Bobby Fischer Is Dead

One of the world’s all-time greatest chess players, Bobby Fischer, is dead at 64. He died on Thursday in a hospital in Reykjavík, Iceland. No cause of death was given officially, but one report says the cause of death was kidney failure. Harold C. Schonberg — who reported for The New York Times on the famous 1972 Reykjavik championship match between Fischer and the reigning World Chess Champion, the Russian chess grandmaster Boris Spassky, a match in which Fischer won the title from Spassky and became the first (and still only) American to hold that title — had this to say about Fischer in his 1973 book, Grandmasters of Chess:

It was Bobby Fischer who...single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity.

Indeed. And for that we overlook the out-of-control lunacy of Fischer's later years.

The New York Times obituary can be read here.