Bobby Fischer

I've been reading accounts, from diverse places, of Bobby Fischer's death today.

He was at the top in his field, almost as elusive as Howard Hughes in his personal life, and I dare say the only American chess player whose name was known to most (or any) Americans.

He captured our imagination and attention by beating the unbeatable Russian player at a time when chess' cold calculating environment would be a perfectly fine metaphor for the cold war that locked together our two countries. And he made money, eventually big money, doing it. There was even a movie, Searching For Bobby Fischer, that counted on his name being enough of a curiosity, enough of a draw, to bring in the public.

But along the way we discovered that Fischer was anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier, though a Jew on his mother's side, and probably, it turns out, on his long gone father's as well. Then we read and heard his anti-American rants after 9/11 in which he said we deserved what we got. The man who was King thought of himself as a pawn.

So, today when after he died in Iceland (another perfect metaphor --- for his soul) I read with fascination and then disgust the obits posted by some of the main media outlets.

Without fail they characterized him a "brilliant," "gifted," player. Most I saw also called him "eccentric," (CNN and Washington Post and Reuters and BBC), or "reclusive," (AP), or "iconoclastic" (NY Times). But while The Times had a few details recalling his virulent anti-Semitism as well as his anti-American outbursts, many barely mentioned that at all, or only in passing. And in the AP story, syndicated around the world, there was nothing at all.

An update: There is a follow-up article in the NY Times today (Saturday) about Fischer. I found it a mushy, oddly sympathetic piece, filled with soft, slightly dismissive references marking what the writer calls Fischer's chess playing "gifts" and labeling his remarks about 9/11 and that Jews were "filthy lying bastard people," only as "delusions." How generous. How kindly. How charitable and non-judgmental.

Oh, and the President of The World Chess Federation recalled Fischer as, "an intellectual giant I would rank next to Newton and Einstein."

Somewhere Hitler is smiling, and every past, practicing, and potential hate deviant is relieved.