KEY POINTS:
Bobby Fischer, who has died in Reykjavik aged 64, was the American international grand master of chess whose 1972 world championship victory over the Russian Boris Spassky caught the imagination of the Western world. But he also gloried in the infamous 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US World
Trade Centre.
Fischer was indisputably the finest player of his generation; perhaps of all time. His genius at the board was only matched by his ability to cause controversy away from it.
Paranoid and obsessive, he never defended his title, preferring to forfeit it in 1975 when the Chess Federation did not agree to his impossible and contradictory demands.
Although he made the headlines as frequently for his eccentric behaviour as for his chess, it never entirely obscured the fact that, at his best, he was the player who single-handedly injected glamour into that arcane world.
Robert James Fischer learned the basic rules of chess aged 6. He joined the Manhattan Chess Club at 10. There he received tuition from chess master John Collins, who later admitted: "Nobody taught Bobby. Geniuses, like Beethoven, Shakespeare and Fischer know before they are instructed."
In 1958 he became, at 14, the youngest player to win the US championship, a feat he achieved without losing a game. In 1959, he dropped out of school in order to devote himself entirely to chess.
In 1972, playing Spassky, Fischer refused to play unless Spassky agreed to play in private without cameras - in direct contravention of his earlier insistence that the match be televised.
With his objections satisfied, he forged ahead, the mad whirlwind of his behaviour away from the board seeming to provoke an ever-greater clarity of purpose at it.
"Chess is war on a board," he said. "The object is to crush the other man's mind."
After his victory he became a media celebrity, appearing on chat shows; offered enormous sums to play exhibition matches. Chess clubs grew and public interest soared.
Then, in 1975, he refused to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov. Forfeiting his title and turning his back on millions of dollars, he joined the fundamentalist Worldwide Church of God and renounced his Jewish heritage.
He gave the church most of his prize money and subsequently became a recluse.
Eventually he completely disappeared, apparently convinced the Russian KGB wanted to kill him as the only Western threat to their domination of the game.
It was, therefore, a surprise when, in 1992, he agreed to play Spassky again in the Yugoslavian Republic of Montenegro for a purse of US$5 million (NZ$6.6 million.
At a press conference he aired his anti-Semitism and spat on a letter from the US Treasury Department informing him that he would be liable to arrest if he played in contravention of American sanctions against Yugoslavia resulting from the Bosnian crisis.
Fischer, although somewhat rusty, eventually won the match 10-5.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Fischer launched an outspoken denunciation of his home country during a live radio interview. "This is all wonderful news," he declared. "I applaud the act. The US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them, for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. No one gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the US. F*** the US. I want to see the US wiped out. Death to the US."
This outburst was not well received. In 2004 Fischer was arrested attempting to leave Japan for the Philippines but was eventually permitted to live in Iceland.
