The End of the Golden Era of Chess

From The Atlantic

The recent passing of Pal Benko and Shelby Lyman draws the curtain on an American period that produced some of the game’s most sparkling play.

By Peter Nicholas
September 5, 2019

Outside the cloistered world that serious chess players inhabit, few would have taken any special note of the death last month of Pal Benko, at age 91.(1)  Benko was a top grand master and one of the game’s great artists. After defecting from his native Hungary in 1957, he moved to the United States, competing in tournaments and composing ingenious puzzles that introduced generations of young players to the mysteries of the endgame.

But his singular contribution to American chess wasn’t at the board. Without Benko, there might not have been Bobby Fischer—at least not the Fischer who delivered the U.S. perhaps its greatest cultural victory of the Cold War. His competitive career fading, Benko stepped aside in 1970 and let the younger, more talented Fischer take his place in the competition to determine a challenger for the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. Fischer, who had been playing sporadically throughout the 1960s and who seemed on the brink of quitting the game altogether, tore through the qualifying tournaments before dethroning Spassky in a 1972 match that riveted America.

Pal Benko, standing with folded arms, at a 1959 match in Slovenia between Bobby Fischer, right, and Paul Keres. The others in the photo are unidentified. Mr. Benko would eventually cede his place in the world championship cycle to Mr. Fischer, who was 15 years his junior.CreditCreditAssociated Press

Benko and Fischer hadn’t always been on the best of terms. Playing in a tournament in 1962 in the Caribbean, they squabbled one night and got into a fistfight—“the first fistfight ever recorded by two grandmasters,” Frank Brady wrote in his Fischer biography, Endgame. But they reconciled and stayed friends to the end. “Pal felt that Bobby could change the chess world—which Bobby did—and if Bobby became world champion, that would benefit the whole game,” Susan Polgar, a friend of both men and a former women’s world chess champion, told me. “His own personal interest was secondary to the bigger picture."

Another chess master who was central to the Fischer story also died last month: Shelby Lyman.(2)  Though not a world-class player, Lyman did more to popularize chess in America than anyone not named Bobby Fischer. He was teaching chess in New York when one of his students, a TV executive, tapped him to host a PBS show covering the Fischer-Spassky match. Lyman proved a natural showman, explaining densely complicated chess positions to TV viewers, many of whom thought of a fork only as an eating utensil. (In chess, it’s a move where a single piece makes at least two simultaneous attacks.) Like tons of other kids at the time, I’d turn to Channel 13 in New York that summer and follow Lyman’s commentary move by move, sparking a lifelong interest in the game. After becoming a journalist, I wrote about Lyman, and from time to time we’d talk about the match.

“I had no concept of TV,” he told me. “I never watched television. I had no idea how a talk show host should act.” But, he added, “chess is a dramatic event. You could hear the swords clang on the shields with every move. They went at each other. The average person is turned onto chess when it’s presented right. Trying to figure out the next move is a fascinating adventure—an adventure people can get into.”

Shelby Lyman, Image: Twitter.com/USChess.

With his bushy brown hair and endearing miscues (in that low-tech era, he’d fumble for the pieces he used to shove onto demonstration boards), Lyman became a mini-celebrity, while interest in the ancient game boomed. In the year before the match, membership in the U.S. Chess Federation was about 27,000. A year after Fischer won the title, it had more than doubled, to about 59,000. “Shelby was the face of chess in America,” Bruce Pandolfini, the coach and author who was played by the actor Ben Kingsley in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, told me.

The loss of Benko and Lyman draws the curtain on an era in American chess that produced some of the game’s richest personalities and most sparkling play. The players and teachers who dominated the firmament in the mid-20th century were the game’s greatest generation. They bested a Soviet pipeline of grand masters who once had a stranglehold on the title.

End Game: Bobby Fischer - from Salon

A review of Frank Brady's new book.

Sunday, Jan 30, 2011 16:01 ET
Laura Miller
"Endgame": The genius and madness of Bobby Fischer
How did one of the greatest chess players of all time end up a paranoid, hate-filled old man?

On the cover of Life, 12 Nov 1977.
Fischer, at the peak of his career.

The life of Bobby Fischer was a compendium of secrets and puzzles from the very beginning. Who was the biological father of the 11th World Chess Champion, possibly the greatest player of all time, and certainly among the top five? Why did he retire from the game after winning his historic match with Boris Spassky in 1972 and refrain from playing publicly for 20 years? What was he doing during those two decades? Why did he espouse a venomous anti-Semitism despite being Jewish himself as well as close to and reliant upon many Jewish friends? Why did those friends put up with him and why, over and over again, did they run to his aid, when his behavior toward them was often contemptuous? And, above all, was he insane and, if so, did his genius have some connection to his madness?

Frank Brady's "Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall -- From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness," cannot answer these questions conclusively, but it presents Fischer's story with an almost Olympian evenhandedness that ends up making it far more absorbing than any sensationalized account. Brady knew Fischer as a child, as Fischer was emerging as a chess prodigy in New York City, but the author renders himself almost invisible in this book. The cloud of chaos and ire that Fischer walked around in all his life doesn't seem to have infected his biographer at all.

