Bobby Fischer: Why do we still care?

Like so many of us here we are drawn to anything relating to Bobby Fischer.  There is a new documentary, there will be a movie released soon.  I've created a thread or two about Fischer with some questions and thoughts about him and they have received a lot of attention/comments.  

My personal opinion is that there is something about Fischer which is resonates with all of us.  I think all believe that we are brilliant and talented in some way(s) or another and yet in other ways we think that we are helpless/hopless screwed up idiots.  I'm not saying that this true or not but that we secretly hold these sorts of beliefs and rarely let anyone else know about it. 

I think that this is the key as to why so many of us are fascinated by Fischer.  He is the poster boy for Brilliance and Lunacy.  He is the visible manifestation of that which remains hidden, even to ourselves, of OURSELVES.  So, to know him is to know ourselves...something that at our deepest levels we all yearn to do.

Fischer stayed a weekend at my grandfather's house off the lake in Milwaukee, Wisconsin back in the day.  My grandfather was Wisconsin state champion for 5 years, so this is kind of a neat story to me.  You can Google info on it.

Extreme might be the key word.  Folks who operate on extemes typically do so in more than one area.  Maybe he is one such example.

Paranoid people are simply intelligent people who haven't found their zen.

I'm really not moivated to talk about him, let's talk abut Judit Polgar.

I think it's the same as the fascination with players like Tal or Morphy: For a few years they made doing the impossible look easy.  They destroyed the best in the world, all the while looking like they didn't even work up a sweat.  Isn't it just the projection of our own fantasy; that we all feel that, given a slightly different set of circumstances, that that would be us up there?

he helped put chess on the map, both for america and the rest of the world.  he had a VERY high IQ and played chess like nobody's business. many believe he's the best player to ever have played the game.  that's why folks still care.  :D

Actually, I'm not all that motivated to talk about him (at least, not as far as his career goes, not anymore).

If there is a fascination about him though, it's in considering those moments in interviews where he is altogether winsome and charming, like some goofy shy little kid.  I think particularly about his appearance on I've Got a Secret (where of course he still was a goofy shy kid) and that interview with Dick Cavett.  There he is everything a chessplayer isn't supposed to be:  relaxed, grinning, not arrogant in the least, a regular guy (somebody you definitely might want to hang out with).

It's so completely against the usual "nutjob" characterization of him...that it does definitely give one pause.

Fischer was the ultimate cross between talent and drive,

his mental deterioration is also a mystery and a tragedy.

Dashkee, but it's not the same.  The proof is simplyin the pudding in that we don't find thread after thread here about Tal or Morphy or even Kasparov.  Not to say that these thread aren't present but there are simply less of them and the ones that are found are not viewed as often or posted in as much.  The question remains simply:  Why?

Regarding Tal and Kasparov I don't think there is anyone who sees them the way we tend to see fischer.  We may see all three of them as genisus of some varied degree of magnitude but only Fischer is regarded as a sort of "dr. jekel and mr. hyde"; in the sense of chess genius highs and personal struggles lows.  So, according to my theory Tal and kasparov don't meet our subconscious need for self knowledge/self actualzation because we don't their is no external evidence of their inner anguish.   

Morphy maybe another matter as is inner anguish is evident, provided you know anything about him.   But make no mistake there is a definite fascination about Morphy too.  However I think it is more muted because his reign being some 150 years ago makes him appear less relevant, plus with the distance of time most of us know so much less about him than Fischer. 

Fischer crushed like no one else in the modern era.  Combine that with the fact that his career was cut short (by himself), and that makes him fascinating.  It's impossible not to conjecture how he'd do against Karpov or Kasparov.  Not only did Fischer give us some of the best and most accurate chess of all time, but he also robbed us of alot of great chess.  We never got 'the rest of the story', chess-wise anyway.

