Top: Bobby Fischer being arrested in Japan in 2004
Middle: Bobby Fischer on the cover of Life magazine
Bottom: Bobby Fischer teaches chess
By: Ali Ismail
0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk
THE TRAGEDY OF BOBBY FISCHER
The story of the best chess master is a warning to South Asians
One of the accusations against the people of South Asia is that, by and large, they rely on other people’s technologies and cultures in order to do whatever they want done. That may be so in recent times but there is little doubt that the game of chess came, at its inception, from ourselves and our part of the world.
The board game chaturanga (A Sanskrit word meaning literally “four hands”) was played in Ancient India where it was considered a training for generals in the services of nabobs, maharajahs and the Emperor himself in peacetime.
It travelled from India to Persia where it changed somewhat in order to become less static and thence to Europe where it changed yet again to be even more dynamic and fast moving, so much so that an early name for the modern game was “mad chess.”
At any rate, this particular pastime, originally from some of our ancestors, is now a symbol of European male potency alongside military and economic domination. In China Western chess is called “Russian chess.”
I would like to emphasise that by all accounts chess is a male dominated game like boxing and wrestling. At this time, bar two Hungarian sisters, all the superb international players are men.
This was apparent to me when in pre-Internet days I went to the King’s Head pub in Moscow Road, London to watch chess played by the chess club based in that particular drinking hole. I never saw a female player.
Subsequently, when the Internet came along and our home went on-line, I played in Internet chess rooms and noticed that even in the beginners’ arenas the ratio of men to women was in the order of about 25:1. In the senior rooms there were almost no females at all.
Taking all that into account, therefore, we find that the true greats of the chessboard - the Gary Kasparovs, the Boris Spasskys and the Michael Tals – are almost folk heroes and role models for other men.
Furthermore, photographs indicate that these masters tend to be macho, thuggish even, and could probably have had alternative careers in the armed forces or in the fighting arts such as karate and Chinese boxing.
The arguably greatest player of all, however, seems to be an exception to the rule and he is the subject of my meditation this week. He is Bobby Fischer.
It was Fischer who brought the game of chess into the big league with purses placing the earnings of the top players near the level of professional footballers and who publicised the game with his stormy sessions with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik and invented the modern chess clock by which each player has a fixed starting duration to which a small increment is added each time he makes a move.
It was also Fischer who brought the game into near disrepute by breaking American law by playing “illegally” in Yugoslavia, getting deported from Japan and making amazing public pronouncements about Israel and the Jews. Additionally, he became a bit of a religious nut with involvement in a controversial Christian cult from which he became disenchanted when certain “prophecies” failed to materialise.
My argument is that extremely high intelligence of the kind possessed by Bobby Fischer requires commensurately high character traits and stability without which all the talent is useless, or worse.
Although Fischer is a Westerner and not at all connected with South Asia I submit that he is symptomatic of a great deal of what is wrong with our homelands.
Talent we have aplenty; we have software engineers, lawyers, scientists, accountants and mathematicians at world levels.
Yet, somehow the aggregate result is wretched. The nations rely on foreign aid and the statesmen take their orders from abroad. The lifestyles of the poor are almost beyond words and bullies and thugs, sometimes backed by foreign interests, rule the roosts. What is going wrong?
My submission is that the life story of Bobby Fischer is a tragedy from which we can all learn. A careful analysis of why, with all his tremendous brainpower and application, he is a failure tells us to a certain extent why our homeland societies are such as they are.
Wikipedia, the Internet free encyclopaedia states: “Robert James Fischer was born in Chicagi, Illinois, to Regina Wender, a naturalized American citizen of Jewish Polish ancestry who was born in Switzerland, raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and later became a teacher, registered nurse and physician. His father was listed on the birth certificate as Wender's first husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist ; the couple married in 1933 in Moscow where Regina Wender was studying medicine at the First Moscow Medical Institute.
THE TRAGEDY OF BOBBY FISCHER
The story of the best chess master is a warning to South Asians
One of the accusations against the people of South Asia is that, by and large, they rely on other people’s technologies and cultures in order to do whatever they want done. That may be so in recent times but there is little doubt that the game of chess came, at its inception, from ourselves and our part of the world.
The board game chaturanga (A Sanskrit word meaning literally “four hands”) was played in Ancient India where it was considered a training for generals in the services of nabobs, maharajahs and the Emperor himself in peacetime.
It travelled from India to Persia where it changed somewhat in order to become less static and thence to Europe where it changed yet again to be even more dynamic and fast moving, so much so that an early name for the modern game was “mad chess.”
At any rate, this particular pastime, originally from some of our ancestors, is now a symbol of European male potency alongside military and economic domination. In China Western chess is called “Russian chess.”
I would like to emphasise that by all accounts chess is a male dominated game like boxing and wrestling. At this time, bar two Hungarian sisters, all the superb international players are men.
This was apparent to me when in pre-Internet days I went to the King’s Head pub in Moscow Road, London to watch chess played by the chess club based in that particular drinking hole. I never saw a female player.
Subsequently, when the Internet came along and our home went on-line, I played in Internet chess rooms and noticed that even in the beginners’ arenas the ratio of men to women was in the order of about 25:1. In the senior rooms there were almost no females at all.
Taking all that into account, therefore, we find that the true greats of the chessboard - the Gary Kasparovs, the Boris Spasskys and the Michael Tals – are almost folk heroes and role models for other men.
Furthermore, photographs indicate that these masters tend to be macho, thuggish even, and could probably have had alternative careers in the armed forces or in the fighting arts such as karate and Chinese boxing.
