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Look, I’m in the prime U.S. Fischer demographic. I was 12 when he beat Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship in 1972, and the match transfixed me and many other young players. Chess has never been more popular in the States. I took on my dad in a match at the same time — and whipped him, something that gave me pause when I read all the Oedipal theories in Ruben Fine’s Psychology of the Chess Player not long after that.
That’s the thing about chess. I absolutely believe it touches on something primal in the human animal, and it’s exhilarating to see that something run wild as it did in Fischer — “I like to see ’em squirm,” he said in one of his most famous quotes — and incredibly depressing and tragic to see it overwhelm the player in turn, as it did with Fischer and his disturbing American patriarch, Paul Morphy. Read David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s Bobby Fischer Goes to War for the best depiction of it in a book — or Vladimir Nabokov’s early Russian-language novel The Defense for the best depiction of chess insanity in fiction.
Yet Fischer’s rampant ego — which made him such a typical 70s sports hero alongside Muhammad Ali and Reggie Jackson and many lesser Me Decade stars — also gave free rein to the personal demons that kept him from defending his title against Anatoly Karpov in 1975 and, really, from ever playing competitive chess again, but for a nostalgic rematch with Spassky in the former Yugoslavia that led to directly to his troubles with the U.S. government.
