Bobby Fischer 1943-2008

It would be hard to find anything more idiotic than the editorial in today's New York Daily News on the death of chess legend Bobby Fischer.

It's a decided chore to come up with charitable things to say about Bobby Fischer, formerly of Brooklyn. He was impossible. He was unpleasant. He was anti-Semitic and anti-American. But he did clean the Russian clock in a 1972 chess showdown that was as politically potent as the Louis-Schmeling fight of '35.

There are those who would argue that the entire Soviet collapse traces directly back to Fischer's dethroning of Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. Which perhaps overstates things, but it's certainly true that, for a while there, Bobby Fischer was one top-gun American.

Sad to say, he went on to reveal himself as increasingly despicable. A man who renounced his U.S. citizenship. A man who spat upon his mother's Jewishness. A man who cheered the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center. And he leaves this life unloved and mourned by few.

He sure could play chess, though.

Personally, I find it a chore to find anything charitable about the idiot who wrote this editorial, because this is hackwork at its worst -- they know nothing about chess, Bobby Fischer or anything else, but that didn't keep them from making their deadline.

Let's be a little more charitable, as well as more accurate.

Bobby Fischer was a genius. He was also mentally ill. I never took umbrage at his nonsensical ravings about the Jews or the United States because I understood them to be what they were -- the outbursts of a man suffering from mental illness, no more to be taken seriously than the barkings of someone suffering from Tourette's Syndrome.

Fischer was what the Germans call a fachidiot -- a genius about chess, an imbecile about virtually everything else. Chess was all he knew, and in the end it consumed him. The sport has a way of destroying its greatest players (or perhaps it has a habit of attracting those with incipient mental illness -- it's hard to tell). Paul Morphy isn't the only other example of a chess player in whom genius and madness went hand in hand.

Fischer's decline into madness was painful to watch for those of us who remember him in his prime -- at the 1972 chess championship match against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland. At that moment, as the New York Times points out, Fischer was to chess what Babe Ruth was to baseball, or Michael Jordan was to basketball. He made people who had never heard of the game take it up after watching Shelby Lyman's low-budget and engagingly dorky live commentary on the match on PBS. For Fischer, chess wasn't a game -- it was the intellectual equivalent of gladitorial combat. But he made chess fans out of thousands if not millions of Americans.

That should be taken into account when discussing his death. Yes, he descended into madness and some of his statements in his final years were hard to stomach. But he was also the best at what he did, and played better chess than anyone ever has, and quite possibly better than anyone ever will. Which of those is more important in the final analysis is for each of us to decide.

Tom Moran