The Wall Street Journal-20080122-Victim of His Own Success- The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer
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Victim of His Own Success: The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer
In his day, he was the best chess player in the world, maybe the best the world had ever seen. For fans of the game, the tragedy is that his day passed all too quickly. And for the last 30-odd years of his life, Bobby Fischer was the chess world's mad uncle, an embarrassment to be apologized for, belittled or ignored. He died last week at the evocative age of 64.
For most of the second half of his life, Fischer considered himself the undefeated world champion of chess. That he had been stripped of his title in 1975 for refusing to defend it against challenger Anatoly Karpov, that he had not played in a competitive tournament since before he won the championship against Boris Spassky in 1972 -- those were mere details. Or worse, they were merely evidence that the forces arrayed against him had succeeded in driving him from the game -- because the only way to beat him, he believed, was to cheat, or to keep him from playing at all.
Fischer's claim to unsurpassed greatness was not entirely without merit. He remained the highest-rated player in history for many years after he had stopped playing. On his way to the 1972 championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland, he won 20 straight games against some of the strongest players in the world without allowing so much as a draw. Twenty victories in a row against the world's best was unheard-of, a feat not equaled in chess before or since. He then went on to beat Mr. Spassky -- and, with him, the entire Soviet chess establishment -- even after blundering away the first game of the match and forfeiting the second.
One of the victims of that winning streak was Mark Taimanov, a Soviet chess grandmaster as well as a concert pianist. He and Fischer played each other in a quarter-finals match to determine who would face Mr. Spassky. Mr. Taimanov never won a game. Afterward, he was reported to have said, "At least I still have my music." In the semifinals, Fischer beat his next opponent 6-0 again.
And yet a year later, after deposing Mr. Spassky, Fischer would all but drop out of the chess world. He spent much of the last three decades of his life living in hiding or seclusion in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Argentina, the Philippines, Japan and, in the end, Iceland, the site of his world championship victory.
Fischer was eccentric and difficult even before he beat Mr. Spassky. He made so many demands in the course of that one match that it almost didn't happen at all. He walked out of a championship qualifying tournament in 1967 because the organizers asked him to play on the Sabbath of the cult-like church he claimed membership in at the time. When he withdrew, his record in the tournament was seven wins with no losses or draws.
In 1962, at the age of 19, he came up short in another world championship qualifying tournament in which Soviet players were, as always in those days, heavily overrepresented. The loss prompted him to write "The Russians Have Fixed World Chess," published in Sports Illustrated that year. His argument -- that the Soviet players were colluding in order to avoid losses to one another and to save their energy for matches against Fischer -- appeared to have some truth to it. Later championship cycles were changed from a candidates' tournament to a series of one-on-one matches (of the sort that Fischer dominated in 1971) in response to his complaint. But the piece also revealed a sense of grievance that Fischer nurtured from early on, and which ultimately drove him out of the game altogether.
That sense of grievance was not limited to chess in his later life. When he made news in recent years, it was invariably because he'd popped up somewhere to spill anti-Semitic bile or accuse various innocent parties of stealing from him. His sense that the Soviets were out to get him at the chess board evolved into a sense that the world, and especially the Jews, had it in for him for real.
His belief in himself at the chess board and his suspicion of others away from it may have been related. Mig Greengard, a chess columnist, recounted to me what he called his favorite Bobby Fischer quote. In 1960, in a tournament in Buenos Aires in which he uncharacteristically finished 13th, Fischer was emerging from the tournament hall after a win. One of the assembled admirers offered him a standard compliment: "Great game, Bobby." Fischer snapped back, "How would you know?"
In Fischer's view, there was almost no one in the world, besides him, who understood what he was doing at the chess board. Few people were even competent to compliment him, never mind offer criticism. But if he felt that way about the area of endeavor to which he devoted his life, it's not hard to see how he could blunder into feeling that way about most everything else.
The French philosopher Alexander Kojeve once wrote that the only defense against madness is the accord of your peers. That is, if you can convince no one that your beliefs are well-founded, then it's probably you who are crazy, and not the herd. Fischer's problem was that he had no peers, at least not in chess, so he had no one to check his worst tendencies. The world championship he won in 1972 validated his view of himself as a chess player, but it also insulated him from the humanizing influences of the world around him. He descended into what can only be considered a kind of madness.
Chess players never gave up hoping that he would snap out of it, come back to the board and treat the world to more brilliant chess. Susan Polgar, the former women's world chess champion, remarked to me that his death was a tragedy because we'd never have another game from Bobby Fischer. When it was pointed out that he'd barely played in 35 years, she said, "But hope was never lost." Ms. Polgar had known Fischer from his time in Budapest in the 1990s, and she said that even then he was as genial personally as his views were "extreme" politically. She claimed to have been in talks with him even recently to negotiate his return to the game.
That was never likely. Having beaten Mr. Spassky in 1972, he had nothing left to prove -- except that, just possibly, he was beatable after all. Over a chess board, unlike in political debate, you can be proved wrong. And unlike the pianist Mark Taimanov, Bobby Fischer had nothing to fall back on if he came up short in chess. It is hard not to detect a bit of cowardice in his retreat from the world and the chess board after 1972. The tragedy was that, at his best, he was as good as he thought himself to be.
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Mr. Carney is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
