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1972 Chess Match Drew Us to Follow the Moves.

From Dave Brooks at the Nashua Post writes -

As a rule, I don’t lament the death of anti-Semitic loonies, but like a lot of people who enjoy the Game of Kings, I couldn’t help pausing a moment last week at the news Bobby Fischer had died.

Fischer spent the last three decades of his life vacillating between weird recluse and repellent blowhard, but during my youth, and particularly in his 1972 championship bout against Boris Spassky, he did what few have ever done: Get everybody in the world excited about something they don’t understand.

For weeks, chess was on the front page of newspapers and in news magazines. It was even on television!

Shelby Lyman’s public-TV commentary of the match was such a hit that he parlayed it into a lifetime job. Three decades later he still syndicates a chess column, which we run in The Sunday Telegraph.

The greatest of sports superstars – Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky – didn’t expand the audience of their pastime like Fischer did. Muhammad Ali is the only comparable American I can think of, and boxing was already a worldwide draw when he came along.

Even for those of us who did understand the game (I floundered through a couple of public U.S. Chess Federation tournaments during high school), Fischer’s teenage bravado was stunning. His 1956 win over Donald Byrne via a queen sacrifice, roughly the equivalent of the Patriots playing the second half without a quarterback, is on any list of the greatest games in history; yet he was only 13 at the time.

Still, it was Fischer’s defeat of the invincible Soviet bear in the heart of the Cold War that pushed him into the stratosphere.

“I think that (match) definitely brought a lot of people, including me, into playing competitive chess,” said David McGrath, of Amherst, when I asked him to look back on Fischer.

McGrath has run the state championship Amherst King Bishops school team for years, and as a man who mentors preteens, he is careful to differentiate Fischer the man from Fischer the sportsman.

“Like I said to my son, he was an extraordinary chess player, but I’d rather have you emulate someone like Albert Einstein as far as a humanitarian aspect of his life,” he said. “Or Kasparov – that’s someone who would be better to emulate; he’s trying to have a positive effect on the political stage (battling Russian leader Vladimir Putin).”

Which brings us to the dark side of Fischer, and what would any public figure be without a dark side?

Much of the commentary after Fischer’s death last Friday at age 64 of undisclosed causes implied an unhealthy focus on chess contributed to his mental decline.

Maybe it did, although certainly there’s nothing in the game itself to unhinge the little gray cells.

“It’s not chess that made Bobby Fischer bad,” said McGrath, who pointed to Fischer’s unhappy youth in a fatherless household as a possible culprit.

But it might be true that chess was the medium that brought out his flaws; his mental heroin, if you will. It gave him a conduit to focus on until his life was warped. Greatness, and great sadness, followed.

I subscribe to the dictum of “moderation in all things,” which is part of the reason I won’t end my life on talk radio claiming as Fischer did that Jews are destroying the world. But it’s also part of the reason that strangers won’t pause a moment when they learn I have passed on.

And bet I’ll never, ever be able to think of a really good queen sacrifice.

The original story can be read here.

Science from the Sidelines appears Wednesdays in The Telegraph. David Brooks can be reached at 594-5831 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com