The Line Between Paranoia and Self Awareness Can Be Somewhat Blurred: Gambling Lessons, Strange Reflections and the Lost Soul of Bobby Fischer
We live in strange and interesting times. Perhaps the Chinese have cursed us or perhaps we have bought these scenes of madness upon ourselves. But these times are a little less strange and a little less interesting now Bobby Fischer is dead.
It is rare that the death of any man is viewed in such contradicting absolutes, a resounding good for reason and a hopeless tragedy for the world. There have been few such contrasting entities in history. He played on par, in mental strength, with giants of intellectualism such as Einstein and Newton yet was so hopelessly simplistic in his acutely paranoid view of humanity that he alienated himself from a world that adored him, destroyed a legacy once thought untouchable and expedited his own death. In Heaven or in Hell, Bobby Fischer will walk with Richard Nixon along the long and winding path of mistrusting agony and personal embitterment for all eternity, driven by hate and vengeance and the unbendable victamisation complex that both held very dear in this world and will in the next.
To chart the life of Bobby Fischer is to chart the gradient of Everest. As amazingly steep as his ascent to greatness was the sharpness of his fall from grace. The son of a bohemian, Jewish single mother who immersed herself in leftist politics, Fischer was a child Chess prodigy, the youngest grandmaster ever. Fiercely intelligent, Fischer was bored by all bar chess and the game soon became his life. While he was reading chess journals written in Russian at the age of thirteen, he was coming home with D’s on his report card. He had become a phenomenon, a kid not only winning chess tournaments against the highest ranked players in the country but humiliating them with the ease and aggressiveness of his victories. Yet he struggled to engage socially and intellectually with nearly everybody. But these foibles aside, he became a tidal wave and was cast as the Great Hope for the western world in the Cold War proxy battleground of the chessboard. There was Vietnam, there was the space race, there was nuclear arms proliferation and there was chess. Indirect aggression was the primary rule of engagement in Cold War times.
The high watermark for the career and life of Bobby Fischer and for the game of chess came in 1972 when Fischer challenged Soviet Boris Spassky for the World Championship in a match-up that was set to take place in Reykjavik and was and is known as “the chess match of the century”. It was title filled with hyperbole but if anything, the label understates the import of the contest. Fischer had become increasingly petulant and erratic in his behaviour and words, no-showing tournaments after making outlandish demands and attacking everybody from the Jews for undermining the culture of chess to the Soviets for fixing games. But this, for a period, was forgiven, as it always is with those who have the flair and the tools to make it to the top. He almost did not show for what would be the defining moment of his life, paranoid that the Soviets would shoot his plane down and increasingly fearful of defeat. It required Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to step in and warn Fischer of the importance of his participation.
When Fischer did arrive, the diva persona he had become was on show for the world to see. Fischer missed the opening of the event, lost the first game in a whimper after making an amateur mistake and forfeited the second game when he demanded a change of venue. Coming back from 2-0 in a twenty-four game match against the World Champion equates to the Bulldogs overcoming a sixteen point deficit with eleven minutes remaining in a big time elimination final in terms of the adversity that was overcome. Fischer responded to his predicament with six-and-a-half wins in the next eight games and losing only once in the final nineteen, winning the World Championship in the process. Fischer’s victory was viewed as a victory for the United States and a vicious blow for the Soviets, whose machine had kept the world title in Russian hands since World War II. Bobby Fischer was a hero to a nation and the face of a sport, an eccentric genius who had done his nation proud.
From that point, however, Fischer crashed into free fall and there would be neither incline nor any level ground for the remainder of his life. His eccentricity became both increasingly distasteful and ever more destructive and no longer was he viewed as a hero but a fallen idol and lost soul and then a criminal and enemy of the state and the common man. He became as a crazy as a bull at castration time and as reviled as he was once lauded. To label him peculiar would be what we in the business of writing call a slight understatement.
Fischer not only withdrew from chess but withdrew from society and normality. He did not play tournament chess for nearly three years and in 1975 he forfeited the world championship when he refused to play against Anatoly Karpov, despite the fact Fischer considered him a hopelessly inferior player. Fischer seemingly craved anonymity more than greatness and after the forfeiture he was unheard of, in any chess sense, for many years. He descended into the life of a mad vagabond, scratching at the world like a scorned mentally-ill lover. He lived in an imagined state of personal dystopia, a prisoner of his own prejudices and narrow world view. At times he was not at all dissimilar to the bearded and disheveled bum on the corner, screeching of the apocalypse and The Word of God and the day of reckoning to anyone who will listen and plenty who won’t.