It should be said upfront that "Endgame" contains no detailed accounts of chess games or moves, and can be read and understood even by those who don't play at all. (My most recent game was with a 6-year-old; we were evenly matched, given that he'd just learned the rules and I could barely remember them.) The book may, perhaps, leave chess aficionados unsatisfied on that account, but this decision makes "Endgame" intelligible to anyone interested in the human aspect of Fischer's life and career.

Among the misperceptions Brady aims to correct is the prevalent belief that Fischer was neglected or unloved by his mother, Regina, a brilliant, Swiss-born American who married a German biophysicist while studying medicine in Moscow. Bobby was born in Chicago, at a point after his mother had separated from his legal father, who was living in Latin America and unable to enter the U.S. due to his Communist ties. There are goods reasons to believe that Bobby's biological father was a Hungarian Jewish physicist (and refugee from Nazi Germany), Paul Nemenyi.

Brady offers many instances in which Regina supported and provided for her son throughout his life (including signing over her Social Security checks to him during his 20 years of reclusion), pointing out that most of the privations and loneliness of Bobby's childhood arose from the fact that the family was very poor and Regina a working single mother. She did allow Bobby to travel alone to chess matches when he was a young as 9, and when she moved overseas to resume her medical studies, she left the 16-year-old boy to live alone in the family's Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. However, given her son's unquenchable obsession with the game and general disregard for adult authority, she probably felt she had little choice in such matters. As far as Brady is concerned, the relationship between mother and son was always loving.

However, if Bobby suffered from a genetically rooted mental disorder, chances are he got it from Regina. She went through a brief period of disorganization and near-vagrancy at the time he was born, an episode ominously echoed by the years Bobby spent living in flophouses and shambling around Pasadena, Calif., after the 1972 match with Spassky. Whoever his biological father was, Bobby also inherited a highly specialized and often volatile intelligence that would also make him the youngest American to attain the rank of chessmaster at 14 -- and at 15, the youngest international grandmaster to that date.

The qualities contributing to these triumphs were Fischer's ferocious capacity for total focus on chess, his highly competitive personality and his phenomenal memory. In his youth, he lived, breathed and ate chess -- literally: Brady recounts that the pieces of his personal set became encrusted with crumbs and other food, and Fischer jokingly complained when the admirer who bought the set as a keepsake cleaned them. His mother often worried that he was neglecting his schoolwork (not to mention his social life), and at one point insisted on conducting all their domestic conversations in Spanish until he improved enough to do well on a language exam.

Fischer's outside interests never did him much good, however. He seems to have had little use for romance and sex (until, late in life, he became preoccupied with the need to reproduce his own genius), and his more profound ruminations led him first to embrace an evangelical church run by a radio preacher, then to dabble in a series of faiths. His final spiritual flirtation before his death in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2008, was with Roman Catholicism, but he also considered the philosophy of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, always adopting a one-foot-in/one-foot-out stance toward the rules and proscriptions of any given creed.

One of the few constants in Fischer's life -- besides chess, that is -- was his anti-Semitism, a bizarrely capricious version of the prejudice that absolved anyone he considered a "good person" (whatever their faith or ethnic background) and labeled anyone he disliked or distrusted a "Jew," again without regard to their religion or background. He was also convinced, at various points in his life, that the USSR and the U.S. government were plotting to assassinate him.

Although many of Fischer's anxieties sound delusional, he was that rare paranoid whom many people are genuinely out to get. His complaints, early in his career, that Soviet chess players were colluding to maintain their nation's dominance of the world's championship turned out to be well-founded. At the height of his rivalry with the Soviet players, a secret chess lab was even set up in Russia to suss out his game and devise ways to thwart him. Due to his mother's leftist activism and his own visit to Moscow as a teenage prodigy, the family's phone was tapped, their associates questioned and their lives monitored by the FBI.

The U.S. government's animus toward Fischer began with his rematch with Spassky in 1992, an event sponsored by a Serbian propagandist. By participating, Fischer was in violation of American sanctions against Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. He had been refusing to pay income taxes for years, in retaliation for a lawsuit that went against him in an American court. This hadn't been a problem during the 1980s, when he was mostly broke, and U.S. officials might even have been willing to shrug off the sanctions violations, but in the 2000s, Fischer made dozens of appalling anti-American and anti-Semitic broadcasts from a small radio station in Japan, where he was living. These got onto the Internet, and in particular the ones made directly after 9/11 may have provoked the U.S. to step up its efforts to chastise him.

Fischer became in effect a man without a country, living in Eastern Europe and Asia, until he was arrested for a passport violation while entering Japan and detained there for months as his fate was disputed. Finally, Iceland agreed to offer Fischer citizenship in 2005 and he spent the last three years of his life there. He died of kidney failure at 64, refusing dialysis because he mistrusted doctors and conventional medicine.

Just how crazy was Bobby Fischer? Those best qualified to judge, such as the psychiatrist friend who kept him company in his final days, insisted he was not schizophrenic or psychotic; he didn't hallucinate or lose touch with reality. However, he clearly wasn't mentally healthy. The intensity of his attention to chess was certainly compulsive, and it unbalanced his life in addition to making him one of the game's greatest players.

