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Posted By: barrysloate

Bobby was not a nice person. When I hung out at chess haunts in Greenwich Village in the 1970's, I knew the Rossolimo family, who were interesting in their own right. Nicholas was a grandmaster and his wife Vera helped him run one of the chess shops on Thompson Street. They were like surrogate parents to Bobby and used to tell me stories about him when he was a boy. They always knew how great a chess player he was- that was apparent very early- but they also knew how very strange he was.

When he played his match against Spassky all of America was watching one of their own try to break the Russian's stranglehold on the world title. Bobby made an amateur blunder in the first game, then accused Spassky of cheating and demanded that his chair be taken apart because Fischer was certain there were secret microphones hidden in it. He forfeited the second game and was down 2-0. It looked like everything he worked for was now wasted.

But when he sat down for the third game and began to play chess, he was a steamroller. He made the world champion look like he did not even belong in the same league, and coasted through the match to become the first American world champion since Paul Morphy in the 1850's (another tortured genius who died young).

Fischer never played a serious game again for the rest of his life. A very sad waste of talent.