Robert J. Fischer, aka Bobby, of Chess

Today we hear that the highly dynamic spark that was the essence of Bobby Fischer has parted company for good from his corporeal being. It happened in Iceland, a sputtering little island in the North Atlantic that was first discovered in 1972, when Fischer and a Soviet grandmaster, Boris Spassky, played a match there to determine the world champion of chess. Fischer won handily in 21 games, 12-1/2 to 8-1/2.

For this his name if nothing else came to the attention of his countrymen and he was nationally hailed as being the victorious "Cold War Warrior." But I would bet that Fischer and Spassky, like many grandmasters before them and those that were to come, took all that with as large a grain of salt as they could possibly manage.

The chess world sees its game as being absolutely unconnected with all surrounding political and social considerations, and believes that it would be a magnificent idea if world leaders could work out their differences on a chessboard, instead of playing their game with real people and whole populations, resulting in misery and death to millions.

One of Fischer's most interesting competitors, the also late Paul Keres, was one of the best examples of this. An Estonian, he got caught in territory that the Germans occupied during WW 2, and as a result he, like another chess immortal, Alexander Alekhine, played in several tournaments that were sponsored by the Nazis. After the war some castigated them for that, yet, though no country had suffered from the Germans nearly as much as had the Soviets, they, having grabbed tiny Estonia for themselves, were quick to embrace Keres in their bear hug, after first giving him, I suppose, a good talking to. Yet through all that, he just calmly kept on playing his usual very high level of chess, as if nothing much had really happened.

The one glaring exception to this is one of Fischer's "descendants," former world champion Gary Kasparov, who recently has been getting himself arrested for protesting Putin's policies. But we can be certain that in this he is establishing no sort of a new trend.

Though Fischer was born and raised in Brooklyn and so presumably was a citizen first of the U.S. and later of Iceland, in reality Fischer was always mainly a citizen of Caissa, the chess world.

I missed out on a rare, great chance to play in a tournament that Fischer also attended. It was sometime in the early 1950's, in D.C. I think it was the Eastern Open, and I surely would've entered that, if I hadn't been somewhere hundreds of miles away, in the service of the U.S. Air Force. This was probably just before Fischer became the U.S. champion, at age 14.

I will always think that if I had been there, not only would I have been able to watch him playing, up close and in person, but also maybe, just maybe, I might have been lucky enough to play him, in one of the early rounds, because it was an open tournament. And maybe, just maybe, taking advantage of what would have been his certain underestimation of me, I might even have come away with a hardfought draw, as I managed to do with several of those other arrogant New York city types, though they were considerably lesser lights. But that of course, is only a far-fetched notion and nothing more.

Fischer's greatest heydays came after my most active years in chess, but I remember, after returning to chess following one of my long "sabbaticals," I noticed how the general style of playing chess had changed, and it had become much sharper and more tactical than I remembered. And it all seemed to be because of the example set by Bobby Fischer.

In a comment that I left on NTodd's Dohiyi Mir, I spoke of how Fischer was a lone David who had to face a whole phalanx of Goliaths, mainly Soviets who, unlike him, had their whole chess-crazy country behind them, yet he largely bested them, and despite that they had only the greatest respect for him ...and fear.

I was partly thinking there of a tournament book in German that I have. It was the 1959 Candidates tourney, played in Yugoslavia. The book has a picture showing Fischer standing with the other players, a group of the then very top players of the world, including Keres, Tahl, Smyslov, Reshevsky, and Petrosian. Fischer was 16. All those other guys were much older, and they were all longtime legends in themselves. They were shown all wearing business suits. Fischer, however, as if he wasn't already set apart from them, wore a thick sweater.

I could really relate to that. In D.C. and in NYC I showed up for several job interviews in similarly "inappropriate" garb. And, as with Fischer, it never seemed to make much difference.

Now Fischer has added to the tradition of native-born American chess marvels who show up, go over to Europe, pound the best minds there into the ground, and then a short while later vanish from the scene. I'm thinking of Paul Morphy, the New Orleans whiz of the 1850's, and of Harry Nelson Pillsbury and his victories in the 1890's, especially in the great Hastings tournament of 1895. Though physically Fischer lasted longer than those two, till age 64, he spent the last half of those years locked away inside his own head, much like a man of far greater wealth and notoriety but of lesser real achievement, Howard Hughes.

But, like Morphy and Pillsbury, Fischer hasn't actually gone anywhere. For those most fortunate of folks, the serious chessplayers, there will still always be the great games that all three, especially Fischer, have left behind in abundance.