But Fischer's celebrity seems to have done him more damage than anything else. It fueled the grandiosity that lies at the heart of all paranoia and it turned him into an imperious diva who inflicted ridiculous demands -- that a hotel raise the level of his toilet seat by exactly 1 inch, for example, or that he be paid outlandish fees just to discuss the possibility of a high-profile match -- apparently for the sake of exercising arbitrary power. People tolerated treatment from him they would not have suffered from anyone else, which surely didn't help with his difficulty perceiving limits. The world loved Bobby Fischer for his genius and his charisma, and too much of it forgave him too easily for his hateful, crackpot diatribes. But for all that it adored him, it didn't do him any favors.

Buy it at Barnes and Noble.  I prefer to remember Fischer as that handsome young man at the top of his game.

Chess at Sundance Film Festival

Not that I'm a person who goes to Sundance (or film festivals, in general), but it's too bad I didn't know about this sooner - I would have plugged it here earlier.  It sounds like a really really cool event and features two of my favorite chess femmes:  Jennifer Shahade, a two-time U.S. Women's Chess Champion and author of Chess Bitch, and WIM Iryna Zenyuk, who has played in multiple U.S. Women's Chess Championships. 

You can find more information at Chesslife Online, the site of the U.S. Chess Federation, what is below are just snippets of the information:

Chess News: Padmini Rout, Irene Karisma Sukandar, Gulnar Mammadova, Bobby Fischer

I haven't got time tonight to start the August edition of Chess Femme News or do much posting - here are some links to stories:

From Redif Sports on India's Padmini Rout and her performance at the Girls U-20 World Chess Championship:
Padmini Rout wins Bronze at World Jr Chess C'ship
August 17, 2010 09:49 IST

From The Hindu on Padmini Rout's performance at the Girls U-20 World Chess Championship:
World junior meet: Padmini Rout claims bronze August 17, 2010

From The Jakarta Globe on Indonesia's Irene Karisma Sukandar
My Jakarta: Irene Kharisma Sukandar, Indonesia's Top Female Chess Player
Chloe Hall | August 17, 2010

From Armenia News.az on Azerbaijan's Gulnar Mammadova and per performance at the Girls U-20 World Chess Championship:
Azerbaijani chess player sixth in world championship
Tue 17 August 2010 | 06:20 GMT





And this just in - not on a chess femme but a chess story nonetheless, about the one, the only, the magnificent and the profane Robert James Fischer:

Lawyers: Chess icon Fischer didn't father girl
By JENNIFER QUINN (AP) – 3 hours ago

LONDON — DNA tests have shown that chess genius Bobby Fischer was not the father of a 9-year-old girl from the Philippines, bringing a paternity claim against his estate to a close, two lawyers familiar with the case said Tuesday.

The test result was announced in Reykjavik District Court, said lawyer Gudjon Olafur Jonsson, who represents Fischer's two American nephews in their own claim on his estate.

Fischer's remains were exhumed in July so samples could be taken to determine if he had fathered Jinky Young, whose mother Marilyn said she had a relationship with the chess icon. Jinky, who lives in the Philippines with her mother, flew to Iceland last year to provide her own sample.

"I can confirm that the result of the DNA report excluded Bobby Fisher from being the father of Jinky Young, and therefore the case has come to a close," said lawyer Thordur Bogason, who represents Jinky.

Though the paternity case has ended, the wrangling over Fischer's estate continues. He died aged 64 in Iceland in January 2008, leaving no will.

Jonsson said the elimination of the paternity claim simplifies the case between Fischer's nephews and the woman who was his long-term partner. The case is scheduled to be heard in Reykjavik next month, Jonsson said, adding he hopes for a result by the end of the year.

Famed Chessplayer Fischer's Body Exhumed for DNA Sample and Reburied

I wasn't going to report this but Sis was right, this is important news regarding a world-renowned chessplayer - the first modern-day World Chess Champion who was an American, excluding Paul Morph.  Morphy, a young troubled American (sound familiar?) was considered World Chess Champion by some before the title became 'officially' established and before there was anything called FIDE which is something like d' Federicion Internationale d'Echecs.  It should be called the World Chess Federation. English IS still the language of international trade and exchange, is it not?  So why is the name of the international chess federation in French instead of English?  Who knows?  I sure don't.

People will be interested in this news. Here's the report that she sent me a few days ago, from CNN - I have since seen that it was one of the briefest and most factual available, with a minimum of sensationalism:

Chess icon's body exhumed in paternity case
By the CNN Wire Staff

July 6, 2010 11:42 a.m. EDT
The body of chess legend Bobby Fischer was exhumed Monday (July 5, 2010) in Iceland, law enforcement officials have told CNN. His body was reburied shortly after DNA samples were taken, the officials said.

Iceland's supreme court ruled last month in favor of a request by Jinky Young, Fischer's alleged daughter, to exhume his remains in order to settle a paternity question.

A doctor, a priest and other officials were present during the procedure, according to the police department in Selfoss, Iceland.

Fischer was 64 when he died in January 2008.

Fischer was a child prodigy and chess master by the time he was 15. He achieved international fame in 1972 when he defeated chess grandmaster Boris Spassky of Russia during the height of the Cold War, to become world champion.

