicting and details vague, but this much was certain: Bobby Fischer was being held in a Tokyo jail cell, where he awaited possible deportation to the United States to face criminal charges.
For most people, whose recollection of Fischer begins and ends with his victory in Iceland over Boris Spassky during the 1972 Cold War soap opera officially known as the 11th World Chess Championship, this was an astonishing revelation. It was as if a forgotten film star, someone long assumed dead because they hadn't been seen on television in ages, had suddenly and quite unexpectedly materialized. It's the type of twisted American tragedy that Hollywood director Billy Wilder would have savored. The movie pitch practically writes itself: "'Sunset Boulevard' meets 'Searching for Bobby Fischer' -- Norma Desmond, with enough chess smarts to slay the Soviets and Deep Blue. It'll open huge in Reykjavik!"
Unlike Norma, Bobby isn't starry-eyed and longing for his beloved close-up. Instead he's in a state of extreme mental anguish, convinced he'll be murdered "accidentally on purpose" if deported to the United States to face charges he violated U.S. economic sanctions by performing in a 1992 rematch with Spassky in the former Yugoslavia. To trot out the hoary cliché, the great chess master has finally reached his own endgame. And, while there are moves yet to play, the outcome appears bleak.
But it's much more than a story of a kooky grandmaster fugitive finally being brought to justice after cunningly evading the authorities for 12 years, the treatment the story has received stateside. In fact, when arguably the greatest chess player in history was detained last week at Tokyo's Narita International Airport on a passport violation, he became an unwitting pawn in a game of geopolitics between North Korea, Japan and the United States. It's a story of real diplomatic intrigue. And now Robert James Fischer, an enigmatic recluse who used to guard his privacy as fervently as he did his king on the chess board, is about to be thrust into public view for all of the world to gawk at. To quote Eugene Torre, a Filipino Grandmaster and longtime friend of Fischer's, "Poor Bobby."
To understand how a Cold War hero and a man once celebrated as an American icon ended up in a jail cell half-way around the world, one must trace Fischer's harrowing character arc. Fischer was raised in four-story walk-up apartment in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His mother Regina, recently divorced but without alimony payments or child support, worked as a practical nurse, and double and weekend shifts resulted in her being absent much of the time. Even so, finances were a constant strain. Young Bobby wore shoes patched with scraps of leather. When his sister, Joan, graduated from nursing school, she didn't attend graduation ceremonies because the cap and gown rental was deemed a luxury the family budget couldn't absorb.
As a child, Bobby was intelligent but performed poorly in grade school. More disturbing was his moodiness and violent outbursts, which invariably were directed at teachers. Inadequately socialized, he was shunned by his peers -- a problem child to be sure, but hardly in need of psychiatric help.
Despite his lackluster academic performance, what was evident from the beginning was that Bobby possessed a preternatural ability to discern and memorize intricate spatial relationships. Regina bought Bobby puzzles to occupy his time spent alone in the apartment with Joan. When he was 6, Joan brought home a $1 plastic chess set. The following year, he joined the Brooklyn Chess Club and soon began competing in local tournaments.
His progress was steady but hardly awe-inspiring, until he played a game in 1956 at New York's Rosenwald Memorial Tournament against Donald Byrne, one of the top U.S. chess players at the time. The game was of such complexity and originality that it was immediately hailed in "Chess Review" magazine as the "Game of the Century." Former Russian world champion Mikhail Tal was so humbled by Bobby's extraordinary prowess he praised him as "the greatest genius to descend from the chess heavens." He was only 13.
Within a year, Fischer was indisputably the best chess player in the country. At 16, he fulfilled his promise, dropping out of high school to pursue international competition against the best players in the world -- the Soviet grandmasters. But lack of experience and an unwillingness to placate the very chess patrons and United States Chess Federation officials who were in a position to help him hindered his advancement. Complicating matters, he insisted on improved playing conditions (better lighting and less noise were constant themes) and more prize money. He did much to improve tournament play for his peers, but was labeled a malcontent in the process.
