Chess politics - Fischer - best thing that happened to New Windsor

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Fischer - best thing that happened to New Windsor

The Masked Bishop

2005-03-27, 5:51 pm

Since we are all so phallically obssessed with the Shame of Chess and
his retro-posturings, our usual spotlights on the merry goings-on in
New Windsor have certainly faded.

How I miss those discussions of Marinello power-grabs, Hanke
capitulations, and Chessdon obfuscations, now lost in a miasma of
Fischer-envy. But I bet they don't. Indeed, they have to be lighting
candles to the old bastard every night, so grateful that our fanboy
fixation on a has-been chess player has taken the heat off the
grotesqueries of USCF governance.

Here's hoping THAT changes, once Bobby fades into the dim haze of the
Icelandic landscape.

TMB

parrthenon@cs.com

2005-03-27, 5:51 pm

WHAT YOU WON'T READ IN CHESS LIFE

<Since we are all so phallically obssessed with the Shame of Chess and
his retro-posturings, our usual spotlights on the merry goings-on in
New Windsor have certainly faded. How I miss those discussions of
Marinello power-grabs, Hanke capitulations, and Chessdon obfuscations,
now lost in a miasma of Fischer-envy. But I bet they don't. Indeed,
they have to be lighting candles to the old bastard every night, so
grateful that our fanboy fixation on a has-been chess player has taken
the heat off the grotesqueries of USCF governance. Here's hoping THAT
changes, once Bobby fades into the dim haze of the Icelandic
landscape.> Masked Bishop

Fear not. This "flake" and "dirt farmer" as Randy Bauer
called me before he and eminento Jim Eade pledged not to respond to my
future posts, I still intend to report what you won't read in Chess
Life.

Meanwhile Sunday's New York Daily News has a large 4-page spread
on Bobby by a sports writer named Wayne Coffey who presents a fairly
accurate biographical composite of the Fischer legend that we all know,
but there were a few inaccuracies. For example, Bill Lombardy was
referred to as a priest (instead of a former priest) and Frank Brady
was termed a master. Robert Byrne in Sunday's NEW YORK TIMES column
disapproves of Kasparov's decision to retire from tournament chess.

sisternehoc@optician.com

2005-03-27, 5:51 pm

How I miss those discussions of Marinello power-grabs, Hanke
capitulations, and Chessdon obfuscations...

Are they really that bad?

Robert Byrne in Sunday's NEW YORK TIMES column
disapproves of Kasparov's decision to retire from tournament chess.

Why?

Meanwhile Sunday's New York Daily News has a large 4-page spread
on Bobby by a sports writer named Wayne Coffey who presents a fairly
accurate biographical composite of the Fischer legend that we all know

What did he say?

parrthenon@cs.com

2005-03-28, 3:53 am

Finding Bobby Fischer

The baffling moves of a chess genius

BY WAYNE COFFEY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Chess champion Bobby Fischer today (above) looks a long way removed...
..=2E. from the young man who set the chess world ablaze in the early
1970s (above) or the young boy (below) who mastered the game while
growing up in Brooklyn.

Members of the RJF Committee who worked to help Fischer get Icelandic
citizenship (from l.) Einar Einarsson, chess grandmaster Helgi
Olafsson, Dr. Magnus Skulason (standing), Gardar Sverrisson and
Gudmundur Thorarinsson.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Late Thursday night, beneath a soft rain that
came in off the Atlantic, Bobby Fischer of Brooklyn walked off a small
white jet, stepped onto the wet tarmac and officially arrived in his
new homeland. He had a thick white beard and a tangle of hair and baggy
blue jeans hanging on his 6-2 frame.

Thirty-three years earlier in this charming seaside city, the world's
northernmost capital, Bobby Fischer had become the first American world
champion of chess in more than a century. He defeated Boris Spassky of
the Soviet Union in an event that was covered as if it were a Super
Bowl, and he was almost universally hailed as the greatest chess player
ever.

