Hartford Courant, Hartford, Connecticut, Tuesday, November 28, 2006 - Page D04
When Bobby Fischer Lit The Fire
It has been more than 1½ years since Bobby Fischer took refuge in Iceland, the scene of his legendary triumph over Boris Spassky more than 30 years before.
Although he received a tumultuous hero's welcome as his plane landed at midnight in Reykjavik, his sojourn in an apartment building at the edge of the Arctic Circle has been notably quiet, his privacy scrupulously respected.
Even though great talents are likely to thrive wherever they are born, that is probably not true of the super-sensitive American. Heralded as the first chess professional, Fischer's knowledge of the game was encyclopedic compared with his contemporaries. Unlike most of his peers, he also understood the critical importance of diet and physical condition.
But today, he would be one among many. Prodigies abound; the pursuit of chess knowledge is obsessive. Competition grows fiercer year by year as a seemingly bottomless cornucopia of grandmasters spills out around the globe.
Although the American prodigy was admirably up to the challenge of his time, he might have recoiled from the kind he would have faced today. As it was, his serious chess-playing career ended abruptly in 1972 at age 29, when he enigmatically withdrew from the chess stage after achieving his dream of becoming world champion. I am reminded of Edna St. Vincent Millay's wonderful lines: “The candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. But ah, my foes and oh, my friends, it gives such lovely light.”