ABOUT a month ago, I received a telephone call from a friend that I’d not heard from for quite a while.
“Hey, what’s this you are talking about the late Bobby Fischer?” he asked, referring to my casual mention of Fischer’s name in this column four week ago.
“Yes, don’t you know? Where have you been?” I replied. It turned out that this chess-playing friend of mine just returned from Mars. He missed the news of the year.
If Fischer were still alive today, he would have been 65 yesterday. But he’s dead at age 64. He died on Jan 17 of kidney failure.
Of course, his death came as a complete shock to the chess world. Everybody expects a chess legend to live forever; nobody thinks that a chess legend would die. But apart from a handful of Fischer’s friends in Iceland and Miyoko Watai in Japan, nobody else knew about the bad shape he was in. In Iceland, a person’s health is a very private affair.
I’m not going to comment much on the last years of Fischer’s life. Too much has been written about this already – his run-in with the US government and his other extreme opinions and comments – which you can read on the Internet. What I want to say here is that Fischer, the world chess champion from Brooklyn, had a big influence on the development of chess in Malaysia, like in the rest of the world.
Remarkable, isn’t it, that he could fire up interest in chess around the globe just because he beat Boris Spassky? He caught the imagination of many who thought his exploits at the chessboard were heroic. Here was a man, representing the free democratic world, who dared to stand up against the boundless machinery of the evil Soviet empire, personified by Spassky.
Non-chess players saw the Cold War as being played out in Fischer vs the Soviet Union. Chess players saw the 1972 world championship match as a realistic chance for a Westerner to break the Soviet Union’s grip on the world title since 1948.
In reality, nothing was further from the truth. Fischer was playing simply for his own self-interest and self-preservation. He set the highest playing standards for himself. He wouldn’t compromise if he thought he could get his way. He asked for the near-impossible and got it. He threatened to abort the match if the match conditions were not improved and they did. Modern professional chess players have a mountain of debt to repay Fischer because he set the standards for them.
Fischer had a great influence on chess players of my generation. Malaysia may be thousands of kilometres away from Reykjavik but the players here followed every move of his world chess championship match.
Like the rest of the chess world, time stopped in Malaysia between July and September 1972 when Fischer and Spassky played. During this match, I tuned in to the BBC World Service every day to listen to five-minute commentaries on their games, thanks to shortwave radio. For once, I could proudly tell my friends that chess was a cool game. It was no longer the game of nerdy and geeky people. Among my contemporaries, our interest in the game was now raging unabatedly, thanks to Fischer. What a love affair!
The same year, chess was introduced into the Majlis Sukan Sekolah-sekolah Malaysia programme. States started organising state-level chess tournaments and it culminated at the year’s end with the first-ever MSSM team chess championship. In 1973 or so, there was even a weekly programme on RTM1 to teach chess to beginners. Unfortunately, the parent chess body at the time – the Chess Association of Malaysia – got itself deregistered. But building on the growing interest in the game ever since the Fischer match, the Malaysian Chess Federation simply continued from where the CAM ended.
Earlier, I mentioned Miyoko Watai as possibly the only person outside Iceland who knew of Fischer’s terminal illness. You may wonder who she is. Other than being the president of the Japan Chess Federation, Watai is also Fischer’s widow.
There was quite a lot of confusion about her status because of implications on Fischer’s estate (he’s known to have a seven-year-old illegitimate daughter somewhere in the Philippines) but it has since been confirmed through official documents from Japan that their marriage was registered earlier. Fischer’s estate is believed to be worth around £1mil (RM6.4mil).
(This story first appeared in The Star on 7 Mar 2008)