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March 7, 2008
Chess champ was driven to win
Though Bobby Fischer became a national hero, he was considered to be anti-Semitic.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Robert James "Bobby" Fischer, the chess genius from Brooklyn, died in, of all places, Reykjavij, the site of his most famous victory, where he had lived for some years as a naturalized Icelandic citizen, having renounced his American roots. The cause of his death, at the age of 64, was given as "kidney failure."
"The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means," is a cogent and apt observation by playwright Tom Stoppard. Fischer was both lucky and unhappy. If you think that's unusual, consider, among many others in the limelight, that irrepressible celebrity, Britney Spears.
For a chess wizard, Fischer peaked very early in his life, looking much younger than 29. In 1972, at the height of the Cold War, everything between the Soviet Bloc and the West was fiercely competitive: rhetoric, music, hockey, space exploration and above all, nuclear warheads and their delivery systems. Surveillance and spying made known anything that each could know about the other.
Things therefore took on great significance in the match between Boris Spassky, the Soviet grandmaster, and Fischer. Iceland was chosen as a relatively neutral ambience, "midway" between the two superpowers and bloc-wise, unaligned. To give the reader some idea of what was riding on this match, Henry Kissinger telephoned Fischer at the game site to wish him luck (something Fischer never relied on) and opened his conversation with: "This is the worst player in the world calling the best player in the world." A bit of over-done "modesty" from the man whose life's goal was to out-Metternich Metternich.
On the subject of being modest, Fischer definitely was not. Before the 1972 match, he boasted that he would teach Spassky "a little humility." In what chess enthusiasts have described as a masterful, aggressive game, Fischer beat Spassky. Americans who didn't know a rook from a pawn were bursting with pride, and Fischer became a national hero. It was like Rocky for America's eggheads.
A word is necessary about the complexity of chess. Anyone who has followed the game knows about General Electric's chess machine, which didn't do badly against a master: one win, one loss, one draw, but years have passed and it still can't guarantee a win all the time. Only a few weeks ago a computer team at a California university announced that, after many years of programming, they had finally succeeded in creating a computer program that was absolutely unbeatable ... in checkers.
Chess is another matter.
In 1972, what added to Soviet mortification was that chess had always been held in high esteem in Russia, even before the Bolsheviks. It could be played on long winter nights – even by a kerosene lamp – and it was incredibly almost a precise mimicry of Russian life, first under the czar and then the Soviets. The use of force in defending oneself was impossible. One could win, i.e., minimize losses against the regime, only within a carefully defined, regulated, hierarchical system in which options were prescribed and narrow, like the initial placement and movement of every chess piece. Victory came only when the supreme leader (party secretary or czar) found himself without a move that wouldn't destroy him.
For Jews, Fischer's life had a particularly upsetting factor. He was born to a Jewish mother but became a vocal anti-Semite, praising Hitler, for example, for the intense power of his will.
After beating Spassky, for years Fischer refused to play world-class chess masters. He had done so quite successfully before the match and did well afterwards but only by playing at a "lower" level.
Finally, Anatoli Karpov, another Russian, was proclaimed champion by the international chess organization following a series of unsuccessful efforts to arrange a match between Karpov and Fischer, which Fischer avoided by making unreasonable demands. Following Karpov, in 1981, after a series of matches in Italy, Gary Kasparov was declared the international champion. Kasparov has been much in the news lately because of his courageous sustained public opposition to Vladimir Putin, whom he considers a calculating enemy of democracy.
By the time of Kasparov's triumph, Fischer had become a co-worker in the Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, Calif. He was fed and housed by the church. They even flew him around in a private jet.
A large part of Fischer's success was not only his game intelligence, but his overwhelming need to win. His match with Spassky was not a gentleman's game, at least from his point of view. He suspected his opponents would try to poison his food and sabotage the plane he had arrived on.
Eugene Kaellis is a writer and retired Academic living in New Westminster.
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