In 1972, Bobby Fischer became World Chess Champion; thirty-three years later, he lived exiled in Iceland—the very country where he won the title. Recently, I rewatched his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, a memorable episode that first aired in 1971 and is often considered the moment America met Bobby for the first time. A decade later, I would discover his games in my local library: the book in my hands sprawling with chess diagrams, appended with penciled-in comments by other patrons.

“Will you welcome the bright boy from Brooklyn,” Dick Cavett announces with a mild-mannered smile. Bobby jumps out from behind the curtains and paces across the stage with his soon-to-be signature stride. He has just eliminated Denmark’s finest, Bent Larsen, with a crushing 6–0 win in the Candidates matches held in Denver. Now he stalks the world title. Come October, he will defeat Tigran Petrosian and qualify for the world championship against Russia’s Boris Spassky.

The music fades; the breakwater of applause subsides. Bobby settles into the guest chair at a slant, looking around. A tall, broad-shouldered man, but not imposing. Later, mid-interview, Cavett remarks that his guest looks more like a footballer than a chess player.

I remember watching another episode of the show, featuring an intense Marlon Brando. The actor spent the hour discussing the injustices committed against America’s native tribes. It was an interesting watch. Cavett rolled with Brando’s zeal for truth and allowed him the right to represent, listening with the openness that good interviewers possess.

Today’s guest emanates a different aura, one of single-minded devotion to his profession, the game of 64 squares, that metaphysical labyrinth—to borrow from Borges—of infinite regression.

When Cavett asks if he has time for anything but chess, Bobby leans sideways and says, “Not at the moment. First things first—get the title.” As he looks up at Cavett, his expression carries the intimation of countless hours spent by the analysis board, probing for fractures in his opponent’s position. He recorded his discoveries in notebooks that rarely left his side.

Cavett is cheerful and deferential throughout the interview, which feels like a conversation between two friends. As I watch, I begin to realize Cavett admires the bright boy from Brooklyn.

“Where do you live?”

“I don’t live anywhere, actually. I’m just living in hotels.”

Cavett compares it to surfers following the sun, which draws a brief smile. A vagabond with no place called home, a quiet man who prefers to express himself in short sentences, delivered with the cadence of a solitary existence.

“All I want to do, ever, is play chess. All ever,” Bobby once declared.

But “all” has a way of changing with the passage of time. From the time machine I inhabit, I know that Bobby Fischer will one day come to question the meaning of a his journey, a question no chess variation can answer.

*

First things first—get the title.

But what came first to Bobby’s mind one day came second the next. The familiar subtext—elusive, flamboyant, unpredictable—needs little emphasis. You might shake your head at it, yet these character traits were also part of his charm.

Some head-shaking occurred in Reykjavik’s Laugardalshöll in the days before 11 July 1972, when the opening game of the world championship was scheduled to begin. Bobby had been spotted strolling through his old neighborhood in New York. Was he not supposed to be in Iceland?

The title contender had decided the winner’s purse of $78,125 was insufficient. Unless someone improved the arrangement, he would not come to Reykjavik.

Henry Kissinger was enlisted to dissuade him from whatever demonstration he imagined he was making—I try to picture Kissinger pleading with the disgruntled grandmaster to play for the good of the country, but I struggle to make the leap. I have to remind myself that this was the Cold War era—now an all too familiar term. America had beaten Russia to the moon; they weren’t about to give up the chess championship without a fight.

Despite his diplomatic skills, Kissinger failed in his mission, and so the torch was passed to President Nixon himself. The exact details of Nixon’s phone call with Bobby are unknown, but in the end, it was worked out that the British financier James D. Slater would double the prize fund: now the winner would receive $156,250.

With the slight money issue settled, Spassky’s challenger landed in Reykjavik on a cloudy 4 July morning. Someone described his arrival as “a hijacker expecting a hail of police bullets.” The world championship candidate marched down the ramp without looking at the assembled press corps. Beneath his left arm, his usual practice chessboard and a stack of flailing notebooks. The waiting car ushered him away with every urgency—except for the flashing beacons on top.

The press and the world had witnessed Bobby’s first move: wait, listen to my conditions, and then perhaps I will appear.

*

Roughly 1,800 spectators packed the dimly lit Laugardalshöll, magnetized by the low hum of an audience in waiting. Two empty chairs stood on the podium, silent witnesses to the war of attrition that was about to unfold. Boris Spassky arrived on the dot, 5 PM, and assumed a relaxed pose that would not last. His opponent was late—nine minutes late, in fact—and those nine minutes soon began to take a toll on Spassky, who could not help but break his unruffled exterior by glancing around the hall.