Soon after his forfeiture to Karpov, Fischer became involved with a cult known as the Worldwide Church of God but after falling out with them he claimed the church was controlled by a “satanical secret world government.” He then fell in with various white supremacist organisations, a type of people who embraced his distorted world analysis and his all-consuming suspicion of people. Despite the fact his mother and most probably his father were Jewish, Fischer was a fierce anti-Semite and by derivation, became fiercely anti-American and anti-Israeli. He blamed most of his problems on a fantastical Zionistic conspiracy; the “death” of chess, his problems with money, the “theft” of his belongings from a storage unit, the persecution of the Palestinians. He, by all reports, felt a deep affinity with Adolph Hitler. In his latter years, Fischer often launched vicious tirades against the Jews on foreign radio broadcasts, denying the Holocaust and blaming the race for the proliferation of fast food, among other things.
In 1992 Fischer returned from obscurity in what many hoped would be his salvation. He was set to play Spassky for a purse believed to be in the vicinity of $5 million. Those with dreams of redemption, however, were quickly awakened. He returned not for the love of chess but for the big pay cheque and the love of an eighteen year-old Hungarian girl who had developed a relationship with Fischer. The match was set to take place in Yugoslavia, where the United States prohibited any American business taking place, another obstacle on the path to personal emancipation. Fischer was informed of this and then proceeded to spit, at a press conference, on the order. Fischer won the match but was now viewed as a criminal. Treason is not a light charge to have applied and anyone who thinks so will soon regret their actions when the hammer comes down.
After turning his back on America, Fischer roamed the earth, a lonesome traveler, though not in any romantic Kerouac notion of discovering one’s self through discovering the world. He spent time in Hungary until his love interest left him, Fischer later denouncing her as a Jewish spy. There were years in the Philippines, where he fathered a child and continued his attacks on the United States. His wild, oft nonsensical screeds, included his expressions of delight at the September 11 attacks. Fischer also lived in Japan and married a Japanese woman, despite the fact he loathed the country. He was held captive in Japan while trying to leave on an American passport and was only released when granted full citizenship by Iceland, after renouncing his American citizenship, as a gesture of thanks for his participation in the epic 1972 battle. Fischer died in Reykjavik, ironically at the age of sixty-four, after refusing medical attention for kidney problems, refusing to trust doctors and modern medicine.
Fischer’s outlook on life was essentially driven by ego, a domineering inferiority complex and in most likelihood some form of schizophrenia. Paranoia ruled his world and his perception of the world and its inhabitants was essentially, at the core, fundamentally utilitarian. People act out of self-interest and nothing more. We are all whores, be it for love or money or fame or power. It is a cynical perspective and one sure to lead to intense loneliness but it was the way Bobby Fischer saw the world.
One man’s paranoia, though, is just another man’s self awareness. And awareness is a sound characteristic to have in these strange times. Bobby Fischer certainly never saw him self as paranoid. He saw himself as a vestibule of alertness, a man who could see the real world and all its truths. He, of course, was somewhat mad and took paranoia to levels often only visited by drug freaks, international spies and psychiatrists with an unlimited access to mind altering prescription medication.
In the high wire world of gambling, where each wager holds risk and information is king, a cynical outlook is not something to be dismissed. When word is shot down the line that a game of Turkish soccer, a league you are not on particularly familiar terms with, is fixed then it would be wise to offer further investigation before wagering heavily.
Gambling excessively above your standard wager is not overly prudent. That is a lesson I learnt the hard way and bookmakers will be calling me angrily until at least April and possibly May. Mouth-covered racetrack murmurs about a hot horse or a boat race are also best ignored or at the very least examined further. The same applies for the regular winter game of Chinese whispers when rumours circulate like electricity about injuries and team changes. Information is the most powerful tool of the gambler but misinformation can mean destitution and a life on the streets hustling for coins.
And the only protection from misinformation is the defense of cynicism. A degree of distrust can be rather helpful when you make a habit out of wagering heavily and winning.
But the line between constructive distrust and crippling paranoia is a fine one and it is important to err away from the side Bobby Fischer chose to walk.
For the tale of Bobby Fisher is a tome of self-destruction and vanquished potential, of a lost soul and a captured mind. And the glory of the landscape from the peak never compensated for the loneliness and destitution of the cactus-laden valleys.