The Brilliant Chess Mind of Bobby Fischer
BOBBY FISCHER, the chess prodigy, was born in Chicago in 1943 but moved to Brooklyn with his family at the age of five and was raised there. He became one of the great chess players of all time, and greatly popularized chess in the United States. But the long second half of his life was not a happy one.
He was raised in a modest apartment by his divorced mother, Regina. She was a non-observant Jew, passionate about her causes and often gone; Bobby’s nominal father, Hans Gerhardt Fischer, was gentile. Bobby’s actual father was probably Regina’s friend Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian-Jewish physicist.
When Bobby was six, his older sister Joan bought him a chess set at a candy store, and taught him to play. Bobby stared at the 64 black-and-white squares on the board. He seemed to instantly grasp the individual gifts of the rook, knight and bishop — but also how to use them as a team. He became a fanatic student of chess and did little else. Chess usually has a clear divide between the many who play for enjoyment, for sport — and the few who play for a living. For Bobby, even as a child, the line was blurred. Before he made any money playing chess, he approached each match as a matter of survival.
He was interested in the Radio Church of God, as promoted by Herbert Armstrong. There was something good in religion, he felt, until “the authorities” came along to ruin it. He was sure that the authorities, if allowed to, would ruin politics, religion, sports, ANYTHING. He had decided that the authorities were not as bright as Bobby, and though they tried to hide their jealousy and mediocrity, Bobby could see through their poses.
Bobby had few social skills, and no hobbies but chess. He would admit that he had no close friends, but so what? The reason people needed friends, he’d decided, was to have someone to whisper their secrets to. Bobby had no secrets and saw no reason for secrets. All of his opinions were for public consumption, if anyone cared to hear them. Besides, friends came with a huge drawback — they wanted your time. That would pull Bobby away from chess and he couldn’t allow that.
He went from chess club to chess club around New York, looking for players who could give him a competitive game. Few players could and Bobby was getting frustrated by this. He felt other teenagers didn’t take chess seriously enough. The young man’s brilliance was overflowing its container.
So when Bobby was 13, his mother, Regina, reached out to a gentleman in Brooklyn named Jack W. Collins. Collins had once been the #17 ranked chess player in the U.S. but he was now primarily a chess coach. He was a sweet, somewhat shy man who’d spent his whole life in a wheelchair. Collins knew how it felt to be a whip-smart kid who didn’t quite fit into the world. As a young man, he’d found the perfect retreat in chess. Regina asked if he could look after Bobby a little and help him find chess players on his level.
Fischer did more than that; he became a father figure for Bobby Fischer, who’d known very few men in his life. Bobby could see that Jack Collins was not one of “the authorities.” Jack lived in a wheelchair, and didn’t try to boss other people around or set the rules. He just helped people to play better chess. Collins was a little disturbed by how dogmatic Bobby could be, but he sensed a sweetness in this kid, and enjoyed his sly humor.
Collins was proud to be Bobby’s chess tutor, but he was careful to tell journalists, fans and other players that Bobby’s skill at chess was something that couldn’t be taught. Collins would concede that he’d ‘imparted some knowledge’ to Bobby. But he’d never coached him. He saw Bobby Fischer as a genius on the level of Shakespeare, Beethoven or Leonardo da Vinci.
At 13, Fischer played a match against the “international master” Donald Byrne and Bobby played so brilliantly that experts dubbed it “The Game of the Century.” He so thoroughly colonized the board that his opponent’s moves looked like sterile exercises, limp troop movements. In 1958, at 14, Fischer was by far the best chess player in the United States; he played 13 games against other U.S. contenders that year and never lost a game. At 15, he became the youngest player ever to make international grand master.
Some people felt he had little soul or depth. On the rare occasions where he lost or played to a draw, he seemed to feel not grief but annoyance. His opponents were nuisances, pests to be put in their place. Bobby was thin and pale, badly dressed, and got little outdoor exercise. Maybe a little swimming or tennis — but only to keep him fit for chess, for those five-hour games when your concentration might waver in the fifth hour if you weren’t in shape.
When he was 16, Bobby started dressing carefully. He suspected the players he beat salvaged some pride by telling themselves, ‘Well, this Bobby Fischer looks a mess.’ At the Manhattan Chess Club, many of the older players dressed up like gentlemen, and Bobby decided that looked good, so he started dressing up for his matches, too.
