Athletes - Bobby Fischer

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	Athletes - Bobby Fischer

Robert James "Bobby" Fischer (born March 9, 1943) is a grandmaster and former world chess champion, who on September 1, 1972, became the first American chess player to win the FIDE World Chess Championship. In 1975, he officially lost the title when FIDE, the international chess federation, refused to accept his conditions for a title defense. Garry Kasparov wrote that of all world champions of chess, the skill gap between Fischer and his contemporaries was the largest in history . Fischer is also well known for his eccentricity, unconventional and irrational behavior, and outspoken political views. Despite his prolonged absence from competitive play, or perhaps because of it, Fischer is still among the best known of all chess players.

Fischer's victory over the Soviet champion Boris Spassky to win the world championship in the "Match of the Century" was seen as a symbolic victory for the West that catalyzed interest in the game internationally. His opponent was portrayed, in the United States in particular, as the product of an impersonal, mechanical, and oppressive system of state control, while Fischer was the solitary genius overcoming the Soviets' claim to dominance. As a national hero, Americans were willing to forgive his behavior and views as eccentricities, and in popular culture he became a symbol of the genius whose brilliance is so great that he is destroyed by it.

Early years

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Regina Wender, a naturalized American citizen of Jewish Polish ancestry who was born in Switzerland, raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and later became a teacher, registered nurse and physician. His father was reportedly Wender's first husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist; the couple married in 1933 in Moscow, U.S.S.R., where Wender was studying medicine at the First Moscow Medical Institute. Though Hans-Gerhardt Fischer is listed as the father on Robert Fischer's birth certificate, a 2002 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer stated that Fischer's biological father was Paul Felix Nemenyi, a Hungarian Jewish physicist who fled Europe after the Nazis came to power and worked on the Manhattan Project on the development of the atomic bomb . Nemenyi paid child support for Fischer during his infancy and early childhood. Later, FBI research determined that although Fischer's mother had returned to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1939, her first husband never entered the country after that date, making it improbable that Fischer, born in 1943, was Hans-Gerhardt Fischer's child. Although at least one of his parents was Jewish, Fischer has vehemently denied being a Jew in several public interviews, and blames the mischaracterization on a "Jewish conspiracy" to defame him. Fischer has noted that his outspoken nature comes from his Jewish mother.

The Fischers divorced in 1945 when their son was two years old, and Fischer grew up with his mother and older sister, Joan. In 1948, the family moved to Mobile, Arizona, where Regina taught in an elementary school. The following year they moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Regina worked as an elementary school teacher and nurse.

In May 1949, six-year-old Fischer learned how to play chess from instructions found in a chess set that his sister bought at a candy store below their Brooklyn apartment. He saw his first chess book a month later. For over a year he played chess on his own. At age 7, he joined the Brooklyn Chess Club and was taught by the club's president, Carmine Nigro. When Fischer was 13, his mother asked John W. Collins to be his chess teacher. Collins had taught several top players, including Robert Byrne and William Lombardy. Fischer spent much time at Collins' house, and some have described Collins as a father figure for Fischer. Fischer attended but dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School, where many teachers remembered him as difficult. According to school records, he has an I.Q. of 180 and an .

Playing career before 1967

Fischer's first real triumph was winning the U.S. Junior Chess Championship in July 1956. In the same year, he played several brilliant games; his game against Donald Byrne, who later became an International Master, is often referred to as "The Game of the Century".

In 1957, Fischer won the US Open Chess Championship in Cleveland, Ohio, on tie-breaking points over Arthur Bisguier. Fischer was given entry into the invitational U.S. Championship, but many predicted that he was too weak and would finish last. Instead, he finished first.

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Athletes - Bobby Fischer

Early years

Playing career before 1967

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