BET BOBBY FISCHER WAS A THUNDERBIRDS FAN:

A Chess Champion and His Demons: Still Searching for Bobby Fischer: Genius and jerk, he exists in a parallel universe. (Fred Waitzkin, July 26, 2004, LA Times)

I recall a crisp, terribly exciting fall afternoon in 1992 in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park when the normal habitues of the chess tables — Manhattan's drug dealers, hustlers and impoverished masters — had been replaced by Hollywood stars.

They were making a movie of my book, "Searching for Bobby Fischer," and on this day they were shooting scenes at the same tables that I had so ecstatically and tremulously visited hundreds of times with my little boy, Josh, when he was first learning the game and taking on all comers. Some of his fans called Josh "Young Fischer," after the great chess champion who had himself played some of his early games on the same grungy tables.

During that time in my life, the game of chess possessed me like an utterly captivating and dangerous love. I had been intrigued with chess ever since Fischer turned the world on edge with his match against Boris Spassky in 1972, and then years later I was set on fire by my son, who turned out to be a chess prodigy.

I wanted my son to be a chess champion like Fischer, and at 15, Josh was a six-time national chess champion. If ever there was a moment when immortality seemed to be breaking my way, it was on that sweet afternoon in Washington Square with the cameras rolling.

But I was concerned about one thing in the shooting script. Fischer was depicted, only half-truthfully, as a boyishly handsome, charismatic charmer who became a cultural icon after winning the world championship. In fact, when I was doing research for my book I had discovered, sadly, that the beauty of Fischer's chess constructions was not mirrored in his personal life. Friends described him as tyrannical, deeply paranoid and a fervent hater of Jews. Shouldn't some of that, I wondered, come into the movie?

You'd think it pertinent.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2004 4:54 AM