BOBBY FISCHER
In 1975, after the no-show of the second Christ that the church had been promising, he abandoned the sect, believing it to be part of “a satanical secret world government”. By this time, he was living in a small basement apartment in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. His elegant wardrobe and fitness regime were things of the past. He cut off his phone, played chess on his own and spurned the friends who visited him. He started quoting the infamous antisemitic fabrication “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, even at dinner with his sister, her Jewish husband and children. “It was as if he was at war with himself,” says Saidy, who told him that if he didn’t play chess, he’d be forgotten. Fischer was so upset at the idea that he never spoke to him again. Well aware of chess’ baleful reputation in matters of psychiatric health, Short notes that it was when Morphy and Fischer stopped playing competitive chess that their mental conditions deteriorated. “So,” he says, “there is a counterargument that chess keeps people, or certain obsessive people, sane.” None the less, he acknowledges that the game can inflict mental damage. He draws an analogy with sport, where players pick up physical injuries as a result of constant strain. High-level competitive chess can also take its toll, only not on the physique. “I don’t think outsiders understand the levels of stress involved,” says Short. “If you’re in time trouble, your heart rate can easily double during a game. Normally when your heart rate is doubling you should be physically moving — so in chess there is no outlet for this stress. I think what happens is that people are getting 76
some sort of mental injuries that are not necessarily detected. Whereas a sportsman with a hamstring problem will receive immediate treatment, you can develop neurotic ideas in chess and they’re just never treated.” Fischer didn’t believe in doctors, much less psychiatrists. His neuroses were left to the media to diagnose and Fischer had even less time for the media than he did for shrinks. Brady records Fischer’s slide down the Los Angeles housing ladder, from the Pasadena basement to a MacArthur Park flophouse. He was reduced to living off his mother’s social security cheques. By 1990, he was a halfforgotten, penniless paranoiac.
High-level competitive chess can take its toll on the mind. Heart rate can double and mental injuries are not detected
That’s when he received a letter, via the United States Chess Federation, from a 17-year-old female chess player from Hungary called Zita Rajcsányi. She told him that he was “the Mozart of chess”. He entered into a correspondence with the teenager and she persuaded him to play chess once more. In 1992, a $5m match against Spassky was set up in wartorn Yugoslavia. There was a UN embargo in place and Fischer was warned in writing by the American government that his participation would contravene US law. He spat on the letter at a press conference. After a sticky start, in which Spassky seemed to take pity on his
plight, Fischer easily won the series. But the match exposed his decline as a player and, more conspicuously, as a person. He was also now an outlaw, facing a potential prison sentence should he return to America. With two Serbian bodyguards in tow, he moved to Budapest, where he drew heavily on the hospitality of Hungary’s leading chess families, the Polgars and Lilienthals, both of whom were Jewish. They put up with his antisemitic tirades because his company — or legend — was still prized within the Hungarian and international chess communities. It was Fischer who eventually turned his back on them, citing, as ever, real or imagined betrayals. Fischer lived a leisurely but dislocated life in Budapest. His money problems were behind him, but he didn’t speak the language and he alienated anyone who came close. Even Rajcsányi fell out with him after he refused to accept that she wanted to marry someone else. “I’ve won from worse positions than this,” he told her. He spent his time reading Holocaust-denial literature and watching American films. In 2000, Fischer relocated to the Far East, splitting his time between Japan, where he formed a romantic relationship with Miyoko Watai, the head of the Japanese Chess Association, and the Philippines. In Japan, by all accounts, he lived an almost normal, settled married life. But in the Philippines, he revelled in an ageing playboy lifestyle common to many wealthy Westerners in the poorer areas of east Asia. There were several girlfriends, including one, Marilyn Young, who claimed to have given birth to Fischer’s daughter.