All right, here I my thoughts.  And keep in mind this is only my opinion.  But the fascination with Bobby Fischer transcends chess.  Names like Tal, Morphy, and Kasparov mean nothing to the average person who is not a chess aficionado.  But Bobby Fischer captured the imagination of the American public, particularly in the 1972 match between Fischer and Spassky.  It is hard for us to imagine today, but the Cold War was all consuming back then, and anytime we beat the Soviets at anything it was a big deal.  We just beat them at going to the Moon, so we were better and smarter at that.  And now we beat them at chess, an intellectual pursuit, so we could produce someone smarter than anyone they could produce.  That is the fascination.  It has to do with the time period, the politics, and the ideology at that moment in time.  It just happened to be chess.  Now Bobby Fischer is part of and ingrained in our cultural memory and history.  At the time I was 13 years old, and that is what it meant for me at that time.  It went beyond the chess game.  These are just my personal thoughts.  I am not saying they are correct.

Yes, everything you say is true, to a point...but we're not still talking about landing on the moon are we?  We're not really even still talking about winning the cold war, except occaisonally when a politician is trying to score political points.  There was/is something about the MAN Bobby Fischer that did captivate us all that is transcendent.  I believe it is because he was a flawed genius where we could all SEE his flaws as his strange existence played itself out...

polydiatonic

If you just look at the number of forums/posts about Fischer, I'll give you that.  But how many forums/posts are about Fischer's political views/outrageous statements/behavior, and how many are just about his chess?  Take away the hate forums and hate posts and I think forums about Morphy and Fischer are about the same, with Fischer in the slight lead, if either one is ahead.  But what I was talking about is it seems to me that people project their values on their heroes--let's not forget that there was a strong anti-Morphy sentiment in the south after the American Civil War because Morphy argued against the legality of secession and did not take an active part in the war.  The "unfulfilled destiny" is another good argument for the lasting fascination of Morphy, Fischer, and even Tal (if only he had good kidneys/quit smoking/drinking, etc.).  But I think it's more of analyzing their careers as well as their games--"If I had been in his position, I would have done...."  And I think that that fantasy projection will keep this fascination going long after we are both gone from here.

As we say in Europe: "Only in America".

I grew up knowing about only one GM, and that was Kasparov. Likewise, if in America one wants to refer to a great chess player, one says "Fischer"; here, one says "Kasparov".

I strongly doubt most British people, if not other Europeans, know who Fischer was unless they have a keen interest in chess. 

DavidStyles

Most non-players I run into here in the states only know of the name Kasparov as a chess player, from all his TV appearances and from losing the match to DeepBlue.  If they remember Fischer at all, it's from the post-9/11 comments or from the "spit heard 'round the world."  Only the players remember who was Fischer.

I think part of the Fischer legend is due to the fact that being from the West (which signified a lot at the time), his triumphs and tragedies were almost guaranteed to be played out in a public forum. If Tal (or Botvinnik, or...) struggled with inner demons, would we necessarily have known, or known to the same level of detail?

What I mean is, part of the reason we are obsessed with Fischer is because we can be obsessed with Fischer. He generated enough varied biographical material on record that you can write books and you can make documentaries and you can show someone in vivid detail who lived a grotesque life of supremacy and lunacy. He is also the closest thing to a celebrity that the chess world has that the non-chess world can understand. Celebrities melting down is a universal language of lurid entertainment.

One of the things I find suprising about Fischer as a person is that he appeared to be very fearful about certain things, particularly about his health and safety, and yet he still wasn't able to stop his extreme sense of persecution from spilling out in public venues, which you could argue would only compound his sense of being a target. It was almost a self-fulfilling feedback loop.

His life reminds me of the Nietzsche quote: "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

I think the 'monster' that Fischer battled with was a certainty that there was some terrible secret at the bottom of the world that only a few could perceive. He spent so much of his life sensing and fleeing from vast shadowy conspiracies that only he (or only he and others who shared his theories and manias) could see. And every setback, every perceived slight or wrong or injustice, was just more evidence that the conspiracy was all around him, everywhere he went, affecting every moment of his life.

I wonder if Fischer ever understood the consequences of his actions on his or other people's lives? Or if (as I am left thinking after reading Brady's biography) he truly believed he was living a blameless existence?