So Long, Bobby Fischer, Thanks for the Opening Line...

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I am speechless!

In 1960 my hero was a sixteen-year old chess player named Bobby Fischer, not a sports figure of high regard in the coffee shops and bar rooms of Plainview, Ohio.

Thus begins my novel The Old Mermaid's Tale. I mention this because Bobby Fischer died yesterday at the age of 64. He was in Iceland having left the United States in 2005, disillusioned by what he referred to as the "allies of evil" (in response to Bush's "axis of evil" remark) claiming that the United States was among the countries that supported evil regimes. He was an outspoken and often virulent critic of politics but we won't hold that against him. Actually, there is very little we will hold against him. He was a genius and we cut slack for genius.

When I was a kid and Fischer was not much older he became the Untied States Chess Champion and the following year the Grand Master. A few years later he took on Boris Spassky in a chess match that had me fascinated. Fischer was the most interesting person I had ever heard of. While my friends were dazzled by those cute musicians from Liverpool, I was dazzled by a bad-tempered, peculiar, geeky-looking American kid who would, in a few years, and at the height of the Cold War, beat a Russian chess master --- a RUSSIAN! Back then the Russians were the bad guys and the fact that an American, little more than a kid, could beat their chess master at a game that had long been owned by the Russians was wonderful in my mind.

Fischer went to Yugoslavia 20 years later to play him again which got him in a ton of trouble. By 1992 the United States had sanctions against Yugoslavia's President Milosovic but Fischer didn't care about political sanctions, he cared about chess. He beat Spassky 10 to 5 and walked away with over 3 million dollars. Fischer had gained a reputation as being outspoken about a lot of things including alleged anti-Semitic remarks despite the fact that his mother was Jewish.

Well, Fischer died yesterday in Iceland and I don't quite know how I feel about that --- the world has lost a brilliant man but also a troubled one. I have a feeling that, like many brilliant people, Fischer wasn't very happy. Except when he was playing chess, perhaps. But he was a hero of mine and I will mourn his passing for that reason. When I started writing The Old Mermaid's Tale I opened with the line about him because, though Clair and I are very different, she would have loved him as much as I did back then. Like me, she has a penchant for brilliant but somewhat self-destructive misanthropes --- as anyone who has read the book can tell you.

I'm not brilliant enough to know what goes on in the minds of geniuses but I have a feeling they are not friendly places to be much of the time. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy comments that all happy families are pretty much alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way (or words to that effect). I've always loved that analogy because it seems comparable to many situations and I suspect that all contented people are more or less contented in the same way but the discontented are discontented in their own unique fashion. Maybe this is because there is so much more in the world to be discontented about. And maybe it is because if you are the sort of person who is able to keep your focus on your own world and not probe too deeply you stand a better chance at being content than if you have the kind of mind that probes and questions and wants to know why?

Good-bye, Bobby Fischer, and thanks for being the colorful and fascinating person you were. I suspect your life was a daily challenge but you gave me inspiration and a conviction that has served me well throughout life --- that it's okay to be opinionated and peculiar. If you run into Jose Capablanca wherever you end up I hope you beat the pants off of him.

Thanks for reading.