Now Fischer was back for the first time, and seeing him there on the
tarmac, a few minutes after 11 p.m., the rush of history was as
palpable as the wind. You knew you weren't looking at the Babe Ruth and
Beethoven of the 64-square set anymore, or a Time, Newsweek and Sports
Illustrated cover boy, or even a U.S.citizen.

You were looking at an international fugitive; a venom-spewing
flashpoint of the war on terrorism and the right of free speech; a
person hours removed from an eight-month ordeal in a Japanese prison.
You were looking at a weary, 62-year-old man who had just traveled
5,500 miles to an island with mountains rising from the sea, 100%
literacy and more chess grandmasters per capita than any place on
Earth.

"Thank you for saving my life," Fischer said to his Icelandic friend,
Saemi Palsson. Fischer hugged Palsson, an amiable, white-haired man, a
former police chief and rock 'n roll dancer who was Fischer's
security guard for the match against Spassky. "He seemed very thankful,
and very much relieved," said Gardar Sverrisson, one of an ardent group
of Icelandic supporters who helped Fischer outmaneuver the U.S.
government by assisting him in getting Icelandic citizenship.

Robert James Fischer has an IQ reported to be 180, and it would be hard
even for him to imagine a person undergoing a more thorough
transformation. Once a Cold War icon, he is now a man who publicly
exults over the attacks on the World Trade Center. The son of a Jewish
mother, he now uses the term "dirty Jews" as though it were a statement
of fact.

Once the suit-clad knight of U.S. chess, he is no longer even a member
of the U.S. Chess Federation. They kicked him out. Not that he much
cares about anything with a "U.S." in front of it.

He had scarcely heard the door slam behind him as he left his Japanese
lockup Thursday when he said President Bush "should be hung."

Dr. Frank Brady, chairman of the communications department at St.
John's University, is the author of a 1964 Fischer biography, "Profile
of a Prodigy." He is a rated master and an international arbiter for
the World Chess Federation.

"He is the pride and the sorrow of American chess," Brady says.

Bobby Fischer's rise to fame began in Crown Heights, 560 Lincoln Place,
Apt. Q, with a plastic chess set his sister gave him when he was 6. It
reached its pinnacle in a hangar-shaped sports hall here called
Laugardalsholl, on the southwest edge of a land with vast treeless
stretches of lava fields, glaciers and enough geothermal pools to heat
one end of the country to the other. Now, Iceland is about the last
place where Fischer can find refuge. U.S. grandmaster Ilya Gurevich, a
trader on Wall Street, recently wrote an open letter to Fischer's
Icelandic supporters, assailing their efforts to help him.

"The guy needs help," Gurevich says. "That's what it boils down to. The
guy needs serious, serious help."

John Bosnitch, head of the Tokyo-based Free Bobby Fischer group,
believes the real villain is the U.S. government, which has had a
warrant for Fischer's arrest since 1992. Fischer has been a fugitive
ever since.

"He got a ticker tape parade in 1972, but now they'd like to put him
away for life," Bosnitch says. "When you severely criticize the U.S.
government, they will hunt you down like a wild dog."

As a chess player, Bobby Fischer was known for his boldness, and his
utter unpredictability. He is a hard man to read, and even harder to
know. He was The Chess King from the Borough of Kings, a man with a
mind unfathomably deep, and equally dark. Here's the journey of his
last eight months, and beyond.

Nabbed in Narita

It was 5:25 on a Tuesday afternoon at Tokyo/Narita Airport, and Bobby
Fischer was at the immigration desk. He was bound for Manila on Japan
Airlines Flight 745. His 90-day stay in Japan was up. He was used to
moving. For a dozen years, Fischer had been on the move, ever since the
U=2ES. government hit him with a felony charge ofviolating sanctions
against the former Yugoslavia by participating in a $5 million rematch
there against Boris Spassky. Fischer was warned beforehand, told he
faced up to 10 years in jail. "This is my response," he said, spitting
on the warning letter. According to Fischer's lawyer, Richard Vattuone,
Fischer is the only American citizen charged with violating those
sanctions, including government officials who shipped arms to the
Bosnians.

