Some say there has never been a chess player as great as Bobby Fischer.
A leading Russian opponent described him as “an achilles without an achilles heel”.
Fischer was not only known for being a chess genius but also for spiraling into
insanity. This video will take you through his highs and his lows.
Bobby Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943 and raised in Brooklyn by a single
mother from Switzerland born to Jewish parents.
They were poor.
Regina Fischer didn’t even have the money to patch up Bobby's torn shoes when he was
a kid.
Regina was divorced from Hans Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist.
But Bobby’s actual father was most likely the result of an affair with her friend Paul
Nemenyi.
A Hungarian-Jewish physicist.
When Bobby was six, his sister Joanne bought him a chess set and taught him to play.
He felt chess was more exciting than Monopoly because no luck was involved.
And he found it far more challenging.
His sister soon grew tired of the game, and his mother was too busy working as a teacher
and a nurse.
So, Bobby spent several hours every day playing against…himself.
He loved the thousands of possible moves and the complex strategy involved.
After a year of this, his mother took him to the Brooklyn Chess Club where he had lessons
a couple of times a week from one of the club’s best players, Carmine Nigro.
Nigh-grow charged him a dollar an hour.
But Bobby believes he wasn’t in it for the money but simply to make sure he took the
lessons seriously.
And apparently, he did.
He was utterly obsessed with chess.
One might even say it was his best friend.
Fischer didn’t have any real friends growing up.
He thought having friends was only important for kids who had secrets and wanted someone
to share them with.
He had no secrets so, apparently, he didn’t feel the need to have friends.
Fischer would spend Sundays playing chess with Nigro (Nigh-grow) in Manhattan’s Washington
Square Park.
He began spending less time with Nigro when he started being tutored by Jack Collins,
a master player who had once ranked as high as #17 in the U.S.
Collins spent his life in a wheelchair.
He never quite fit in, just like Fischer.
He was careful not to say he was Fischer’s coach.
That would be like saying someone had to coach Beethoven, Shakespeare, or Leonardo da Vinci.
He thought Fischer was a genius on the level of those geniuses.
Collins did have an extensive library collection of chess books which Fischer devoured - spending
five to ten hours a day reading and studying.
He would need the preparation when he faced older and more experienced opponents.
When Fischer was 13 years old, he faced 26-year-old Donald Byrne, one of the top ten players in
America.
Fischer played in black, Byrne in white.
The “Game of the Century” - as it’s remembered - took place in New York City on
October 17, 1956.
Fischer’s moves looked like lethal art.
He even dared to sacrifice his queen.
Fischer got a thrill out of breaking his opponent’s ego.
His opponent was outclassed and outmatched.
The game put Fischer on the map.
The world knew it had a genius on its hands.
The following year, when he was still only 14 years old, he won the U.S. Championship.
A year later, he became the youngest ever grandmaster.
And in 1972, he defeated the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky to become world champion.
This was stunning: the Soviets lived and breathed chess.
They were more obsessed than Canadians are about hockey, or the Chinese about table tennis.
Then comes along a lone wolf from America who was up against the entire Soviet chess
institution.
It was a David versus Goliath matchup.
Bobby Fischer singlehandedly beat the Soviets at their own game.
This took place during the Cold War and the symbolism wasn’t lost on anyone.
The world’s two superpowers battled it out on a chess board.
Except Fischer nearly skipped the “match of the century”.
He refused to fly to Reykjavik, Iceland for the tournament unless he got more money including
a guarantee of a slice of the lucrative TV revenue.
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had to insist he “...get his butt over to Iceland."
He finally flew there after a British investment banker offered to double the prize money to
$250,000.
Fischer was still in a foul mood when he arrived.
He played poorly during the first match and lost.
He didn’t even show up for the second match, complaining that the TV cameras distracted
him.
So he lost automatically.
The tournament organizers conceded to demands for the third match to be played without TV
cameras in the room.
From that point on, his playing got stronger.
Fischer, the 29-year-old who dropped out of high school, would beat Spassky to become
World Champion - single-handedly dismantling the Soviet Union’s 24-year hold on the game.