Some of the old-timers at the Manhattan Chess Club spoke of a Cuban chess master named Jose Raul Capablanca, who’d played at the club in the early 1940’s. Capablanca had used very simple, uncluttered openings which turned brilliant in the middlegame. The old-timers said that when you played Capablanca, you’d arrive at the game’s climax, only to find that the chess game had been lost long before, in complexities of the middlegame which only Capablanca had grasped. Bobby wished he could have played Capablanca, and tried to imitate that style of play.
To Bobby, old chess games never died; they were always alive. At the Marshall Chess Club, he pored over a cupboard full of dusty index cards recording 19th century chess games. Few chess players cared about these ancient games but Bobby did; he liked to find an old move, an old opening, and put a twist on it, make it his own. He published his first chess book before he’d left high school.
Fischer also borrowed from the Russians; he liked the way the Russians opened their chess games, and he borrowed many of their opening moves. But he found the Russian middle game stodgy and predictable, weighed down by theory. Fischer’s middle game was astonishing — fresh, pragmatic, full of reversals, totally unafraid to violate basic principles of high-level chess.
Because Bobby made moves that other grand masters did not, he put even vastly experienced opponents in positions they hadn’t seen before. Then, suddenly, as his opponent was hastily improvised, a startling series of moves in Fischer’s middle-game would crystalize into something unstoppable. Now his opponents could see where Fischer was going, but not how to stop him. There was a psychic moment when Bobby could FEEL the ego of his opponent break, and begin to accept defeat. Bobby loved those moments.
Through the 1960’s, Bobby was eccentric, and something of a conspiracy buff but his chess playing was magical. When one chess grandmaster plays another, often the match ends in a draw. But Fischer once played 20 straight matches, every one with a grandmaster, and won every single one. No losses, no draws. His goal was not to mystify his opponents but to use furious advances to overpower them.
Bobby could be charming in his own way. He did Dick Cavett’s TV show several times, and Cavett found him sweet. Bobby went on a Bob Hope TV special, and performed capably in a long comedy sketch. He was struck by the way people in show business seemed to genuinely like each other and wish each other the best. Especially jazz musicians; Bobby thought they seemed like very nice guys. Chess players were not nice people, Fischer said, which is why he enjoyed crushing them.
Someone once asked him: “What is it like for your beaten opponents?” Bobby chuckled and said, “They can’t kid themselves that they’re so hot now.” He liked to see himself as administering doses of reality to mediocre players, who told lies.
By 1972, he no longer was in touch with his mother or his sister. He traveled to his matches, stayed in spartan hotel rooms, maintained a rigorous stretching routine, read chess books and watched television but had almost no friends. Unlike most top players, he had no coach, no manager. Fischer sometimes burst out with weird statements, or nasty complaints — ‘People are sheep’ or ‘Women make stupid chess players’ but his chess was so brilliant that people tried to look the other way.
Sometimes his complaints about the playing conditions of his matches seemed reasonable; at one match in Berlin, members of the audience seated just behind Fischer were allowed to smoke, and it bothered him. But at other times, he was needlessly petulant: the temperature in the room was too high, or the lights too bright. He told people these were not opinions but facts; anyone who didn’t agree with him was stupid.
In 1972, in Reykjavik, Iceland, at the age of 29, Fischer played an arranged match against the great Russian champion Boris Spassky for a purse of $138,500. The Cold War was on, and all U.S.-Russian confrontations took on great symbolic force. The Russians had held the world chess title for 35 years, and tended to regard it, if only subconsciously, as their national property.
For reasons strangely petty, Fischer almost didn’t go to Reykjavik and play the match. One of the more bizarre diplomatic missions on which Henry Kissinger ever embarked was convincing Bobby Fischer to go to Reykjavik and play chess with Boris Spassky. Kissinger deeply identified with chess and saw diplomacy as a chess game.
Finally, Bobby flew to Reykjavik. He was late for the first chess match, almost forfeited, then lost to Spassky. He didn’t show up for the second match, so he lost that one, too. Bobby complained about the TV cameras; they were too noisy; they spoiled his concentration. The most enduring still photo of the Fischer-Spassky match is of Bobby with his head between his hands, staring at the board as if something awful is about to happen.