When an immigration official put his U.S. passport - Z7792702 -
under a special lamp, Fischer heard a beep. He was asked to take a
seat. A half-hour passed. It was getting close to flight time. Fischer
complained and was told to sit down. Soon security escorted him to a
private office. He would have a long wait.

The Boy King

Bobby Fischer learned to play chess by reading the rulebook. He learned
Russian so he could study the Soviets' voluminous chess literature. He
implored his mother, Regina, to let him go to Washington Square Park to
play speed games. He became the U.S. champion as a 14-year-old
sophomore at Erasmus Hall High School. By the time he became the
youngest grandmaster in history a year later, he was playing or
studying chess virtually every waking hour.

"You could mention a game to him and he would know it, whether it was
from 1898 or a few weeks earlier," says Brady, who vividly recalls a
tournament he played in Poughkeepsie in 1960.

Fischer walked by on his way to the men's room, barely even glancing at
Brady's table. Months later, Fischer visited Brady in his office,
reconstructed the entire game and told Brady how he should've played
it.

"It was an incredible feat of memory and mnemonic relevance that just
burst forth from him," Brady says.

Fischer did not have the same facility with social skills. He never
knew the man listed as his father on his birth certificate, a German
biophysicist named Gerhardt Fischer. He clashed often with his mother,
a smart and forceful woman who embarrassed him with the way she
pressured the chess establishment to recognize her son's genius. Once
she barged into a midtown meeting of the American Chess Foundation and
dropped a packet of news clippings about the failings of top chess
officials to promote young talent.

"Bobby was mortified," Brady says.

He was living alone in the Lincoln Place apartment by his late teens,
and visitors said he had three different beds, with a chess set next to
each one. His mother gave him a leather-encased set with his name and
likeness on the front; he'd sometimes pull it out and start playing,
even if he was having dinner with a friend in a restaurant. Gudmundur
Thorarinsson was the chief organizer of the 1972 match here with
Spassky, and a person instrumental in getting Fischer Icelandic
citizenship.

"He has devoted his whole life to the goddess of chess," Thorarinsson
says. "Because of that, he didn't develop in other fields. Perhaps the
most difficult thing in life is how to accommodate other people,
learning to live with others and respect their views without constant
collisions. He didn't learn to compromise, because that wasn't his
field."

One of Fischer's favorite exercises was to walk, and he would do it
very briskly, as if daring people to keep up. Few could. "He's been a
loner all these years since Reykjavik," says Bill Lombardy, the New
York priest and grandmaster who served as Fischer's adviser in 1972.

Passport to nowhere

Immigration authorities at Narita told Fischer his passport had been
revoked and that he was under arrest. Fischer said he'd gotten the
passport in Bern, Switzerland, in 1997 and it was valid until 2007.
That was before the U.S. State Department had been contacted on Nov.
18, 2003, by the Justice Department and Department of Homeland
Security, requesting assistance in "the revocation of the passport
privileges" of Fischer "in order to secure his deportation."

Fischer was shown a letter dated Dec. 11, 2003, informing him of the
revocation. He says he was never notified, as U.S. law requires. He had
been allowed to enter Japan with the supposedly invalid passport in
April 2004, three months earlier. Vattuone calls it a blatant "ambush."
Fischer was not on the administration's favorite-citizens list. He'd
often go on the radio to rant about Jews and the criminal acts of the
U=2ES. His most infamous commentary came on a Filipino station called
Bombo Radyo. The date was Sept. 11, 2001, a few hours after the
attacks.

"This is all wonderful news," Fischer said. "It's about time the
bleeping U.S. got their heads kicked in. Look, nobody gets that the
U=2ES. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians for years.
Bleep the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out."

