Death of a Grand Master

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After he won handily, he dropped out of sight again. He avoided arrest on American charges over his Yugoslavia appearance. 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 USA and against Jews.

Fischer’s 1992 victory against Spassky was a sad reprise of his most glorious triumph. It was in summer 1972, in a match played in Reykjavik, that he wrested the world championship from Spassky, becoming the only American till date to win the title.

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.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews he gave to a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely against Jews.

On September 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. 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 to trounce Spassky 12.5 to 8.5. 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 USA, the game was cool. And when it was over, he walked away with staggering winner’s purse of $250,000.

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 Nixon. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons, as scores of poverty-stricken chess players benefited from the cachet that Fischer had conferred on them.

But Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird 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.

He was involved with the now defunct Worldwide Church of God in the early 1960’s. For a time, he 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 his 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, and also experimented with new moves. But he did not emerge publicly until 1992, when he accepted the offer to play against 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 – Fischer was a hugely demanding personality who felt his prowess as a chess player entitled him to exorbitant privilege. It was an outlook that became ever more skewed as his life went on.

He was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. His father, a German-born physicist Gerhardt Fischer and mother Regina divorced when he was two years old. He was brought up by his Jewish mother in Brooklyn. 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, Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister Joan, who bought him his first chessboard when he was six, died soon after and two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. Having never married or had children, Fischer leaves no immediate survivors.