Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Imagine you’re a shy, quiet boy growing up in a large quiet place. You have among your biggest heroes men of physical action, both real and not real—Robin Hood and Aragorn; Larry Bird and Dennis Rodman—but you know in your gut from early on that what sets you apart is your mind. You’re content there, can always find things to do in there, where others seem to not. Going into the woods with a long stick, a pen knife and a dog doesn’t cease to pass the time well as early as it might, because you can make the forest a frontier, an escape, a place to lay a trap.

That’s enough empathetic exercise—it’s not a particularly difficult or rare one. My point is that this is the kind of boy I was, and, though I had no tremendous affection for chess, Bobby Fischer became on of the most intriguing heroes I had almost from the moment I first heard his story. Bobby Fischer Goes to War concerns itself with the war that was Bobby Fischer versus Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. When I heard stories about this ’72 battle, with the variety of big, unblinking demands made by Fischer—his refusal to play, his demands for more money that, coupled with his disallowance of TV or film coverage for the event and the revenue stream that went with along with it, practically bankrupted Iceland—I struggled to make sense of them, to find some noble ethic of resistance that was consistent, and would’ve failed at, but for the fact of his disappearance. He was in hiding.

Hiding, see, was where the best kinds of heroes went—the misunderstood men who had to bide their time and lay low, waiting for their moment of redemption. I knew of these themes even as I loved them—I enjoyed finding the common threads in my heroes, and one thread that ran through all of my most highly held characters was that of being thrown out, excommunicated, on the run.

So Bobby Fischer took a seat in that pantheon of mine, and stayed there for some time, until he unavoidably showed himself to be something not at all like a hero, or a relatively sane person. Now, years later, that hasn’t ended up being a bad thing for my idea and estimation of him — Hunter S Thompson’s body of work and life practically demanded his eventual shotgun suicide, if you know what I mean.