The Big Red Chess Machine

Before Bobby Fischer, the Soviets weren't merely the dominant
chess-playing people on Earth. They were czars of the sport, producing
every world champion between 1948 and 1971.

"Chess provides indisputable proof of the superiority of socialist
culture over the declining culture of capitalist societies," wrote the
authors of a book called The Soviet School of Chess.

Winning the U.S. championship the same year that Sputnik went up,
Fischer had no problem carrying the pawn for capitalism. The Soviets
were so threatened by him that dozens of Soviet grandmasters were
required to give reports on Fischer's chess, and his personality, in
hopes of finding a weakness Spassky could exploit.

"All the Soviet grandmasters were here, the best players in the world,
and when they looked at Fischer they had stars in their eyes, because
they sensed what he was," Thorarinsson says. "It was quite amazing."

Cell Change

In August, Fischer was moved to a detention center amid the rice
paddies of the city of Ushiki. The U.S. sent two letters to Japanese
authorities to turn Fischer over for deportation. Fischer renounced his
citizenship and announced his intention to marry his girlfriend,
Japanese chess champion Miyoko Watai. He filed motions through the
courts to stop the deportation. The Japanese justice ministry turned
down his request to be protected as "a political refugee," and ordered
him to be deported. It seemed only a matter of time. Fischer appealed.
The order was stayed.

Missing in Action

Relentlessness was nothing new to Fischer; he had displayed it over a
chessboard many times. "Some pro players take games off. He would never
take a game off," says Asa Hoffman, 62, of New York, an international
chess master who used to compete against Fischer. "He had incredible
fighting spirit."

He was also incredibly obstinate. Fischer defaulted his world title
when he refused to play Anatoly Karpov in 1975. He made 179 demands on
chess's international governing body before he would agree to play,
covering everything from the size of the squares to the lighting to the
proximity of the fans (he wanted them far away), according to David
Edmonds and John Eidinow, authors of "Bobby Fischer Goes To War". Only
177 were accepted. Fischer wasn't swayed even by a potential $5 million
payday.

After his epic victory over Spassky in 1972, Fischer didn't play in
public again for 20 years. Some believed he was terrified of losing,
but others insisted that Fischer's self-confidence was unshakable.
Brady, for his part, thinks it was hubris, plain and simple. From an
early age, Fischer had masters seeking him out, deferring to him,
wanting to be part of his inner circle. As with countless superstars
before him, says Brady, it created a bloated sense of self-importance.
"There was an incredibly super-attenuated sense of himself, a feeling
of almost being God-like, and heaven forbid if you didn't do what he
wanted."

The combination of Fischer's irresistible genius and chronic crankiness
made him great theater - and the greatest draw the sport ever had.
Before he played Spassky, there were some 10,000 members of the U.S.
Chess Federation. Today there are almost 100,000. When Garry Kasparov
retired earlier this month, he did so as a multi-millionaire. He has
Fischer to thank.

Enter Iceland

Iceland has a population of 293,000, and lists people in the phone book
by their first names. It's a place with deep Viking roots and strong
sense of history, and Bobby Fischer was a big part of it. "Bobby Fisher
is a hero in Iceland," Gudmundur Thorarinsson says. "He became the
world champion of chess here, and people have not forgotten that."

With Fischer still managing to stave off deportation, Thorarinsson and
a small group of fellow Icelanders who had been following his plight
resolved to help him. Iceland is a longtime ally of the U.S., but some
80% of the nation is against the Iraq war. His supporters were appalled
at what they felt was a gross violation of Fischer's rights. Fischer's
crime, after all, was playing chess, says Gardar Sverrisson. For this
he could not attend the funerals of his mother and sister - both of
whom died while he was out of the country?

"This is a man who never harmed anyone, and all of a sudden he's being
treated as if he were Osama bin Laden? It's absurd." The Icelanders
worked on their government and succeeded in getting Fischer residency,
and then an Icelandic passport.

