Bobby Fischer
On 17 January 2008 Bobby Fischer the former American world chess champion died in his last adopted country Iceland
BBC NEWS | Europe | Chess legend Fischer dies at 64. The one country that was still willing to take him. The scene of his greatest triumph
Chess genius Bobby Fischer, from American hero to paranoid fugitive | AFP.com.
I never played, never got, chess. It seemed unnecessarily complicated for a pass time. I went to the trouble of learning the basic moves and such. I might have played chess four maybe five times in my life. I realize that in this I have sometimes been a disappointment to others who wanted someone to play with. I am fairly fixed on a policy of not making specific amends for being a disappointment to others. I have an inclination that to start down that road could tie me up for a number of years.
All fame is fleeting the saying goes, but not so much in reality. Most fame is pretty resilient. There is always an ode for who comes in first or gets higher. "the fame for every work is due to its inventor"(Pindar Olympian ode 13). Then if you behave it's dinner at the lyceum for life. If you manage to misbehave; though, they will be serving chicken asclepius, with a hemlock garnish. "Grace, which causes life to flourish, looks with favor now on one man, now on another" (op cit 7). Possibly then there is no such thing as a free lunch.
It's the waste that gets to me, not just of the potential for a long and brilliant career. Fischer was still very young at the time of the match in Reykjavik. As much as what this career might have meant to us, chess folk or American youth of a certain age for whom he was as valid a hero as any other. The waste with Bobby Fischer was also to himself; the loss of the opportunity to bask in the warm glow of extended fame. Chess players like mathematicians are under no obligated expectation to remain at the top of their game. There's plenty of time to spin your fame and ride herd on the young turks. Unlike actors or musicians, who are forever being asked to perform one more time. An actress who must continually tell people she played ingenues not mothers of ingenues and certainly not their grandmothers. Rockers, who are expected to crank out tunes of teenage angst into their fifties, then are slaged for not making it seem real. Well, that last might be structural to rock and roll, but such are the vagaries of fame. Fischer could have let his championship go, declined to defend it and not been worse for it. If he had been able to settle down. Not even completely iced, but a channeled archness. The senior commentary position he seemed to have wanted could have been his. For this adoration; though, he needed the formal chess world which he tried to divide against itself. He needed an education, the education he figured he could dispense with once he found he could make a payday with his game. He only found himself used by those, clever and unscrupulous, at the last trying to break up U S led international sanction regime against Yugoslavia during the Balkans war. Becoming in the process an outlaw to the disinterested judicial machinery of his own country. The late faint morbid echos of this that were his occasional ranting sorties onto the Philippines radio airwaves. Where he had nothing to offer the world, merely coughing up lumps of calumny. The penultimate chapter of his life the month spent in a detention cell at the Tokyo airport. Grossing over storage sheds of stolen memorabilia, falling into a victimized bitterness. This fate seemed undeserved even given his bile. Maybe he was right in a narrow and pointless sense. I could probably go on eBay right now and find some of his possessions. Someone did him a minor wrong thirty years earlier. You worry about that sort of thing and its the farm you buy on eBay. At end he stopped fighting off the notion of having peers. He had a home and some years of peace. He seemed to have accepted counsel that his years of interacting with the general public were over
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It's ok Bobby, we'll always have Iceland.
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