And so the world awoke to news of the death of the King of Chess, Bobby Fischer. There is little I can add here that probably hasn't been written elsewhere, other than to add that it somehow all seems so right that Bobby would leave us at the numerical age - 64 - which also happens to be the number of squares that are on a classical chess board.
I have vague memories of the tall, lanky, intent, and striking looking Bobby when he was at the height of his playing powers. I can dimly remember as a small boy that my older brother was wrapped up in following the 1972 Spassky-Fischer match up. I remember that he used to play with my mother and that I would watch them, wondering about this strange game and how it was supposed to work. I do remember watching Bobby play tennis with Gail Goodrich at a tournament, but then it seemed that he disappeared from the public consciousness. I went to a parochial school where athletics was the past time of choice and none of my neighborhood friends played chess. In another time and another place, I might have become a master level player myself, but we were fated to play the newly created type of game called role playing games as teenagers. We then saw the onset of video game arcades in the 1980's, the precursors of today's home computer games. As it was, my memories of Bobby had faded like a ghost.
But it need not have been that way, and much of whether young people a generation ago might have picked up chess as a past time would in fact have depended upon Bobby Fischer. Chess, as a past time, has to compete with all other past times for time, money, and social attention, in order to thrive. In that sense, the Royal Game is no different in needing a charismatic figure than basketball needing Earvin Magic Johnson or Michael Jordon, or golf needing Tiger Woods. As it was, since he dropped out of the game, and out of public view, the surge of interest in the game - the "Fischer Boom" - was brief, like a fiery comet in the night. Bobby was literally fielding offers to play chess in Vegas for millions of dollars in the aftermath of his 1972 triumph. Anatoly Karpov became the first man to become a chess millionaire, but Fischer would have beaten Karpov to that title by 15-20 years had he stayed playing. It is a widely accepted observation that Fischer was literally 20 years ahead of his time when he was at the height of his game. Most people have no idea how much effort Fischer put into studying the game. Frank Brady wrote in Bobby Fischer - Profile of a Prodigy that Bobby owned some 480 chess books and thousands of chess magazines from all over the world in his apartment, many of which written in Russian, a language which Bobby taught himself how to read. He wrote that nearly all of the books had annotation notes written by Bobby under their board position diagrams. He had to part with some of them because he didn't have enough room to store all of them.
My thought is that Fischer, had he been a different person, would have held the title until around 1990 or so, probably losing it to a late 20's Garry Kasparov, who by that time had finally broken through the 2800 Elo rating barrier. What a match that would have been! Even today - 35 years later and armed with 3 gigahertz, 1 terabye sized disk computational power, and research assistants at their disposal - there are only perhaps 4 players in the world (Vladamir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, and Veselin Topalov, as well as Kasparov) who have achieved Elo ratings that are generally equal to or greater than that which was achieved by Fischer, who incidentally did all of his analysis on his own in the final age before the advent of personal computers.
Fischer could have easily amassed a fortune of over $100,000,000 had he kept playing, and could have been a hero to two entire generations of young American children. Instead, he found that once he had achieved the summit of being recognized as the greatest chess player in the world, he found that he literally didn't know what to do with himself. He gave a good chunk of his 1972 Championship winnings to a church which he then denounced (and with good reason) for malfeasance. Interest in the game cooled down after Bobby refused to defend his title in 1975. The game never really recovered and as a result, most really strong players struggle here in America to earn enough money to pay the bills. An acquaintance of mine who is a master level chess player has told me that there are only about 200-300 master level players in America (with an elo rating of 2200 or higher) who actively play the game. Most simply retire or go on to do something more lucrative.
It's hard to say where Bobby's anti-Semitism started, but it seems to me that it probably had the same roots which caused Bobby to be so difficult with his rock star, prima donna like demands which he imposed on tournament directors and game promoters. Maybe the rage from having been brought up in an unstable, fatherless household was too much for the chess board to bottle up, but that's an issue for the psychiatrists to chew over. As it was, I still find it hard to believe that he is gone. I hope that God has forgiven him and that he has left us for a better place.
Bobby Fischer - RIP.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at January 18, 2008 08:20 PM