As a one-time mediocre chess player whose brains are now too fried to even begin to compete with my twenty-year old self, I have always been fascinated and repelled by one of the great (perhaps the great) whacko chess geniuses of all time – Bobby Fischer, of course. Fischer, still eluding US authorities who didn’t like him playing a rematch with Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992, is now headed for refuge in Iceland.
“Okay. Great, great,” a tired-looking Fischer told Reuters when asked how he felt about travelling to his new home country.
Sporting a thick white beard and dressed in a striped sweater and jeans, Fischer declined further comment, setting off on an airport shopping tour with his companion, Miyoko Watai, a four-time Japan women’s chess champion.
The Watai-Fischer love story, if you can call it that, is quite a tale in its own right. This interview with Watai is worth a look.
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