I’m standing at the grave of Bobby Fischer, who once made chess must-see TV in an epic world championship showdown with Soviet grand master Boris Spassky. That was before Fischer became a fugitive and an outcast, a man despised for his repeated antisemitic slurs and his endorsement of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Fischer’s final resting place is a quiet spot. It’s one of maybe 40 graves clustered around a small Christian church that’s a little more than 35 miles from Reykjavik, the city where his lionization began and his long fall from grace concluded.
It’s difficult for anyone under the age of 60 to understand how the Fischer-Spassky chess match captivated not just America but the entire world in 1972.
That’s because it was seen as more than a contest between men and minds. Occurring in the heart of the Cold War, it seemed to symbolize the forces engaged in what President John F. Kennedy more than a decade earlier had declared to be “a long twilight struggle” between democracy and communism.
Between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Between the individual spirit and rights and collective authority and action.
Spassky and Fischer seemed to be perfect symbols of that struggle.
Spassky was the product of a regimented Soviet system designed to identify and hone talented chess players. He trained and was taught by experts, learning the game as if he were being built on an assembly line.
Fischer was close to an autodidact. The son of a single mother, as a child he taught himself the game with a chessboard and bought at a candy store. He quit school at 16, claiming the classroom could teach him nothing, and dedicated himself to studying chess.
Blessed with an IQ of 180, he devoured chess books, teaching himself Russian so he could study the strategies of the Soviet grandmasters.
The Soviets had dominated chess for decades, but Fischer was something new, something different … something else.
When he and Spassky met in Reykjavik for their epic showdown, it was a moment of high drama, drama underscored by Fischer’s erratic behavior. He forfeited games because he didn’t like the room where play took place and took turns preening and pouting the whole match. Which he won easily, ending the Soviets’ seeming unassailable domination of the sport.
Score one for the USA in the “long twilight struggle.”
At the time, Fischer’s petulance was considered endearing—a sign of his individuality and creative American spunk.
After his death, a cottage industry sprang up that attempted to determine if Fischer had an undiagnosed mental illness or whether he suffered from untreated childhood trauma. (His home life wasn’t “Leave It to Beaver.”)
Whatever the cause, the “difficult” personality traits he displayed in the showdown in Reykjavik stopped seeming charmingly individualistic.
He largely quit playing competitive chess, returning only once, when he played Spassky in a rematch in 1992 for a $5 million purse. Once again, Fischer won easily.
But at a cost.
His participation in the lucrative rematch took place in Yugoslavia. That violated a presidential executive order signed by President George H.W. Bush in the Cold War’s waning days. A warrant was issued for Fischer’s arrest, but his capture wasn’t a high priority.
Until he lauded the terrorist who killed thousands in the 9/11 attacks.
Then, President George W. Bush seized on the warrant his father’s administration had issued to pursue Fischer relentlessly. The younger Bush pressured Japan to detain the chess wizard, which the Japanese did, throwing him behind bars before Iceland opted to grant him citizenship and asylum.
There was irony in that.
Even though Reykjavik was the scene of Fischer’s great triumph, he never liked the place.
His last years were not happy. Jewish himself, his antisemitic rants carried more than a hint of self-loathing.
He died at 64 in 2008.
He rests in a peaceful place, in a quiet graveyard next to a horse farm and far from the tumult of the larger world.
I stare at his headstone for long moments, pondering his epic ascent and his stunning fall from grace. I gaze at the chess pieces others have left in tribute.
What did the poet William Carlos Williams write?
“The pure products of America go crazy.”
That could be Bobby Fischer’s epitaph.