The tournament was considered a symbolic battle between the two greatest powers in the world. It was held in Iceland, midway between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Soviet chess masters had held the title since World War II -- until Fischer won. The victory, unequaled by an American since, was followed by tens of millions of chess fans around the world.

But Fischer's genius proved eccentric. Years after his historic win, Fischer gave up the title in 1975 and refused to defend it. He vanished and lived in a self-imposed exile for decades. He resurfaced in Yugoslavia in 1992 for a rematch against Spassky. It was another victory for Fischer, one that earned him $3.5 million.

But the U.S. government claimed Fischer's participation had violated UN sanctions against Yugoslavia, imposed to punish Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, and revoked his U.S. passport.

Fischer again disappeared.

He was not heard from again until 2004, when he was arrested in Japan for traveling on an expired passport. When Iceland granted Fischer citizenship in 2005, he moved to that country and lived there until his death in a hospital.

Latest Robert J. Fischer (a/k/a Bobby Fischer) News

I remember a few months back when 'Sis first mentioned to me the possibility that Fischer's body might be exhumed I told her it was an April Fool's joke perpetrated by chess gadfly Sam Sloan and dismissed it.

Just goes to show - 'Sis knows all. 

For those who do not follow the game of chess, Robert James Fischer is American's greatest chess hero.  He became the only American in the modern era of chess to become the World Chess Championship, by defeating Russian opponent Boris Spassky (or is that Spaasky?) in 1972 in a World Chess Championship match held over the course of weeks in Raikjevik, Iceland.  I'm tired and I'm not checking my spelling, hope you can figure out the correct versions of the names.  Fischer was probably already half insane back then, but by 1975 he was totally over the bend and for various reasons decided not to defend his title. The Russians promptly reclaimed the title by default when Fischer did not appear for the scheduled match, and it went to GM Anatoly Karpov, who held it until he was, in turn, defeated in a match by GM Garry Kasparov, a Russian by citizenship but a renegade at heart. 

Anyway, to make a long story short, Fischer died in 2008 while living in Iceland.  His heirs were (1) a Japanese woman who says she is Fischer's wife (2) a young girl purported to be Fischer's daughter of a woman of Philippine descent and (3) the two sons from the legitimate marriage of Fischer's older sister, who predeceased him.  Oh, and I believe the U.S. Government is claiming probably all of the money in whatever Fischer's actual estate is value wise, for back taxes, plus penalties, plus interest  -- long story.  For those of you interested in more back-story, just google Bobby Fischer and the 1992 Yugoslavia 're-match' against Boris Spassky (or Spaasky). 

Hocus pocus beanie focus, etc. etc. The Icelandic version of the U.S. Supreme Court has come down with a ruling that says the parties may have Fischer's body exhumed to extract DNA for testing to determine paternity of the alleged Filippina daughter. 

I don't understand why they couldn't have just tested DNA in items that survived Fischer's death.  Surely Fischer left some personal articles after he died that had sufficient DNA of his for testing.  I mean, come on - a comb, a hairbrush, or a toothbrush?  For that matter, what about scraping for skin flakes from his bed sheets?  What about his used underwear?  He died wearing something, after all.  Come on, folks.  We have the tchnology to "grab" that DNA today.

So what is with this exhumation baloney?  Is this just a grab for publicity by a bankrupt country?  It sounds pretty stinky-cheesy to me.

Best headline about the whole brou-ha ha:  Body of chess champion Bobby Fischer to be exhumed to check if he mated.  From Daily Grail, Daily News Scan, posted by Turner Young, June 18, 2010.

Bobby Fischer Notebooks/Materials on Auction

Bonham's auction house has announced the auction of a lot containing several (all?) of Bobby Fischer's notebooks, chess magazines, and other materials that were claimed to have been forfeited by Fischer for failure to pay rental on a storage unit (I believe in California). See the link for information on what the lot contains.

Who is auctioning this material? My recollection is that when alive, Fischer vehemently denied that he failed to pay the rent due on the storage unit and claimed that the property was still legally his, although it seems he never followed up with bringing legal actions against the company owning the storage unit and/or those to whom, I presume, his property was subsequently sold.

Does whoever is offering the Fischer lot for auction have a legal right to do so, given Fischer's claims when he was alive? I wonder what the legal representatives of Fischer's daughter would have to say about this?

The auction in which the Fischer lot is to be offered is set for June 10, 2009 in New York. Chess collectors must be abuzz with this news!

Sale 17109 - Fine Books and Manuscripts, 10 Jun 2009 New York
Lot No: 3372
FISCHER, ROBERT JAMES “BOBBY.” 1943-2008.
BOBBY FISCHER’S CHESS LIBRARY, INCLUDING NOTEBOOKS PREPARED FOR THE 1972 WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP.


