The Phaeton-like rise and fall of Bobby Fischer brings back memories of the Cold War.

 

It is hard to describe the surge of utter dominance and confidence which lifted Fischer to his World Chess Championship victory over Boris Spassky in 1972. Imagine (if you can) Tottenham winning the Premiership by 16 clear points, then beating every team in the Champions League 5-0 before beating Bayern Munich 6-2 in the semi-finals, and rounding it all off by thrashing Barcelona 9-3 in the final – after being 0-2 down after the first ten minutes. Then never playing another competitive match. That was Bobby Fischer’s chess career.

 

Latterly Fischer did little but rant against Jews and the United States in a strikingly vile way:  I’m very concerned because I think the Jews want to drive the elephants to extinction … because the trunk of an elephant reminds them of an uncircumcised penis. … I’m absolutely serious about that.

 

In his earlier playing days Fischer railed against officially-inspired Soviet chess machinations. We now know that he had a point. The book Russians versus Fischer draws on Party and KGB archives to describe all this in vivid detail. Grandmaster Taimanov was officially punished by the Soviet authorities for losing an unprecedented 0-6 to Fischer in his surge to the top. I recall veteran Grandmaster Yuri Averbach telling me how the Communist Party’s sports committee at one point had even tried to suppress certain sorts of theoretical chess studies for being too ‘bourgeois’ and reactionary. Madness takes many forms.

 

Fischer has gone. But his games live on. Especially this legendary one. A towering intellectual achievement for anyone. Bobby Fischer was thirteen at the time.