He became a hero to millions of Americans and inspired new interest in the game of chess.
Some chess clubs saw membership double during the Fischer frenzy.
He was a star and made the rounds of American television.
On the Carson Tonight show, he showed off his brilliance by solving a sliding puzzle
in 17 seconds.
This was not very well mixed up. I want to say that it wasn't well mixed up.
17!
Well, they didn’t mix it up too well. Takes about 30 seconds.
He reportedly had an IQ of 181 which is said to be even higher than Albert Einstein’s.
Although he scaled the heights of fame, Fischer wasn’t all that likable.
He had a habit of saying controversial things though people tended to ignore it because
he was the Cold War chess hero after all.
This is what he once said about female chess players in an interview with the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation.
The women aren't really very good players. I mean, I could give them a knight and still win easily.
Why is this. Do women make bad chess players?
Oh they're terrible chess players.
I mean, some are better than others, y'know.
Why do you think so? And they don't play in men's tournaments.
I don’t know why.
I guess they're just not so smart.
Would you call yourself a misogynist?
Excuse me, what’s the definition of that word?
A woman-hater.
No.
No? What do you think of women?
When it comes to chess, not too much.
He managed to offend everyone.
During an interview with a Philippine radio station hours after 9/11, he said the attacks
were “wonderful news.
I applaud the act.
The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for
years.
I want to see the U.S. wiped out.”
He never hid his hatred of Jews, repeatedly making anti-Semitic remarks - despite being
Jewish ethnically.
His anti-American, anti-Semitic comments coincided with his growing paranoia.
He decided the U.S. government was out to get him.
He also believed the Israeli national intelligence agency - the Mossad - was after him.
He refused to defend his world championship title in 1975.
He complained that opponents were trying to poison his food, his hotel rooms were bugged,
he feared the Russians wanted to bomb his plane.
For years, Fischer carried a blue cardboard box with him wherever he went and refused
to say what was inside.
Once, when he went to use a restaurant restroom, he left it on the table and the friend he
was with peaked inside.
He saw a Bible.
Religion appealed to his desire for logic and order.
Except he later cut ties with the Worldwide Church of God - funded by a televangelist
after complaining that Herbert Armstrong’s teachings made members lose their minds and
become “zombies”.
He later cut ties with the organization.
One of the surest signs of his mental decline was that he insisted on removing his dental
fillings!
a
He explained that he didn’t want anything artificial in him and had heard of a guy wounded
in WWII who had a metal plate in his head that picked up vibrations and even radio transmissions.
His mental instability manifested in his physical appearance.
Gone was the athletic young man who swam and played tennis to keep in shape for chess which
requires enormous mental and physical endurance.
He was unrecognizable.
California police officers mistakenly arrested him because he resembled a man who wanted
for robbery.
He spent 48 hours in jail and wrote a book about the alleged torture he endured.
During his descent into madness, Fischer didn’t play a competitive game in public for twenty
year.
But eventually, he had to.
He had run out of money.
In 1992, he agreed to a $5 million dollar rematch against his Russian arch-rival (arch)
Spassky in Yugoslavia.
Except the U.S. government wasn’t too pleased about that.
It defied UN sanctions against the war-torn country.
Americans were forbidden from doing any business in Yugoslavia.
Fischer was warned he’d face up to ten years in prison if he went ahead with his plans.
But he didn’t care
He won the tournament.
Some believe he was coaxed into playing again by his teenage Hungarian girlfriend Zita Rajcsanyi
who was also a chess player.
She had apparently turned a pen pal relationship into a romance despite their 30-year age gap.
Although, Fischer claimed he didn’t have time for women.
He is said to have married a Japanese chess player Miyoko Watai and lived with her in
Japan for a few years.
He reportedly hoped that as the spouse of a Japanese citizen he could stay there as
he had been on the run from American authorities for defying sanctions.
But his attempt to stay in Japan was unsuccessful.
Authorities arrested him for using a passport that had been revoked by the U.S. government.
He begged Iceland to take him in, the country that made him famous in 1972.