Even stranger - does this auction include materials that were originally offered for auction on e-bay back in 2005, according to this New York Times article:

Arts, Briefly; Bobby Fischer's Stuff At Auction on eBay
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN; COMPILED BY LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: December 16, 2005
(Photo- not included in this archive)

Chess enthusiasts eager to own a bit of the game's history have a unique opportunity, at least for a few more days. Someone is selling several personal effects of Bobby Fischer, the former world champion, on eBay. Most of the collection (one example, above), according to the list on the site, consists of chess books and magazines, many of them foreign, some of them inscribed by Mr. Fischer with his name. Also included are an original manuscript for Mr. Fischer's ''My 60 Memorable Games''; 20 small handwritten notebooks detailing the openings played by some of his top competitors; and legal papers surrounding his attempt to copyright a chess move. In all, the seller says, the trove includes about 16 cardboard boxes full of material. The minimum bid is $15,000, and at least one has been received, from the Netherlands. The auction, which started last Friday, ends on Monday. The seller said the material was bought at a flea market six years ago and evidently came from a storage locker that Mr. Fischer rented in Pasadena, Calif. The contents were seized for nonpayment of rent. Mr. Fischer went into a tirade about it several years ago in a radio interview with a Philippines radio station, saying the seizure was illegal. DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN

*****************************************************

So, did the e-bay sale fall through? Or was the sale successful and the lot being offered by Bonham's is not the COMPLETE Bobby Fischer library?

First Edition of "My 60 Memorable Games" Discovered

I was visiting YouTube tonight and did a search under "chess" when up pops this video, about a fellow's visit to a "dollar" store, where he visits the used books shelves and discovers a nearly pristine first edition of Bobby Fischer's "My 60 Memorable Games." I don't know if it is for real or not but it was interesting! He paid $1.00 for the book. Yes, that is One Dollar American. Amazing, absolutely amazing.

Fischer's Daughter to Get Part of Estate

Fischer heiress to get share of P140-M estate soon Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 02:52:00 06/05/2008 MANILA, Philippines—Jinky Young, the late Bobby Fischer’s Filipino child, will soon receive her share of the estate left by the chess icon estimated at P140 million, excluding gold deposits and royalty from the movie, “Bobby Fischer Goes to War.” This was disclosed by lawyers Sammy Estimo and Rudy Tacorda after getting word from Reykjavik, Iceland that the Probate Court had already received the claim folder of Jinky Young. The deadline for receiving claims to the estate of the deceased chess legend was May 17, or three months after Fischer died on January 17, 2008 of renal failure. Estimo said that Fischer had contacted him and Grandmaster Eugene Torre in 1984 while he was in an airport prison cell in Japan and had wanted to become a Filipino citizen to be with his child and common-law wife, Marilyn. But Estimo advised him not to push through with his plan because it was in the Philippines that Fischer’s passport was cancelled. With the help of some Icelandic chess friends, Fischer was able to obtain an Icelandic passport and was flown out of Japan in March 2005. Jinky Young and her mother linked up with Bobby in Iceland in September 2005 but that was the last time the three of them lived together as one small family. But Fischer kept in touch with them through daily calls via mobile phones. The late chess legend also sent them monthly euro remittances. Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

* * * * * * * *

If I did the currency conversion correctly, P140M equals $3,186,890 USD. The article did not state what percentage the daughter's share would be. Assuming the movie actually gets made and released, royalties could potentially be quite lucrative. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

If you didn't know it before, you do now -

This information has been out for some time, the consensus being that the book purportedly written by Bobby Fischer in December, 2007 "My 61 Memorable Games" was a fraud. Here is the article by GM Larry Evans from the SunSentinel.com: Bobby Fischer book appears to be fake May 4, 2008 "No other chess figure has had, has or will have more autograph imitations than Bobby Fischer GUARANTEED!" — Fisching for Forgeries, by Lawrence Totaro Last December, a month before Bobby Fischer died in Iceland, an auction on eBay Canada announced a new revised edition of his classic My 60 Memorable Games called My 61 Memorable Games purportedly written by him. Bidding reached $3,050 for the first 50 copies when eBay pulled the plug: "We recently suspended this seller's trading privileges. Due to privacy concerns we cannot share further details." Fischer angrily denied writing it. Yet the seller denied any hoax and insisted the auction was withdrawn solely because of death threats received online from someone called "Jews Against Fischer." "So what should I do with all these books then?" said the seller. "Why not send them — if they exist — to Fischer in Iceland?" I replied. In extensive e-mails over the next three months the seller repeatedly promised to send me a copy of the new book but never did. I think it may exist on someone's computer but it has not yet appeared in print. Obviously a strong player using a computer did a lot of work updating the manuscript. But Fischer had nothing to do with it and the seller's story appears to be a fairy tale. The Canadian came up with excuse after excuse for not sending me a copy of the book. I played along to gather more information, then encountered one falsehood after another — too numerous to mention. In order to convince me the book exists, the scammer sent me a photo of the cover and page 79, naively asking who this Weinstein was that Bobby kept attacking (knowing full well that Weinstein was Kasparov before he changed his name). This sample page pointed out a flaw in analysis by Kasparov in his series My Great Predecessors (Volume 4). To mimic Bobby's sarcasm, the author was called "Weinstein" and then boasted: "I'll say this only once — Fischer beats Kasparov!" If the book does surface one of these days, we can rest assured it was NOT written or authorized by Fischer. For the full story, see Chess Life Online (http://tinyurl.com/2noyxp). Larry Evans is a five-time U.S. chess champion and nationally syndicated chess writer. Write to him at P.O. Box 1182, Reno, NV 89504.