Finally, it was decided that Spassky and Fischer would play chess in a room without cameras, but with the match shown on closed-circuit screens. From that moment on, Fischer seemed to revive. He beat Spassky, and became World Champion. In one of their matches, Fischer’s play was so remarkable that Spassky himself was moved to applaud. Bobby was now famous around the world, — more famous than he wanted to be.
But he did like the idea that more Americans were now playing chess. The United States was a football country, a baseball country, but his victory over a Russian in chess had made it a little bit of a chess country. “Americans like winners,” Bobby noted.
In 1975, he was supposed to defend his title against Spassky, but refused. He secluded himself and stopped playing competitive chess altogether. That same year of 1975, a Russian chess prodigy eight years younger than Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, became world champion and held that title for a decade, until he lost to another prodigy, Garry Kasparov, who was 12 years younger than Karpov.
Kasparov was like Fischer in combining a deep understanding of the principles of winning chess with a brash willingness to break with those principles in a tight match, with a specific goal in mind. But Fischer was unimpressed. He called Karpov and Kasparov “the lowest dogs around” and said they had “destroyed chess.” Asked to explain this, Bobby said that Garry Kasparov was a chess genius, yes, but nothing more than an idiot savant of chess, and if you asked him to do anything else he would be merely an idiot.
Whereas, Bobby considered himself an all-around genius, who’d chosen to display his genius at chess, but could have been a genius in any number of fields. His bigoted comments began coming more frequently now. He lost the friendship of Jack Collins when he made harsh statements about African-Americans and Jews. ‘The goddamn Jews have to be stopped,’ Bobby would say. Jack Collins decided he didn’t want to know Bobby Fischer anymore, and those two men, once very close, lost all contact with each other.
Many of the greatest chess players have had mental health problems. It’s a lively topic of debate among chess fans: Does master-level chess keep mad people sane — or drive sane people mad? Grigoryan… von Lennep… von Bardeleben… all were great chess players who took their own lives. Bobby’s life disintegrated, and then his mind did.
As Fischer aged, he decided the U.S. government was after him, and so was the Israeli Mossad. It was all part of a massive conspiracy. He claimed his hotel rooms were bugged. He didn’t want to fly on a commercial airplane because the Russians might plant a bomb on the plane. For years, Bobby hated to travel anywhere without a certain blue cardboard box. He refused to tell anyone what was inside. Once at a restaurant, he went to the men’s room and left the blue box at the table. His companion slid off the cover — and discovered a gold-embossed Bible.
Bobby’s unsuccessful lawsuit against members of the Worldwide Church of God cost him much of his meager savings. In 1992, he was living in Los Angeles, in squalid living conditions, no longer playing chess, when he received a letter from a 17-year-old Hungarian which said: “I would like to sell you the world’s best vacuum cleaner. Now that I have your interest, turn the page.” This, said Fischer, made him want to play chess again.
In that same year of 1992, Bobby DID get in trouble with the U.S. government, by playing chess once more against Boris Spassky, this time at a resort in Montenegro, Yugoslavia. The chess match violated U.S. sanctions against Yugoslavia triggered by the Bosnian War. Fischer beat Spassky again — but was indicted by the U.S. Government. The man who had once disdained secrets, and boasted that he did everything out in the open, now went into hiding.
In 1997, Bobby’s mother died, and in 1998 his sister Joan died. Bobby was said to be distraught, writhing with delusions. In 2004, he was arrested in Tokyo, for violating immigration laws. By then, he’d put on about 40 pounds, had gray hair, wild, staring eyes, bad teeth and a scruffy beard. He didn’t want to be in America anymore, he said, and with a touch of melodrama, pleaded with Iceland to take him in. Iceland did more than take him in; they made him a citizen.
Bobby Fischer died of kidney failure in Reykjavik in 2008, at the age of 64. Anatoly Karpov remarked that “You need a very strong nervous system” to play master-level chess. Fischer’s nervous system betrayed him, and the coarseness of his paranoia in middle age made such a sad contrast to the tender brilliance of the chess he played in his youth. He’d achieved so much — but he might have done so much more, in chess and in life, if anyone had ever been able to help him bring his mental illness under control. His brilliance was impersonal, and it danced away.