Iceland welcomed him by making him a citizen.
He would spend the rest of his days there living in obscurity.
So, what caused his spiral into madness?
Some speculate that training in blindfold chess can cause mental strain as you can’t
see or touch the pieces, so you’re forced to maintain a mental image in your head.
However, there were signs something was not right with Bobby Fischer much earlier on.
Legendary chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal picked up on it back in the fifties, mocking Fischer
for being “cuckoo”.
Another chess grandmaster, Pal Benko, once remarked: “I am not a psychiatrist, but
it was obvious he was not normal.
“I told him, ‘You are paranoid,’ and he said that paranoids can be right.”
World-renowned chess grandmaster and psychoanalyst Dr. Reuben Fine described in his book on the
chess master that Fischer’s mother had consulted him because she was concerned her teenage
son was too obsessed with chess and felt he needed friends and other hobbies.
Fine described how, when he “...I started a conversation at one point about what he
was doing in school.
As soon as school was mentioned, he became furious, screamed, 'You have tricked me,'
and promptly walked out.
For years afterward, whenever I met him in clubs or tournaments he gave me angry looks,
as though I had done him some immeasurable harm by trying to get a little closer to him."
In other words, Fischer reacted in a paranoid way.
Perhaps school was a sensitive spot.
He dropped out at the age of 16 to focus on chess.
He was always insecure about his lack of education and decided to trade his casual wear for suits
when playing chess in order to look more sophisticated.
Social skills were not his forte.
When CBS’ 60 Minutes spent his 29th birthday with him and surprised him with a cake he
actually REFUSED it.
Happy birthday to you.
You were worrying about this?
Why were you worrying about it?
You know, first of all, I don’t eat this kind of cake.
Second of all, I don’t go for these kinds of things.
Shall we take it away, please?
Yah.
It appears paranoia ran in his family.
The FBI described Fischer’s mother Regina as mentally unstable in their secret files
on her.
They had spied on her since the dawn of the Cold War in the 1940s.
The FBI suspected that the left-leaning political activist was a Communist spy.
Both she and her then-husband had lived in Russia.
The agency was also worried that the Russians had tried to recruit Bobby.
Bobby’s relationship with his mother was strained.
He resented her for abandoning him when he was a teen so she could focus on her medical
career.
Although they hardly saw each other over the years, he is said to have become distraught
after she passed away in 1997 quickly followed by his sister the following year.
Some believe their deaths caused him to lose whatever last grasp he had on reality.
Bobby’s probable father was also believed to be paranoid.
Paul Nemenyi was highly intelligent.
He even collaborated with Albert Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein who was also a scientist.
Nemenyi emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. in 1939 but had trouble adjusting.
He reportedly walked around with soap in his pockets, paranoid about getting his hands
dirty.
Some speculate Bobby Fischer could have had schizophrenia or Asperger's, though there
is no evidence that he was diagnosed with any mental health disorders.
It also does not appear that Fischer had any long-term treatment for mental health issues.
One can only wonder if his life would have turned out differently if he did.
During the last years of his life, he stayed in close touch with a psychiatrist who headed
Iceland’s hospital for the criminally insane.
Dr. Magnus Skulason stayed in hospital with Fischer as he lay dying of kidney failure.
Fischer passed away on January 17, 2008 and, according to Dr. Skulason, his final words
were: "Nothing is as healing as the human touch."
Coming from a man who shied away from social contact, this was a rather remarkable thing
to hear.
It was fitting that having fallen in love with 64 black and white squares on a chess
board, Bobby Fischer died when he was 64 years old.
He asked to be buried as a Catholic.
Bobby Fischer once wrote in an article for the Boy Scouts magazine:
“With talent, study and a positive attitude, there is no limit to how far you can go.”
Yet he failed to live up to his own words.
If Fischer had stayed in the game longer, perhaps we would have seen a match-up with
Gary Kasparov - arguably the two greatest chess players of all time.
Though, they were 20 years apart.
But it would never come to pass.
The person who finally defeated Bobby Fischer was sadly himself.
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