Thoughts of Robert J. Fischer

Isis and I discussed the sad news of Fischer's death last night on the telephone, and she reminded me of a thread we had started a long time ago (back in 2000) on Fischer at our Goddesschess Discussion Group. The Chief had some acquaintance with RJF and I shamelessly pressed for whatever information he could/would give us about him. The thread continued for several months.

Isis said she was going to publish some of the posts at her My Space site, and I think that's a good idea. What follows are a few of the posts, a trip down memory lane, not only memories of 2000 but memories from much further back.

From: RICALVO 2/21/00 5:08 pm
To: ALPHETA 2 of 197 39.2 in reply to 39.1
I met Bobby twice, but not on the same board. First in Havanna 1966. Second time in Siegen (Germany) 1970, when he allowed me to participate in the post-mortem analysis of a game agains Portisch. He retired because of the MiV in the federations, particularly Jeweis ones. He is retered because of danger for his life. He has money, but must escape as a fugitive from their powerful enemies. Not many people dare to speak about BF, but Patton is surely brave enough. SB

From: RICALVO 3/1/2000 10:37 am
To: ALPHETA 5 of 197 39.5 in reply to 39.4
Well, my dear Patton: It´s time to talik about BF, the greatest champion in chess history. He never accepted money as the ultimate reason. He never played tricky chess (no ease draw games of him are recorded). He hated federative crooks, Russian cheaters and particularly, Jeweish manipulators. You may or not agree with him, but the fact is that he won the World Championship in 1972 and was deprived of it by decree in 1975. Now he says that he is protecting his own life. He has been studying not only chess, but also history, above all history of religions. He seems to believe that troubles in the world are created not only by Soviet malignancy but, above all, by Jewish control of powers. Our tribe has some reliable sources, but on the whole, BF is a worthy point of discussion in this forum. SB

From: ALPHETA 3/1/2000 9:08 pm
To: RICALVO 6 of 197 39.6 in reply to 39.5
Greetings, Honorable Sitting Bull. I agree whole-heartedly that BF is a worthy subject of discussion. I was a full-time secretary and part-time hippy living on this city’s "fashionable east side" in 1972 when BF won the World Championship. I didn’t pay much attention to current events back then, but EVERYONE paid attention to BF and the Epic Struggle Against the Russian Juggernaut, and I was no exception! My brief six-month stint as a would-be chessplayer was behind me by this time, but it seemed as if EVERYONE had the name of BF on their lips. The young ladies who didn’t care a fig about chess thought he was oh so cute and "sexy" (he was a very compelling presence back then – still is, actually – at least I found him to be so in the 1992 photographs I have seen of him), the older more motherly type ladies thought him a clean-cut stand-up representative of the United States who clearly loved his mother (this is always counted a very good thing among Americans, home of Mom, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet), the guys (both young and old) got into the "cold warrior" aspects of the match, and basically everyone American agreed that it would be a very good thing if BF could kick some Rusky butt!

Those days are long gone, but the memories will never disappear. They are etched in our collective consciousness as long as we (USA) exist as a country. That is Innisfree, Sitting Bull – a place of beauty, and peace and security; a secret place of the heart; a place we wistfully look back on and to which we perhaps, wish we could return; a place that exists corporally for each country, and for each of us individually no matter what our nationality.
So, talk to us about BF, Sitting Bull.

From: RICALVO 3/2/2000 5:22 am
To: ALPHETA 7 of 197 39.7 in reply to 39.6
Patton: Our tribe will obey your orders following strictly the points indicated by your posted guidelines. 1.Yes, the boom in US chess and in World chess was due to BF. Last year I travelled by car during several hours with Karpov, who declared to me: "I have tryed since 1975 to maintain the financial flowering in chess created by the image of Fisher, but nowadays the stupidity of the current top chess players are spoiling everything" 2.You say, with better instinct, that BF was and still is sexy. But sex seems a very negligible question in BF´s life program. Once, during a chess tournament in Buenos Aires, several chess grandmasters acted as go-betweens to procure the first sexual encounter of BF (with a biutiful woman). When asked maliciously the next morning, his answer was: "Chess is better". 3. His relations wit his mother (who by the way, had the fateful name of "Regina") had apparently nothing to do with Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet, ant at some points seemed rather conflictive and diverging. 4. About Innisfree, I agree with you. I saw "The quiet man" several times, but my reference was aimed basically at Yeat´s poem. Tell me, in case you don´t have it. What I can tell about BF is based mostly in readings, but also in internals reports because the international chess world is a curious group full of chats. BF´s image has suffered an aimed degradation because of many bastard interests of his jealous rivals, and the last one seems to us the article at the "Chess Café" you mentioned in a recent post.