Then Bobby appeared. He entered through a side door, his looping stride absent as he walked slowly towards the stage with his head held high, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had taken nine minutes off his own game time. Although he later claimed that traffic had been bad, the signaling was clear: the lost minutes did not shake him. Always the gentleman, a relieved Spassky stood up and shook the latecomer’s hand and then quickly sat down.

The world championship would prove to be a strange narrative arc: an early blunder by the American in the first game, a forfeited second, and then the inevitable shift in gravity as Fischer’s relentless precision eroded Spassky’s calm authority. Spassky, once the guardian of the Soviet dominion in chess, appeared drawn into positions that felt less like defeats and more like the unfolding of a pattern latent on the board. Here was an outsider showing lines the Russian chess master had not yet imagined.

In August 1972, Fischer dethroned Spassky in the twenty-first game. When it ended, Spassky did something extraordinary: he joined the audience in applauding his opponent. The Cold War had paused over sixty-four squares.

The Brooklyn boy’s victory reverberated beyond chess. In New York, he was awarded the keys to the city by Mayor John Lindsay. After the ceremony, he told a reporter that “the creeps are beginning to gather,” meaning the press.

America began to dream of Bobby. Bobby dreamed chess. In the metaphysical labyrinth of variations, he now faced one his mind was not purposed for. Chased by journalists and paparazzi, he soon became an absentee monarch. He absconded from tournaments and lived out of sight, studying and analyzing in solitude. In Pasadena, California, he joined the Worldwide Church of God, to which he donated much of the winnings he had debated over the phone with Kissinger and Nixon. Money was not his goal; it was simply a measure of the value placed on his craft.

***

In the years that followed, Bobby Fischer kept away from the creeps. He refused offers worth millions of dollars and chose instead to live modestly on book royalties and what he could scrape from his mother’s Social Security checks. Over time, his mind began to delve into increasingly paranoid delusions. Suspicious of radio transmitters, he had all his dental fillings removed; he developed a fear of flying, believing the Russians might hide booby traps beneath his seat; he became convinced the KGB planned to seize his notebooks.

Yet above this somber undercurrent, he still lived and breathed chess. Hours spent at the practice board proved that his mind was as sharp as ever, sustained by an unbroken ambition to remain on the throne.

And the throne called his name. Between 1973 and 1975, negotiations began for the defense of his world championship title. His challenger would be the young Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, a player whose quiet, prophylactic style resembled that of a boa constrictor—unstoppable, if courteous.

True to form, Bobby demanded changes to the tournament format: first to ten wins, draws not counting, with no limit on the number of games. In the event of a 9–9 score, the champion would retain the title. He argued that this would preserve the integrity of the contest. In 1975, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) refused his demands, pointing out that a 9–9 tie imposed a weighted margin whereby Karpov needed to win 10 games to Fischer’s 8.

FIDE set an administrative deadline of April 1975 for both players to confirm their participation. Karpov announced his availability, but Fischer did not respond, maintaining that his stance was non-negotiable.

Without a move played, the world chess champion title passed to Karpov.

The title loss accelerated the former champ’s mental decline. He descended into a life of silence away from the tournament world. Now and then, stories surfaced of his long, solitary walks in the streets of Pasadena, of a life lived in threadbare hotel rooms, paid for by the Worldwide Church of God. Nights alone by the chessboard, tearing up the pieces and tearing them down, analyzing lines of play until they consumed him.

*

It took twenty years before Bobby would re-enter the professional chess arena. In 1992, he resurfaced to play a rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia, an event that would turn out to be another collision of wartime politics and defiance. Jezdimir Vasiljević, CEO of Jugoskandic Bank, had bumped the prize pool to five million dollars, making the Reykjavik purse look like pocket change.

In an interview given to 60 Minutes three months before the match, Bobby Fischer looked unrecognizable. He had grown a ragged, unkempt beard that he kept fumbling with whenever pressed for an answer. His once sleek frame had taken on a bear-like figure, imposing and heavyset, as if his mind had somehow reconstituted his physiology.

Appearance aside, his temperament remained unchanged. Before the match, he again insisted on the “first to 10 wins” rule, draws not counting. Not only that, but he wanted to be introduced as the current world champion, despite the title having passed to Garry Kasparov in 1990, who then defeated Karpov 4 wins to 3, with 17 draws. One can imagine the organizers' eyes rolling as the former titleholder’s demands were accepted.

