There was only one Bobby Fischer. For seven weeks of 1972, the Western world seemed to stand still and watch in awe as this lonely, troubled genius fought the Cold War on a chess board, and won.
He was arguably the best chess player the world has ever seen, yet he was an abject failure in life, a self-hating Jew, who betrayed the country in which he grew up, and threw his talent away. His death is hardly an occasion for great mourning: he was so obviously unhappy on this earth that he may be better off out of it. But oh, the waste of a brilliant mind! [...]
Even in his teens, Fischer’s rift with his mother seemed to turn him into an anti-Semite. In 1962, he was quoted as saying: “There are too many Jews in chess. They don’t seem to dress so nicely. That’s what I don’t like.” In 1984, he sent an open letter to the Encyclopaedia Judaica demanding that his entry be removed.
In 1992 he emerged from retirement to play a rematch with Spassky in Serbia. He won by 10 games to five, with 15 draws, but the game put him in conflict with the US government for defying its sanctions against Serbia. That, and his anti-Semitic tirades, provoked the Worldwide Church of God into publicly disowning him.
The incident simply stoked Fischer’s hatred of his home country. He continued raging against the Jews, became a Holocaust- denier, and after 11 September 2001, he went on radio in the Philippines to say: “This is all wonderful news. It’s time to finish off the US once and for all.”
He was arrested in Japan in 2004, and faced the possibility of being sent back to the US to stand trial for sanctions busting, but found sanctuary in Iceland. Its people had not forgotten the man who made them the centre of world attention in the summer of 1972. He died in a Reykjavik hospital. http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article3350920.ece
