The Dark Side Still Haunts Bobby Fischer

EAST HAMPTON, NY - Millions await the return of Elvis. I've been waiting for Bobby. Fischer, that is. The king of chess. The greatest player who ever lived. The man who 20 years ago won the world championship, then vanished.

We know he is alive. Fischer sightings, though less frequent than Elvis sightings, are somewhat more reliable. He has been spotted among the alcoholics and homeless in rundown parts of Los Angeles. He talks to almost no one. And if anyone he does talk to talks to the press, they never hear from Bobby again.

Twenty years of total withdrawal. Twenty years of silence. Twenty years without a single recorded game of chess (we know of). Then late last month, the electrifying news: Bobby's back. A Yugoslav promoter announces that Fischer has agreed to play again, a $5 million rematch with Boris Spassky, the world champion he dethroned in 1972.

Where does Bobby surface? In Belgrade, capital of an outlaw state. The match will be played in Serbia in defiance of international sanctions. This, of course, fits Fischer perfectly. He has hated every authority he has ever dealt with, starting with the international chess authorities that he saw (sometimes not without reason) as plotting against him.

When I told a journalist friend that Bobby's second coming was scheduled for Belgrade, he replied, "Why didn't he go all the way and make it Sarajevo?" Belgrade is, shall we say, an eccentric choice for a coming out. But in Fischer, eccentricity and genius are hard to separate.

His genius is undeniable. As a boy he was called the Mozart of chess. At 13, he played a game of such brilliance (against Donald Byrne) that it became known as the "Game of the Century." At 15, he became the youngest grandmaster in history.

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.

His 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 so as 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 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 last 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.

(Copyright, 1992, Washington Post Writers Group)