Via the BBC: Chess legend Fischer dies at 64
Controversial former world chess champion Bobby Fischer has died aged 64, Iceland’s media says.
The US-born player, who became famous around the world for beating the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in 1972, had been seriously ill for some time.
Mr Fischer was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2005 as a way to avoid being deported to the US.
Mr Fischer was wanted for breaking international sanctions by playing a match in the former Yugoslavia in 1992.
Fischer was the rarest of breeds: a chess superstar. Of course, it took the Cold War to produce such a phenomenon, as I guess the only way for chess to gain national attention in the US would be for nuclear weapons to be somehow involved1. Sadly, he was also mentally unstable, a fact that is clear if one is even passingly familiar with his biography.
The NYT has a more extensive write up (Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64) which notes his triumph over Spassky:
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, Robert James Fischer was a U.S. chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15. He beat Spassky in a series of games in Reykjavik to claim America’s first world chess championship in more than a century.
The event was given tremendous symbolic importance, pitting the intensely individualistic young American against a product of the grim and soulless Soviet Union.
While the piece does note his anti-semitic diatribes (and anti-US rants), it doesn’t mention the paranoia that seemed to drive him into seclusion in the 1970s right at the zenith of his popularity.
Sphere: Related Content- Or human v. supercomputer competition, but even that paled in comparison to Fischer’s fame [↩]
January 18th, 2008 at 11:55 am
According to Einar S. Einarsson, one of the group that brought Bobby Fischer to Iceland after his Japan adventure, the chess mastermind died of kidney failure. He had been battling some kind of kidney disease for some time.
January 18th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is and that was very important to him! He was controversial, but he was never afraid to speak up and speak out. We know the truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart and he had a heart!