Fischer, Bobby 1943-

FISCHER, BOBBY 1943-

Chess champion

Prodigy

Bobby Fischer was thirteen in 1956 when he became the youngest national junior chess champion in history, fourteen I when he won the U.S. Open Chess tournament and the right to challenge Arthur B. Bisguier for the U.S. Championship, fifteen when he became the youngest International Grandmaster in the history of chess and won the U.S. Championship, and sixteen when he ended his formal education: "The stuff they teach in school, I can't use," he explained. Erasmus Hall High School, his alma mater, presented him with a gold medal for his accomplishments in chess the year he quit school.

Charges against FIDE

Before he was twenty Fischer was the most outspoken critic of the world chess establishment. He boycotted the U. S. Championships in 1961 because he said the prize money of one thousand dollars to the winner was insulting. Three months later he won the world interzonal tournament in Stockholm, earning the right to play for the world championship. In June 1962, nine months before his twentieth birthday, Fischer finished fifth among eight players in the world championship tournament in Curaçao. Russians finished in the first four places, and Fischer charged that the tournament was rigged. He announced that he would not play in any other tournament sponsored by the governing body of world chess, the Federation Internationale deÉchecs (FIDE), and he thus voluntarily eliminated himself from competition that might have brought him the title of world chess champion during the 1960s.

Eccentric Genius

Fischer's eccentricities and his genius attracted media attention. As a result he was able to play in exhibitions and in events not sponsored by FIDE and command large fees for doing so. He revamped his image during the 1960s as well. To replace the casual clothing that had caused reporters to dub him "the Sweatshirt Kid" and "The Corduroy Killer," Fischer bought himself seventeen similar suits after the 1962 world championships. "If you have seventeen suits you can rotate them. They wear a long time. That's where the poor man gets it coming and going. His suits wear out fast."

Withdrawal

Sometime in the mid 1960s Fischer was converted by radio preacher Garner Ted Armstrong to the Worldwide Church of Christ, a fundamentalist, evangelistic group. He gave the church some ninety-three thousand dollars in donations before his bitter break in the early 1970s and moved to Pasadena to be near the headquarters, where, reportedly, he studied chess. In 1966 his Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess was published by Basic Systems books, and in 1969 Simon & Schuster published My Sixty Memorable Games: Selected and Fully Annotated regarded by chess experts as the best chess book ever written.

World Champion

In 1970 Fischer went into total seclusion for a year, then emerged to announce that he was tired of being the unofficial chess champion of the world. He was ready to play for the title. He did so in brilliant—analysts say unparalleled—style, beating all contenders handily. In 1972 he met Soviet world champion Boris Spas sky and did not so much defeat as humiliate him to earn the official title of world champion. Then he reverted to his seclusion, eventually forfeiting the title because he refused to belittle himself by defending it.

Source:

Ivan Solotoroff, "Bobby Fischer's Endgame," Esquire, 118 (December 1992), pp. 106+.