Southtown Star Tinley Park, Illinois Saturday, January 19, 2008 - Page 4
Chess Legend Bobby Fischer Dies at 64
Reykjavik, Iceland—Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.
Mr. Fischer died of kidney failure Thursday after a long illness, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said Friday.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Fischer faced criminal charges in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph.
Mr. Fischer vanished after the 1992 match and occasionally re-emerged to give interviews on a radio station in the Philippines.
Mr. Fischer lost his world title in 1975 after refusing to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. He dropped out of competitive chess.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation, called Mr. Fischer “a phenomenon and an epoch in chess history, and an intellectual giant I would rank next to Newton and Einstein.”
Spassky, reached briefly at his home in France, said of his friend and rival: “I am very sorry, but Bobby Fischer is dead. Goodbye.”
An American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer dethroned Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to become the first officially recognized world champion born in the United States.
