Death of a Grand Master

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 war-torn 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. 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 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.

... contd.