Chess legend Bobby Fisher dies in Iceland

Former chess champion Bobby Fischer has died at 64

LA Times 9:45 AM PST, January 18, 2008

REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.

Fisher died of kidney failure Thursday in a Reykjavik hospital after a long illness, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said today.

Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer faced criminal charges in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph.

As a champion, he used his eccentricities to unsettle opponents, but Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess was soon eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.

"Chess is war on a board," he once said. "The object is to crush the other man's mind."

Fischer vanished after the 1992 match and occasionally re-emerged to give interviews on a radio station in the Philippines. During one interview, Fischer praised the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, saying America should be "wiped out," and described Jews as "thieving, lying bastards."

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion from Russia, said Fischer's ascent in the chess world in the 1960s and his promotion of chess worldwide was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game.

"The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess," Kasparov told The Associated Press.



Bobby Fisher was a rebel and like Johnny Yuma he roamed through the West. He became a political embarressment to Poppa Bush, because he didn't take orders from the NWO.
His role in making the US look good by deafeating the Russians at chess made him a political target for playing a chess game in Yugoslavia, a country that the U$ didn't approve of. His bank in Switzerland at the same time told him that they would release all of his money which would mean that the U$ could sieze it, while in Los Angeles all of his stuff in storage was siezed. He was outspoken on the US government, but he certainly had just cause for disliking the Bu$hes...G: