Bobby Fischer Dies at 64
REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Bobby Fischer, the reclusive
American chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet
Union's Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died. He was 64.
Fischer died Thursday in a Reykjavik hospital, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson,
said. There was no immediate word on the cause of death.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, Fischer was a U.S. chess champion at 14
and a grand master at 15. He beat Spassky in a series of games in Reykjavik to
claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
But his reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed by his idiosyncrasies.
A few years after the Spassky match, he forfeited the title to another Soviet,
Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it.
He dropped out of competitive chess and largely out of view, emerging
occasionally to make erratic and often anti-Semitic comments.
Fischer, whose mother was Jewish, once accused "the Jew-controlled U.S.
government" of ruining his life.
He fell into obscurity before resurfacing to win a 1992 exhibition rematch
against Spassky on the Yugoslav resort island of Sveti Stefan in violation of
sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic.
A fierce critic of his homeland, Fischer became wanted in the United States for
violating the sanctions.
He renounced his American citizenship and moved to Iceland in 2005.
Fischer told reporters that year that he was finished with a chess world he
regarded as corrupt, and sparred with U.S. journalists who asked about his
anti-American tirades.
"The United States is evil. There's this axis of evil. What about the allies of
evil — the United States, England, Japan, Australia? These are the evildoers,"
Fischer said
Bobby Fischer