BOBBY FISCHER
The former world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, is in detention in Japan, accused of trying to leave the country without a valid passport. He faces deportation to the US, from which he has been in exile for more than a decade. He is accused of violating economic sanctions by playing an exhibition match in Yugoslavia in 1992.
When Bobby Fischer returned to the United States in 1972, after his victory in the World Chess Championship in Iceland, he was given the keys to his native New York City.
This was the hero who had beaten the commies at their own game. How different things look today. If sent back to his homeland now, Fischer could be facing 10 years in a prison cell.
Chess was one of the means by which the Soviets believed they could assert the superiority of their system over the capitalist West.
With the Cold War at its height, Fischer, with his fearless, attacking genius, overcame the incumbent champion, Boris Spassky. Good had, apparently, triumphed over evil.
Or so it seemed.
In fact, only a last minute phone call from the then national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to "get his butt over to Iceland", prevented Fischer from pulling out.
Fischer during his 1992 re-match against Spassky
In a display of the paranoia that has never left him, he demanded different lighting, a new chair, no audience, no cameras, more time, less time, and all manner of other outrageous conditions.
Today he is known as much for his right-wing views as for his mastery of chess. His diatribes, mainly on live radio, include his glee at the attack on the Twin Towers, and his assertion that the US government is a "brutal, evil dictatorship".
He also alleges that he has been swindled out of a personal fortune, and has issued a vicious tirade against Jewish people.
This is ironic since Bobby Fischer was born in a Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn to a Jewish mother and, it transpired later, to a Jewish father.
His sister first taught him chess in his early teens. It soon became an obsession. He had boards placed beside every bed in his apartment and would sleep in each in rotation as he played against himself in games sometimes lasting for days.
Stripped of title
Fischer became increasingly demanding of tournament organisers, while, at the same time, absorbing himself in anti-Semitic and white-supremacist literature.
He was vehemently anti-Communist, another irony since the FBI, it was revealed years later, had once suspected him and his mother of being Russian spies.
Fischer's hold on the world chess crown ended when the chess authorities, in 1975, refused to meet his 16 pages of demands prior to his defence against Anatoly Karpov.
Fischer gave up playing tournaments and took up with an apocalyptic cult called the Worldwide Church of God. After a bitter falling out with them, his paranoia increased.
Bobby Fischer, a troubled soul He reportedly had his dental fillings removed, fearing that the Russians could use them as radio wave receptors to control his thinking.
He was coaxed out of retirement for the 1992 re-match with Spassky in Yugoslavia out of sheer financial necessity. This time, he insisted the toilet in his bathroom should be higher than anyone else's and even argued over the length of the knight's nose.
He won the chess contest with its $3m prize, though by now, Spassky was rated only 99th in the world.
Now an outlaw, deemed to have been "trading with the enemy," Bobby Fischer remained in Yugoslavia for a while before moving to Hungary where he became involved with a chess player, Zita Rajcsanyi.
When they broke up, she wrote a book about their relationship in which she accused him of regarding women as inferior. She blamed his attitude on his mother, who often left him alone.
He began leading a peripatetic life as he attempted to avoid extradition to his homeland, ending up in Japan. During his travels, he is said to have fathered a child with a Filipino woman living in Manila.
In his hey-day, Bobby Fischer's brilliance raised the world profile of chess. But to those who once championed the one-time King of the Castle, Bobby Fischer is now nothing more than a dirty rascal.
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