For Bobby, all world championships played after his win over Spassky in 1972 were, according to him, “fixed and prearranged.” Having been stripped of his title in 1975, he refused to recognize the authority of FIDE. In his view, he was the reigning world champion, and now he would prove it. The shadow of a world championship, cast from Bobby’s alienated state of mind, represented a bittersweet comeback.

Before the showdown, the United States government warned that any game played would violate the sanctions order issued by President George H. W. Bush. Yugoslavia was under an international embargo for the ethnic cleansing their army had performed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Like many Europeans, I struggled with the fact that people were being killed en masse in Southeastern Europe; this war woke me from my innocence.

Not so Bobby. At the pre-match press conference, he held up the letter from the U.S. Treasury and spat on it.

Politics had once more found him, but this time it would cast him as a villain, not a king. The Treasury viewed his defiance as a clear and unlawful declaration of disregard for their cease-and-desist order. A spokesman stated that the department would “take appropriate action.”

In spite of these events, the match went ahead. The games were played partly at the Adriatic resort of Sveti Stefan and partly in Belgrade. Again, Bobby defeated Spassky, this time with a score of 10 wins, 5 losses, and 15 draws. At the prize ceremony, he was presented with a gold-leaf laurel wreath as the Belgrade crowd chanted “Bob-by!Bob-by!” Bobby wiped away a tear. There, on the podium in the Sava Centre, it became clear that beneath the stoic facade, something had stirred in his heart.

Immediately, the US Treasury took action, issuing a warrant for his arrest in the United States. No more golden keys to New York, no more multi-million dollar tournament offers. Now the cameras captured an unofficial world champion on the run.

As a consequence of the arrest warrant, he would never again set foot on American soil, instead entering a geography of exile. He spent time in Budapest with the Hungarian chess player Zita Rajcsányi, and later traveled to the Philippines where his friend and former second Eugenio Torre lived, a masterful chess player in his own right.

In September 2001, an indignant Bobby Fischer appeared on Philippine radio and expressed approval of the September 11 attacks. Re-listening to the recording years later sends a sudden chill. I oppose many of America’s wars, yet the weight of his endorsement of the attack feels like stepping onto snow whose depth cannot be judged.

* 

In 2005, Iceland granted Bobby Fischer an alien’s passport and later full citizenship. He settled in Reykjavik, sometimes playing informal games with his friend Magnús Skúlason. The city where he had conquered the world now became the city in which he withdrew from it.

Magnús Skúlason worked as a psychiatrist and served as the head of Iceland’s national hospital. They had met in the Bókin, an old bookstore in Reykjavik. Bobby told him that Bókin reminded him of the bookstores in Brooklyn where he first discovered chess.

Throughout their friendship, Magnús never assumed the role of psychologist, knowing that offering his friend therapy would heighten his paranoia and risk their bond. Magnús genuinely enjoyed their meetings and later revealed that their conversations often touched on Freudian dream theory; Bobby was fascinated by the symbolic meanings of dreams.

And so, at the end of his life, exiled in Iceland, the former world champion was searching. If we forgive the dominant, abrasive persona associated with his genius, then I think we should believe him. Like Odysseus, his journey had brought him more trials than answers. Somewhere within that frail mind of his, he knew that something was not right—and maybe he could fix it.

In October 2007, he was admitted to the National University Hospital of Iceland, suffering from a serious urinary tract blockage. Doctors urged him to accept treatment, but he refused, lambasting them in typical fashion, saying he would not accept any “Jewish sciences.” Instead, Magnús brought him fresh goat milk, which he drank, convinced of its healing powers.

Chess masters possess a peculiar consolation: every serious game leaves a notation—a sequence of symbols preserving the struggle move by move. The players disappear; the pieces return to their starting positions; the hall grows silent, yet the game remains, ready to ignite again decades later.

In this way, a chess player is granted afterlife.

On Bobby’s deathbed, Magnús kept vigil beside him. When he asked for a massage to dull the searing pain in his legs, Magnús obliged—and as he did, the boy from Brooklyn departed.

His last words were, “Nothing is as healing as the human touch.”

Some months later, reflecting on the man he once had interviewed, Dick Cavett wrote: “Among this year’s worst news, for me, was the death of Bobby Fischer.”