The arguably greatest player of all, however, seems to be an exception to the rule and he is the subject of my meditation this week. He is Bobby Fischer.
It was Fischer who brought the game of chess into the big league with purses placing the earnings of the top players near the level of professional footballers and who publicised the game with his stormy sessions with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik and invented the modern chess clock by which each player has a fixed starting duration to which a small increment is added each time he makes a move.
It was also Fischer who brought the game into near disrepute by breaking American law by playing “illegally” in Yugoslavia, getting deported from Japan and making amazing public pronouncements about Israel and the Jews. Additionally, he became a bit of a religious nut with involvement in a controversial Christian cult from which he became disenchanted when certain “prophecies” failed to materialise.
My argument is that extremely high intelligence of the kind possessed by Bobby Fischer requires commensurately high character traits and stability without which all the talent is useless, or worse.
Although Fischer is a Westerner and not at all connected with South Asia I submit that he is symptomatic of a great deal of what is wrong with our homelands.
Talent we have aplenty; we have software engineers, lawyers, scientists, accountants and mathematicians at world levels.
Yet, somehow the aggregate result is wretched. The nations rely on foreign aid and the statesmen take their orders from abroad. The lifestyles of the poor are almost beyond words and bullies and thugs, sometimes backed by foreign interests, rule the roosts. What is going wrong?
My submission is that the life story of Bobby Fischer is a tragedy from which we can all learn. A careful analysis of why, with all his tremendous brainpower and application, he is a failure tells us to a certain extent why our homeland societies are such as they are.
Wikipedia, the Internet free encyclopaedia states: “Robert James Fischer was born in Chicagi, Illinois, to Regina Wender, a naturalized American citizen of Jewish Polish ancestry who was born in Switzerland, raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and later became a teacher, registered nurse and physician. His father was listed on the birth certificate as Wender's first husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist ; the couple married in 1933 in Moscow where Regina Wender was studying medicine at the First Moscow Medical Institute.
Though Hans-Gerhardt Fischer is listed as the father on Robert Fischer's birth certificate, a 2002 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer stated that Fischer's biological father was Paul Felix Nemenyi, a Hungarian Jewish physicist who fled Europe after the Nazis came to power and worked on the Manhattan Project on the development of the atom bomb.
Paul Nemenyi paid child support for Fischer during his infancy and early childhood. Later, FBI research determined that although Fischer's mother had returned to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1939, her first husband never entered the country after that date, making it improbable that Fischer, born in 1943, was Hans-Gerhardt Fischer's child.
Although at least one of his parents was Jewish, Bobby Fischer has vehemently denied being a Jew in several public interviews, and blames the mischaracterization on a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ to defame him.
The Fischers divorced in 1945 when their son was two years old, and Fischer grew up with his mother and older sister, Joan. In 1948, the family moved to Mobile, Arizona where Regina taught in an elementary school. The following year they moved to Brooklyn, New York, where his mother worked as an elementary school teacher and nurse.
In May1949, six-year-old Fischer learned how to play chess from instructions found in a chess set that his sister had bought at a candy store below their Brooklyn apartment. He saw his first chess book a month later. For over a year he played chess on his own. At age seven, he joined the Brooklyn Chess Club and was taught by the club's president Carmine Nigro. When Fischer was 13, his mother asked John W Collins to be his chess teacher. Collins had taught several top players, including Robert Byrne and William Lombardy. Fischer spent much time at Collins' house, and some have described Collins as a father figure for Fischer. Fischer attended but dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School, together with Barbra Streisland, where many teachers remembered him as ‘difficult.’ According to school records, he had an IQ of 180 and an incredibly retentive memory.”
My analysis is that the above account of his early years explains, in large measure, why he is so unstable and controversial. The doubtful paternity, the marriage breakup, he shifting locations of the family home and the casual entry into the world of chess are all preparations for later instabilities just as ripples on one side of a pond eventually translate into small waves crashing on the shore of the other side.
Back in South Asia instability is a way of life. The youngsters live in a part of the world where the ruling politicians change with almost every election and they are subject to third party interference and intimidation. Social chaos is endemic and the personalities who insist on being viewed by their compatriots as authority figures turn out to have feet of clay who do not bear close examination. In fact, they usually forbid people knowing too much about them while they make everybody else’s business their own.
Furthermore, please note that it seems that Bobby Fischer belongs to one particular ethnic group and denies vehemently that he has anything to do with it. There are strong echoes with us. I once encountered a clearly Asian woman with dark brown skin and jet black hair insisting that she was of pure European stock. She could not acknowledge that she was what she was because she was in denial.
Furthermore, his remarks on a radio interview about the 9/11 attack so soon afer it happened that the actual targets had not yet been confirmed are highly revealing:
“This is all wonderful. I applaud this act….Arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of their leaders, apologize to the Arabs. I am hoping for a totally new world.”
As a result the United States Chess Federation (USCF) expelled him for bringing disrepute on the game.
The following resolution was passed 7-0: "The U.S. Chess Federation disassociates itself from the remarks made by Robert J. Fischer about the terrorist actions. The U.S.C.F. Executive Board expresses the deepest sympathy for the victims of the tragedies and the strongest condemnation of the actions of the terrorists. Mr. Fischer will be informed that his membership may be revoked."
Like so many of us, he has an unstable personal position and, instead of addressing the internal problems, attacks a perceived external enemy as exemplified by the antics of al Qaeda against the USA.
Although Bobby Fischer is not of our own ethnic group his life story is surely a warning to us all.
THE END
This article was published in the 6 July 2006 issue of the Bangla Mirror newspaper, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read all over the world from the Arctic to the Antarctic.
posted by Ali at 6:19 AM
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