There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess. These are abstract, almost invented realms, closed systems bounded by rules of custom or principle. Here, the child learns, is how elements combine and transform; here are the laws that govern their interactions; and here are the possibilities that emerge as you play with signs, symbols, sounds or pieces. Nothing else need be known or understood — at least at first. A child’s gifts in such realms can seem otherworldly, the achievements effortlessly magical. But as Bobby Fischer’s death on Thursday might remind us, even abstract gifts can exact a terrible price. In 1956 Mr. Fischer, at 13, displayed powers that were not only prodigious but also uncanny. A game he played against Donald Byrne, one of the top 10 players in the United States, became known as “the Game of the Century,” so packed was it with brilliance and daring (and Mr. Fischer’s sacrifice of a queen). “I just got good,” he explained — as indeed he did, winning 8 of the 10 United States Championship tournaments held after 1958 and then, of course, in 1972, breaking the long hold that Soviet chess had on the international championship.“All I want to do, ever,” he said, “is play chess.” And many thought him the best player — ever. Garry Kasparov once said that he imagined Mr. Fischer as a kind of centaur, a human player mythologically combined with the very essence of chess itself. But of course accompanying Mr. Fischer’s triumphs were signs of something else. His aggressive declarations and grandiose pronouncements were once restricted to his chosen playing field. (“Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.”) Eventually, they grew in scope, evolving into ever more sweeping convictions about the wider world. After his triumph against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, he all but abandoned chess, and seemed to replace the idea of a seated challenger pushing pieces on a 64-square board, with that of a demonic Jewish world conspiracy that was (as he said in radio broadcasts from the Philippines) perpetrated by a “filthy, lying bastard people” who kill Christian children (“their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies”) while exploiting that “money-making invention,” the Holocaust. In this vision the circumscribed rules of chess were overturned, and in their place were imagined esoteric plottings of evil grandmasters. In a 2002 essay in The Atlantic Monthly Rene Chun chronicled Mr. Fischer’s “pathetic endgame.” He was reported to keep a locked suitcase with him, containing pills and home remedies: “If the Commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them,” he said. He had his dental fillings removed, worrying about the secret signals and controlling forces that might be channeled through his jaw. The 9/11 attacks, he said, were “wonderful news.” What was all this? “I don’t believe in psychology,” Mr. Fischer once said about chess competition. “I believe in good moves.” And yes, without the good moves, he would never have struck the fear in his opponents that he once did. But how did faith in good moves mutate into such perverse psychology? Was there any connection between his gifts in chess and his later delusions? You might of course speculate that his perceptions were affected by never having seen his father, a physicist named Mr. Fischer, after he was 2. A revealing profile in Harper’s magazine in 1962 indicated that Mr. Fischer’s mother, Regina Wender, also had other preoccupations. Bobby’s sister described her as a “professional crusader.” Bobby had dropped out of high school and was a chess wunderkind with a world reputation, while, at the time of the profile, his mother was spending eight months walking to Moscow in a “pacifist” protest. A few years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer, obtaining F.B.I. records under the Freedom of Information Act, also found compelling evidence that Bobby Fischer’s father was not the man named on his birth certificate, but a brilliant Hungarian scientist, Paul F. Nemenyi, with whom his mother had an affair. Mr. Nemenyi apparently paid to help support Bobby, and there is even the record of a complaint he made to a social worker about Bobby’s upbringing. If that identification is accurate, the paradoxes of Mr. Fischer’s virulent anti-Semitism become still more profound, since Mr. Nemenyi, like Ms. Wender, was Jewish. Chess too can seem to encourage a streak of craziness. ( “I like to see ’em squirm,” Mr. Fischer proclaimed.) But for paranoia and posturing, nothing could come close to the 1972 championship match in Reykjavik. In recent years the argument has been made that the attention given to the confrontation between Mr. Fischer and Mr. Spassky had little to do with the cold war. Mr. Spassky himself was no party-line comrade, and Mr. Fischer, with all his idiosyncrasies, was far from a comfort to the United States State Department; moreover, by 1972, such confrontations no longer had the symbolic power they had during the era of Sputnik. But there is still no question that the contest drew its worldwide audience partly because it presented two conflicting national idols.
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