Last Thoughts on Bobby Fisher

"In ceremonies of the horsemen
Even the pawn must hold a grudge"
-Bob Dylan, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"

"Lolita and Bobby Fisher
Country no part is red
Just black and white
Humphrey Bogart is dead"
-Buck 65, " 1957"


Bobby Fisher is dead.

He was not a good person. He believed in horrible, vile things. He was an anti-Semite, he publicly lauded the September 11th attacks. He defied sanctions put in place to punish the genocidal dictator Slobodan Milosevic. When he was a young man, sportswriter Dick Schaap befriended Fisher, taking him to Knicks games and acting as a sort of father figure to the young genius. Later in his life, Fisher told Schaap son's Jeremy that his father was "a typical Jewish snake". There is no good reason to mourn Fisher's death. But there is a great deal to consider about his life.

The sheer amount of symbolism and apparent cliches that comprise Fisher's life can be daunting. First, he was the classic child prodigy- a champion and grandmaster in his teens- in the mold of Mozart or Rimbaud or LeBron James. He was a symbol of the Cold War- his now legendary victory over Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972 is as much a milestone of the athletic side of the Cold War as the Miracle on Ice in 1980, or the theft of the gold medal from the United States in basketball in the Munich games. He was a national hero, if only briefly. He is the insane genius- like Nabokov's Luzhin, or Van Gogh or John Forbes Nash. He is the recluse, who dropped out of the public eye , like J.D. Salinger. He is the self-hating Jew (his mother was Jewish, although Fisher he denied being Jewish, much as he denied the Holocaust), the conspiracy theorist, the man without a country for the last fifteen years of his life.

He also played chess. He might be the greatest chess player ever. When I was younger and played chess, I studied his book, Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess, and imitated the way he held his hands over his face in a picture. I still do, although now only because of 16 or so years of habit.
I quit playing chess, mostly because I realized that I'm not patient enough to be good at it, but whenever I saw a newspaper article on the increasingly tragic genius, I would read it. His story began to combine the mythic and the pathetic in such large portions that I could no more ignore it than I could ignore a classical tragedy, at least, until the mythic portion was so utterly devoured by the pathetic that observing Fisher became little different from watching a particularly nasty car wreck.

Bobby Fisher's life included a great many things worth mourning- what might be seen ultimately as his talent being largely wasted and his humanity being gradually destroyed. But I see little point in mourning Fisher's death.