SO BOBBY Fischer has died – and things will never be the same.
Chess is a passion, I study every day. When depression falls, as it still too often does, I play through chess games in my head. Many of them are by Fischer.
To me, he was more than a chess genius. He was an intellectual artist of unique distinction. He won the World Championship against Boris Spassky and gave to those who needed it a victory metaphor in the Cold War.
But that championship, for many non-chess players Fischer’s defining moment, became a public blanket that hid what he really achieved. That did not lie in his ability to analyse, though he could and frequently did assess up to a dozen and more forward moves: a monumental feat given the number of possible combinations in a complex position. There are hundreds of move-strings of and large numbers could be playable.
Fischer’s genius truly existed in the cold beauty of relentless logic, in the final tableaux of pieces, unique in their structure, but, once achieved, seeming inevitable from his first move.
Fischer was able to do this not only because of his own gifts, but because of the strength of the players who faced him. Spassky, Petrosian, Tal, Botvinnik, Cherner, Reshevsky and their like, they were all master-devisers of themes, variations, counter-statements and resolutions. They were all players of such chess distinction that their games stand as huge mountains of achievement. Theirs was the landscape in which Fischer travelled and in which he built even greater and more sublime monuments of intellect.
But Fischer knew always that he stood above and beyond them all, unchallenged in making beauty on the chess board. Nobody else could come near. He played chess as a matador in the corrida; the bull, dangerous and fierce, essential to the drama, but its fate inevitable.
He probably had the biggest chess ego in the history of the game. He believed himself invincible, but so did his opponents. That was simply a chess truth when Fischer was at his height. Neither Steinitz nor Morphy, Capablanca nor Alekhine, Kasparov nor Karpov, Kramnik nor Anand, achieved or can achieve what Fischer has left behind him.
But Fischer’s life was a Faust-like tragedy. He had his immense, unique gift of intellect. Its price was his sanity. He was a paranoid schizophrenic. From his teens he say conspiracies everywhere around him. He had devastatingly powerful delusions and wrestled with many demons. After winning the world championship, a pinnacle from which he must necessarily have fallen, they overpowered him.
I think they comforted him in a perverse way. Certainly he was able to act them out. Fame and money gave him the means for reclusion, for unrestrained retreat from reality, and he made the journey.
The spittle and vitriol of his later life, his acting out, his vindictiveness, his intolerances and his unkindnesses are better seen through a lens of compassion rather than with an invocation of censure. He should not be condemned. Mental afflict chooses many. It chose him and destroyed him.
From Iceland heights in 1972 to an Iceland end in 2008: 64 squares on a chessboard and 64 years of life, most of them in an agonising thrall. A life with a summit that will probably never again be achieved, but also a life of tragedy ad pain. A man who commanded a beautiful intelligence, bug who was ultimately vanquished by the frailty of his own mind.
Body Fischer, whom we many admired, at whose gift we many looked at in awe, and whose suffering shrove we many in its contemplation, now have peace.
