Weirdly, I just rented that movie last week, and suddenly Bobby Fischer is everywhere again. Some people seem to wish he would disappear again. The Atlantic has a riveting piece on Fischer. The beginning of the essay focuses on Fischer’s raging anti-Semitism and virulent anti-Americanism, but what hooked me in was the the CHESS. I don’t know chess well enough to recognize how good Fischer was, but the story of the explosion of his genius is thrilling.
What was astounding wasn’t simply that a gawky thirteen-year-old kid in blue jeans was suddenly winning chess tournaments. It was the way he was winning. He didn’t just beat people – he humiliated them. The thing he relished most was watching his opponents squirm. “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego,” he once said, during a Dick Cavett interview.
Also:
Fischer also just won a lot of games – an impressive fact given that draws among grand masters are commonplace. At the highest level of competitive chess, players are so familiar with one another’s games that they can practically read their opponents’ minds. The memorization of opening theory and the intensive study of an opponent’s oeuvre so dominate the modern game that when two grand masters square off, the first twenty moves unfold like a stale sitcom plot. Players often lament that “draw death” is killing the game.
But Fischer didn’t play for draws. He was always on the attack – even rhetorically. Of the Soviet champions who had dominated the game so completely, he said, “They have nothing on me, those guys. They can’t even touch me.”
Well worth the read.