Patton: let us know specific objectives for the next charges of our cavalry.
SB

From: ALPHETA 3/3/00 7:24 am
To: RICALVO 11 of 197 39.11 in reply to 39.7
Greetings, S.B. Yes, I am familiar with Yeats’ beautiful and elegantly simple poem. I chose the recurring theme of Innisfree in "The Quiet Man" for a reason – I don’t recall the words of the song that Maureen O’Hara sang as she sat at her mother’s piano in the cottage she shared with her husband, John Wayne, their being married and together but estranged; I remember it was beautiful, and poignantly wistful, and it seemed somehow quite appropriate to an American Son who has been far from the shores of his homeland for over twenty years. Fitting, too, the theme of a man haunted by demons from the past that MUST be confronted and battled with before he can move forward and get on with the rest of his life. John Wayne as a retired Irish-American boxer at odds with himself and the world is an apt metaphor for our chess heavyweight, BF. …

From: RICALVO 3/3/00 5:49 pm To: ALPHETA 13 of 197 39.13 in reply to 39.11
Dear Patton: Your sensibility surprises our tribe. We can send an explorer to the "Pat Cohan´s Tavern" in Innisfree to obtain the song of Maureen O´Hara. BF is of finer stuff, and our council agrees with your overall impression. Our model for him is however not "The quiet man". First we thought on Coriolanus, as described by Plutarch in "Parallel lives": "Many people thought that his quite retirement was due to modesty, but they didn´t realized the tremendous fury containid inside his apparent stillness". The mother of Coriolanus was his driving force, as described by Shakespeare. Hamlet is in our opinion a much better metaphor. Deprived of his rights to the crown, searching for the history of his father dissapearance, looking at the power of usurpators ("smiling villains") and seeing his mother flirts with the established dictators. Our tribe was once allowed to read a big KGB dosssier on BF, but not to obtain a copy of it. If you wish, I can tell you in secrecy this story next Monday in this forum. SB

From: ALPHETA 3/3/00 8:59 pm
To: RICALVO 15 of 197 39.15 in reply to 39.13
Great Sitting Bull, Off to another chess tournament? Lucky man!

I prefer a happy ending to a tragedy, S.B., and that is why I chose "The Quiet Man". Alpheta JanXena is ever the optimist, in the face of all contrary evidence! I stick my tongue out at the boo-hooers and nay-sayers. I believe wholly and absolutely in the inherent power and triumph of good over evil. Naive you say? Perhaps we should put it to the test then - how about the creation of a "FREE BOBBY FISCHER" campaign? An interesting idea, don't you think?

… It seems to me that for the greater part of his life, people were either telling him what to do and when to do it, or TRYING to get him to do things that THEY wanted him to do. But what about what BF wanted? I've read pages and pages and pages of articles and not one of them addressed this simple and yet profound question - what did, and what does, BF want?

… I am engaging in research on BF … and I am merely reporting on what I have read and what I have concluded:

FACT: I have read many accounts of children approaching BF and asking for his autograph - and the Man always gave his autograph to these young ones without a second thought. Contrast this behavior with the attitude of today's so-called sports superstars, who charge for everything!

FACT: I read an article on one of the websites devoted to BF that described an afternoon spent in the country, somewhere in South America where he was appearing at a tournament - long ago and far away - and about BF's rapturous encounter and immediate friendship with an old dog who miraculously cavorted about like a puppy when BF came into her presence. This, perhaps more than anything else, spoke to me, S.B. Animals ALWAYS KNOW about people - ALWAYS!

FACT: I have read, from more than one source, about BF spending lots of time tutoring many children in The Game, about how patient and gentle he is with these children, and how the children, in turn, have responded to this loving attention. BF has never, as far as I know, either touted or confirmed these activities - the stories have come from the families of the children! I believe these accounts because in a recorded radio interview that I listened to the other night given in January, 2000, BF talked about how he had hoped one day to raise his children on a homestead on land he owned in Florida. Land that he had inherited from his mother, who had inherited it from her father. Land that, for various reasons, he decided to forfeit by refusing to pay the real estate property taxes thereon.

FACT: Just today at GKasparov's current (new and improved) website I read in a recent interview given by GKasparov about a connection between 19 year old Hungarian wunderkind Peter Leko and BF. Perhaps this isn't "news" to the world of professional chessplayers, but it sure was news to me! I believe that BF has lived in Hungary (Budapest) since 1992, and perhaps Peter Leko was one of the children (in 1992 he would have been 10 or 11) that BF took under his chess-tutoring wing...

Friday Night Miscellany

Right now I'm watching BBC news on public television and they are doing a retrospect on Robert J. Fischer, the greatest American chess player who ever lived (to date). This is one of my favorite photos of Fischer, returning triumphant to NYC after winning the World Chess Championship in Iceland. I haven't read the latest news reports - what I read this morning indicated that Fischer died Thursday. I read that it was kidney failure, but someone at the office said she read it was liver failure. I read that he died at home, having removed himself from hospital perhaps in November because he did not trust western medicine/doctors; I also read that he died in hospital. So - I expect the facts will be sorted out in time.

I'm very sad that he died without ever having received treatment for his mental illness. He never gave himself a chance for a more normal life. I know attorneys who would have been glad to help him with his legal battles, if only he had been willing to return to the USA. But mental illness prevented Fischer from acting rationally.

Will his illness overshadow his great achievements in the world of chess? I'm no judge. I admired what he accomplished as an individual going up against what was the Russian chess monolith; I admire him even more for turning himself into a chess genius through sheer dint of will and hard work. I abhored, like many no doubt, his personally espoused views on my country, the USA, and his views on Jews and women.

