Excerpt from Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How A Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine
Since Fischer was such a moody uncommunicative weirdo, he never said much about who he was, how he felt, what chess meant to him, blah blah blah. His notorious behavior (showing up late for matches, making outrageous demands in regards to the lighting, his chairs, the board itself, the feel of the pieces) spoke volumes, but what, exactly, did it say? People are still analyzing him, still trying to figure him out.
Here’s an excerpt I found interesting – about how this arrogant little wunderkind handled defeat. There is little agreement, to this day, on the inner workings of Bobby Fischer’s mind. One of the most obnoxious (yet still entertaining) sections of the book is where Freudian psychiatrists analyze Bobby Fischer (his fears of women, his loathing of his father) through his chess moves. “His fondness for THIS particular move shows that he was emasculated by his mother …”
I have no problem with obsessives, even though they are a little nutty. If psychiatrists want to spend 30 years studying Bobby Fischer’s every game, trying to piece together his Oedipus complex, more power to them.
How does a man who lives for chess take defeat? Among Fischer watchers there are, broadly, two schools of thought. One maintains that he was petrified of losing, that this was his deepest dread, and that his incessant demands about the playing conditions were conscious or subconscious strategies to avoid appearing. This view of Fischer was common in Soviet circles. Lev Abramov, the former head of the Sports Committee Chess Department, wrote an article called “The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer”. Why “tragedy”?
A tragedy in that Fischer was scared to sit next to the chessboard. The most paradoxical thing was that this outstanding, amazing chess player sometimes couldn’t force himself to come to the game, and if he managed to overcome this “disease” he still lacked confidence until he got a good result. I think it was a disease.
Soviet grandmaster and psychologist Nikolai Krogius agrees: “As a psychological type, Fischer resembles the French marshal, who was unable to pull himself together before a battle, but who was transformed when the battle began. Napoleon said that this marshal demonstrated his talent as a military leader only from the moment ‘when the cannons began to fire’.”
A linked but divergent interpretation is that Fischer was so utterly convinced of his superiority that failure became inconceivable. Thus even the occasional defeat tended to have a shattering impact on his self-esteem. Certainly there is empirical evidence to back up such a claim. The records show that on those rare occasions on which he lost in tournaments, he would perform below par in the following game, too, with his percentage of victories not as high as normal. Recovery from knocks was easier for players whose worldview included their own fallibility.
