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197 4, Los Angeles TimesWho is the most unusual and. perhaps, greatest sports champion in American history?I ll give you a clue. He has his own extremist religion, he is highly controversial, says and doesoutrageous things, and he won his title on a far-off landout in the Atlantic.Muhammed Ali? No. Muhammad Ali is a model of decorum and discipline compared to the guy I have inmind.Robert J. Fischer is the strangest and most contentious champion sports has ever seen. With Koufax throwing a ball. Ruth hitting a ball, Grange carrying a ball, or Snead putting one, he fell out of bed with nis talent one day. He is a genius at what he does His life is choreographed by a distant drummer no one else hears. Over a chess board he is God. Away from it, aschlamazo.His strange peripatetic storv is told in a notebook, “Hobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World,” written by an old colleague of mine from my magazine days, Brad Barrach, who was in the no man’s land between Bobby and the universe on the occasion of the world championship chess match in Iceland two years ago.It’s a horror story that outrattles anything Lon Chaney ever starred in. Bela Lugosi would be perfect for the part of Bobby Fischer.If you can imagine Jack Demsey — or Muhammad Ali. for that matter — not showing up for the first three rounds of a heavyweight title fight, if you can imagine the Rams not making it for the first quarter, you have a pretty good fix on Bobby Fischer.The whole world waited in the summer of 1972 for the most famous face-off in chess history — the brat from Brooklyn and the grand master from Moscow. The whole world except Bobby Fischer, that is.Bobby slept w ith good conscience at a Long Island suburban house while all Iceland scanned incoming Rights to Reykjavik expecting to see the American challenger alighting for his chance of a lifetime atfame.Barrach describes Bobby as a man indifferent to the whims of the world, a “man who functions like Frankenstein's creature, a man made of fragments connected by wires and animated by a monster's will,” and “the man who wears a business suit about as naturally as a python wears a necktie.”Barrach was there as Bobby, sometimes halfway up a plane ramp, w ould suddenly balk and hie himself off to a food orgy, disdaining departure to the chess venue where the world champion, Boris Spassky, and aretinue of hundreds awaited the great confrontation.Bobby finally had to be virtually shanghaied aboard Icelandic Airways for his rendezvous, where a libretto right out of a Peter Sellers movie was played out.When the vagrant suggestion was made that he was afraid of the Russian, Bobby snorted, “I know as much chess as the top 10 Russians put together.”But he threw needless tantrums over the lighting.the TV cameras, his hotel room, and referred to his hosts as “these Icelandic creeps.”He stunned the world champion. Spassky, by forfeiting one game — this in a series where Spassky really only had to win 10 games to keep his title,whereas Bobby had to win 12.His dementia finally crippled Spassky, who was to go back to Russia in ruins. Bobby began to play his match before he ever left Long Island, and he left hisretinue of handlers and aides such nervous wrecks that some of them go screaming into the night at themention of his name to this day.A chess match only appears to be a sedentary, contemplative sport. In reality, it is Dempsey-Firpo,Army-Navy, a mugging in the park. Grand masters have suffered nervous breakdowns over the board. Two fell dead of heart attacks in the midst of games. It is a gut-burning, mind-whenching exercise in totalwar.Bobby thrives on it. He would go bowling on the eve of a match, while Spasskv presumably sat in his room working over chess problems with trembling fingers.Spassky's talent was massive and mysterious,” writes Barrach. But Bobby’s attacks were so abrasive, unpredictable, even insane, that Spassky would turn turn pale every time and lose his poise. For Bobby, it was not simply a Pawn to King Four opening gambit or Alekhine’s Defense. In the 16th game, Bobby, playing White, began with Pawn to Queen’s Bishop Four. Writes Barrach: ‘‘It was as if Tom Seaver, one of the finest right-handed pitchers of this generation, strolled to the mound in the World Series and pitched with his left hand.”Spassky came completely apart. But on the 42nd move, he tabled his king. “It was like watching a ython crush a sheep! ” a Yugoslavian observer wired ome. Bobby won wnen Spassky failed to show up for acontinuation of the 21st game.Back home, Bobby disdained a hero’s welcome. The New York mayor’s offer of a ticker-tape parade brought this scornful response: I don’t believe in hero worship.” Instead, he tithed his winnings to something called the Worldw ide Church of God. Bobbydisappeared into a monastic life, leaving some $10 million lying around the world uncollected.Maybe he never was a boy. He spent his life as ahermit, motivated by strange impulses, behaving asif he were alone in the world which, in a sense, he w'as after his mother left him in a Brooklyn apartment at the age of 15 while she went off to get her medical degree in Moscow. Half Jewish and half German, andall eccentric, Bobby is at bay with the world. He dwells permanently on the other side of the Looking Glass.Great men have played chess. Napoleon, generals, emperors, explorers. But no one played it as well as this shambling ruin of a man who still goes through life like a chased chicken or, as a friend who has tagged along after him for 12 years picking up thepieces, describes him, a “a sort of holy idiot” who neither sees nor deals with the w orld the rest of us see. Compand to Bobby, Muhammad Ali is a 9-to-5 Babbittwho gets into the pipe and slippers in front of the TV set every' night and carries his lunch to work in a bag.
Newspaper Details
Hamilton Journal News
Hamilton, Ohio, US
Thu, Nov 14, 1974
Page 14
Full Page
Clipped by
Los A.
CA, USA 14 Jan 2023
Other Publications Near Hamilton, Ohio
Hamilton Evening Democrat
Hamilton Daily Democrat
Hamilton Weekly Hamilton Telegraph
Daily Telegraph
Hamilton Guidon
