From: "jay hack" <jay.hack@execnet.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.chess
Subject: chess news        3/5
Date: 17 Aug 92 03:12:44 EST
Reply-To: "jay hack" <jay.hack@execnet.com>
Distribution: rec
Organization: Executive Networks Information

>>> Continued from previous message
   Twelve years later he turned what is still the most astonishing
feat in   chess  history: In the run-up to the championship, he
played a series of  matches against the strongest grandmasters in
the world. He won 20 straight  games. No losses. No draws. (At this
level of play, wins are hard to come by.  Most grandmaster games
end in draws.) It was the equivalent, it has been said,  of winning
Wimbledon without losing a single game.

   Fischer's legend, however, has as much to do with his
eccentricity as his  genius. Eccentricity, though, is too mild a
word. Fischer has walked the line of  madness about as closely as
any other genius of our time. He is said to have  removed the
fillings from his teeth to prevent enemy radio transmissions. He is
seized with conspiracy theories, principally that of a
communist-capitalist-Jewish plot to run the world.

   He has the stamp of a man who played  chess  too long, too hard
and too  deeply. A man who has sunk, in Vladimir Nabokov's phrase,
into "the abysmal  depths of  chess. " After all, it is Fischer who
said, " Chess  is life," and in   chess  you are always being
pursued. Every action that occurs on the board is  designed to
encircle, entrap and destroy you.

   A century ago, the inmates of the Bedlam Insane Asylum played
Cambridge  University in a correspondence  chess  match. Bedlam
won. The association of   chess  with madness is long and
venerable. It is a feature of the popular  imagination, of literary
fiction (Nabokov's "The Defense," Stefan Zweig's "The  Royal Game")
and, with Fischer, of real life.

   Not many men have given up glory at the height of their powers.
And few have  done so as mysteriously, as madly, as Fischer. He has
spent much of the past 20  years in a netherworld of extreme,
conspiratorial Southern California sects.  Refusing to be seen.
Obsessed with secret plots. Self-publishing a pamphlet "I  Was
Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse" (his account of two days spent
arrested,  mistakenly, for bank robbery).

   Fischer's life eerily recapitulates that of the only other
American world  champion, Paul Morphy. Morphy too had a meteoric
rise and fall. In 1858-59, with  a triumphant tour of Europe, he
swept the  chess  world. He then returned home  and abruptly quit
the game. He refused ever to play again and descended into a
psychosis from which he never emerged.

   A hint of the darkness still haunting Fischer came with press
reports from  Belgrade of his acceptance of the rematch. The
promoter said that for a year and  a half Fischer had been studying
the Karpov-Kasparov matches (his successors in  the world
championship) and had come to the conclusion that they were fixed.

   Then within a week of the initial announcement, Bobby was
issuing demands and
complaints about conditions in the prospective playing hall. This
is his  customary prelude to backing out. It makes sense.  Chess
players, like baseball  players, age. Fischer would surely beat
Spassky, who is far past his prime. But  then there would be
irresistible pressure to play the real champion, the young  Gary
Kasparov. Fischer could not possibly win.

   I'm still waiting for Bobby. I would love to see him play again.
But if he  slips away again, I'll understand. There is something to
be said for dying -- or  disappearing -- young.

                              Inter Press Service

                           August  13, 1992, Thursday

HEADLINE:  YUGOSLAVIA: STAGE SET FOR A NEW BATTLE BUT ON THE  CHESS
BOARD

BYLINE:  by Alecia McKenzie

DATELINE: BRUSSELS, Aug. 13

 BODY:
   Even as the United Nations considers a draft resolution to use
force to  protect humanitarian aid to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbs in
Belgrade are wetting  their lips for a more peaceful battle.

   It's the settling of an old score -- 20 years old actually --
between two of  the  chess  greats of this century. The match will
pit the eccentric Bobby  Fischer against Soviet emigre Boris
Spassky in a remake of their famous 1972  duel which Fischer won to
make him the first U.S. world champion.

   The match, scheduled to start sometime between Sept. 1 and 5, is
being  sponsored by Jezdimir Vasiljevicx, the owner of Jugoskan, a
privately owned  share-holding company operating within the
duty-free zone in Svetistefan, a  small Yugoslav island connected
to Montenegro by a thin peninsula.
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