Fear and Loathing

In 1962, in the prestigious Candidates tournament in Curacao, Fischer
placed fourth between a trio of Soviets, and outlined the reason why in
Sports Illustrated: the Soviets were cheaters. They colluded against
him, playing non-taxing draws against each other, saving their mental
energy for Fischer. "Russian control of chess has reached a point where
there can be no honest competition for the world championship," Fischer
said.

While experts agreed there was some merit to Fischer's charge, it was
nonetheless evidence that the king of American chess was also the king
of the conspiracy theory. Not that Fischer wasn't entitled to his
wariness; his mother was under FBI surveillance for a quarter of a
century starting in 1942. Her offense was apparently moving to Moscow
in 1933. An FBI dossier on Regina Fischer, some 900 pages in length,
was declassified in 2001, according to Bureau officials.

Bobby Fischer settled in the Pasadena area in the late '70s and '80s,
living a reclusive life in a series of rundown apartments. Real or
imagined, Fischer had his bogeymen. He reportedly had the fillings
removed from his mouth, to prevent the Soviets from beaming in
malignant waves. In 1982 he published a pamphlet called, "I was
Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse," after being picked up on an
erroneous suspicion that he'd robbed a bank. When his personal
memorabilia was removed from a Bekins storage bin some six years ago
(Bekins said it was for nonpayment of the monthly fee), he ranted about
"the dirty Jews" who were out to get him, and called it "one of the
biggest if not the biggest robbery in the history of the United
States."

quote:

>From prison last year, he sent a pleading letter to the Seiko Corp.,

with whom he has been working on a chess-clock project: "They (U.S.
government) are threatening to deport me to my death any day," he
wrote.

A friend and supporter of Fischer believes his time in Japanese
detention has exacerbated Fischer's anger, and his paranoia.

"There is a lot of hate in him," the friend says. "But there is also a
lot of kindness. I don't know what goes on in his head. The anger comes
up like that." The friend is worried about Fischer's mental health. He
asked not to be quoted by name. Fischer has a history of cutting off
friends who talk about him to the press.

Yule logjam

The U.S. Embassy asked Iceland to not extend any special courtesies to
Fischer, but Iceland declined. One year ended and a new one began.
Bosnitch, head of the Tokyo-based Free Bobby Fischer, churned out press
releases and lobbied the Japanese government to let Fischer go to
Iceland. Japanese officials said privately that if Fischer were to get
Icelandic citizenship, they would let him go. Saemi Palsson, Fischer's
old friend, traveled to Japan to see Fischer. They had not seen each
other since 1972.

"You look good, Saemi," Polsson told him.

"You have a big beard," Saemi replied. They were separated by a
plexiglas partition. Fischer had to go through 16 sets of locked doors
to see his visitor. He was let outside only 45 minutes per day. He was
growing increasingly agitated. He wound up in solitary confinement for
ripping the shirt of a guard who wouldn't give him a hard-boiled egg.
Later, he was talking to Palsson on the phone when he was ordered to
get off. "I am talking to my friend, you goddamn kidnappers!" Fischer
shouted. A scuffle ensued and Fischer stepped on the guard's glasses.

Even yesterday, at his first press conference in Iceland, Fischer was
in full vitriol, telling ESPN's Jeremy Schaap that his father, the late
Dick Schaap, was "a typical Jewish snake."

The cantankerous Fischer and the kindly Palsson seem an odd match, but
the bond goes deep. Fischer prizes Palsson's loyalty, and Palsson sees
a goodness in Fischer that is cloaked by his hard-edged rhetoric.

Palsson believes Fischer's greatest problem is his almost ferocious
candor.

"He's the most honest person I've ever met," Palsson said. "He tells
what he thinks without thinking. I always tell him, 'Better to eat
too much than talk too much.'" Palsson winces when he hears or reads
some of Fischer's ramblings about the "Jew-controlled U.S. government."