Now I'm wondering if there will be a legal battle over Fischer's estate. Of course, I'm assuming that there IS an estate, but who knows for sure? Only Fischer's bankers. I understand that Fischer's deceased sister had two children, who would stand to inherit Fischer's estate (at least, under USA law) if he has not otherwise bequeathed it via Trust or Will (or married and his wife survived him). The USA is owed money for income taxes on Fischer's $3,000,000 prize won in the 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky. Will the IRS file a claim in whatever country Fischer's estate is probated? Will we ever know? Is it any of our business? Will friends now rush to print what they withheld for years on pain of banishment from Fischer's figurative side? Will others rush to attempt to cash in on Fischer's death? So many questions - no answers at the moment.

The Lehrer News Hour is on PBS now - it mentioned Fischer's death in a short story.

To a happier topic; today in many places of employment and schools throughout the state of Wisconsin, people wore their green and gold in support of our beloved Packers. The big game, the NFC Championship Game, is on Sunday, kick-off is at 5:40 p.m. I will be snuggled in my pajamas under an afghan, ensconced on the sofa in front of the fireplace to watch the game. The temperature turned sharply colder last night, and will drop even lower over the weekend. By Sunday evening it might be zero in Green Bay at game time, with windchills of - who knows? The winds are supposed to be strong here in Milwaukee County. We are under a winter weather advisory for dangerous windchill due to strong winds; but up in Green Bay I haven't heard that there will be much wind.

The supermarket was absolutely NUTS tonight, geez! The line for the liquor checkout was half a mile long, I swear, and the "regular" checkout lines were nearly as long. Everyone is stocking up on goodies for the Big Game, as well as extra so they won't have to venture out tomorrow or Sunday to pick up milk, eggs, bread or toilet paper (essentials to surviving life as we know it). Myself, I quit the office half an hour early because the forecast was for the winds to start whipping up around the time I'd normally leave. As it was, the 3/4th mile walk home from the supermarket loaded down with groceries was no picnic. The wind was out of the south/southwest and very cold - and the ambient air temperature was about 12 degrees F. I don't want to be out there when the highest temperature during the day is zero! Now I'm snug in front of my computer. I have my pizza, my mac and cheese, ground beef, assorted soups and casserole fixings, and lots of wine and liquored-up Christian Bros. eggnog (leftover from Christmas); also lots of peanuts for the squirrels and bird seed for the birds. I'm not stirring farther than the end of the driveway to get my mail and the newspaper until Monday morning, when I HAVE to go back to the office :)

I understand the Packers are 7 point favorites in the Big Game. Honestly, I have no idea what will happen in this game; but then, I expected that the Pack would have to play Dallas in Dallas, surprise surprise! I have nothing against the Giants - that is, I don't hate them like I hate the Vikings, da Bears, and Dallas. I've read that the Giants are dirty players - well, dirtier than average because I'm sure most players will take free shots in a pile-up if they think they can get away with it. Particularly dirty play, as opposed to just playing like nasty little boys with bad manners, does not set well with me. So I will be keeping a keen eye on the t.v. screen and if I see something I think is below the belt (so to speak), I won't hesitate to put a JanXena hex on the offending player. JanXena hexes ALWAYS work.

I've written a short piece about the TRUE history of football for Goddesschess - I expect it will be published shortly, so check there the next day or two to see if it's up and running. It will be published under my nom de plume of Alpheta Patton, former Ace Girl Reporter for the gone but not forgotten International Chessoid.

About that story that Dylan McClain published a few days ago in The New York Times (which, evidently, hardly anyone read, poor Dylan, just not very popular are you, gee, I wonder why?) about the USCF requesting the resignation of Executive Board member Paul Truong, who was elected to the EB in June, 2007. I do wish McClain would check his facts and solicit comments from more than a USCF press release before publishing his stories. Doesn't the man have an editor? That quote he published from Sloan - something like "now I'll always be known as a sex offender." Oh poor Mr. Sloan, playing the victim. What a hoot! If McClain had checked out Sloan's website, he would be in for a NASTY shock and see the reason why such charges have been leveled at Sloan from many different directions - they didn't come out of thin air. As I understand it, Sloan has not removed any of the truly offensive material he's posted over the years. I haven't visited there since 1999 (a one-time event, when I was innocent in the ways of the internet and didn't realize that people could and did publish such things, eek!) for fear of contracting some kind of loathsome disease, not to mention getting the heebie-jeebies at the mere thought.

Of course, a miracle could occur and Sloan could receive GODDESS and become born again. He could repent his formerly errant ways and seek forgiveness, and spend the rest of his life in penitence, giving free chess lessons New York prisons. Well - like I said, it would be a miracle.

I love this over at Dailygrail.com: Anthony North asks the simple question of "Why Are We Here?" at Beyond the Blog. I mean, geez, get over it already. We're HERE. Deal with it! Do the best you can and duh! - die and then see what's beyond, if anything. That's what everybody else here has to deal with too. So boo hoo, eat some chocolate, drink some wine and get a good night's sleep. You'll feel better in the morning.