"I try to get him not to talk like that," Palsson says. "He should of
course have not said anything about (9/11) or talk about the Jews. I
know plenty of people who would not forgive that. It's terrible. He has
always been very sharp with his words. It's one of the reasons why he
is where he is. I am trying to get him to change."

The RJF Committee, as Fischer's Icelandic supporters call themselves,
kept working behind the scenes to convince the parliament to grant
Fischer citizenship. Last Monday afternoon, it did, by a 40-0 vote. The
U=2ES. appealed to the Japanese government not to let Fischer go, and
there were reports that a federal grand jury would bring fresh charges
- for tax-evasion and money-laundering - against Fischer. "Mr.
Fischer is a fugitive from justice. There is a federal warrant for his
arrest," said State Dept. spokesman Adam Ereli. But it was too late.
Eights months of wrangling - moves and countermoves as complex as any
game of chess Fischer ever played - were over." Little Iceland
stepped on the toes of the superpowers, the U.S.and Japan," said Einar
Einarsson, a top chess official in Iceland, After 253 days, Bobby
Fischer walked out of the detention center. Saemi Palsson got on a
flight and met Fischer and his fianc=E9e in Copenhagen. They hugged and
sang songs. Fischer had already told reporters on the plane that he had
no plans to lighten up on his rhetoric. "I grew up with the concept of
freedom of speech. It's too late for me to adjust to the new world
order."

Return to Reykjavik

Fischer and his fianc=E9e, Miyoko Watai arrived in Iceland late Thursday
night, in a small jet provided by an Icelandic TV station. The plane
landed at the Reykjavik Airport, because Fischer did not want to step
foot on the grounds of Iceland's biggest airport in Keflavik, where the
U=2ES. has a military base. There was a crowd of maybe 250 people waiting
with "Welcome home" signs, chanting his name.

In the rain, Fischer and Watai were escorted into a silver Range Rover,
and taken to the Hotel Loftledir, to the same suite he stayed in when
he played Boris Spassky. Later, his supporters gave him each a bouquet
of flowers, and Fischer was handed his official citizenship document.
While a U.S. federal grand jury continues to look into tax evasion and
money laundering charges against Fischer, a federal law enforcement
source said Friday "unless Fischer makes a nuisance of himself over
there" in Iceland, the chances of the U.S. coming after him were
slight.

Amid the lava fields and geothermal springs and radiant ribbons of
light in the northern sky, the greatest chess player who ever lived is
back among the free. On his first day out of detention, he went for an
hour walk by the sea. He got a haircut and a beard trim from Saemi
Palsson's daughter.

"He looks pretty good now," Palsson says, laughing.

Fischer is in a place where the water is pure, the air pristine, and
where he is still revered as the king of chess, even though he never
plays the traditional game any longer, only Fischer Random Chess, in
which the back row pieces are shuffled before every game, into 960
possible combinations.

Bobby Fischer has never had a job other than playing chess, and spent
most of his life wanting to conform to his own rules. For the first
time in nearly nine months, he can do as he pleases.

"We are hoping this will be another chapter in his life, that he will
start a new and different life and lifestyle in Iceland," Einar
Einarsson says. "We are hoping it is a quieter chapter, living with
Miyoko, but with Bobby Fischer that remains to be seen - as always."

Originally published on March 27, 2005

parrthenon@cs.com

2005-03-28, 3:53 am

"Except from his own demons, fugitive former world champion Bobby
Fischer is free at last." GM Larry Evans

See FISCHER IS FREE in Evans On Chess

worldchessnetwork.com on 3/28/05.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/gamezon...e&SessionToken=

parrthenon@cs.com

2005-03-30, 7:01 am

parrthenon@cs.com

2005-03-30, 7:21 pm

sisternehoc@optician.com

2005-03-30, 7:21 pm

parrthenon@cs.com

2005-03-30, 7:21 pm

quote:

>From prison last year, he sent a pleading letter to the Seiko Corp.,