Bobby Fischer is dead

In high school and college I played a LOT of chess. I still have the records of hundreds of games I played and dozens of books and magazines. I had thought maybe my children would be interested in chess but kids seem to develop interests in things other than what their parents are interested in.

In any case I was a big into chess before Bobby Fischer became the first American world chess champion. Fischer winning the championship made chess in the U.S. popular for a while. And I remember walking into the high school cafeteria on the first day of school in the fall of ’72 shortly after he had won and my friend Lance Jones yelling across the room, “Yea Fischer!”.

In later years after I was most of the way through college my electrical engineering classes started sucking up the desire for challenging intellectual stimulation and I mostly dropped out of the chess scene.

Fischer made the news again a few years ago and I wrote about him then. The news about him made me sad and now that he is dead at the age of 64 it’s like another milestone in my life. A childhood hero is gone.

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One thought on “Bobby Fischer is dead

  1. Yes, I was saddened, too. I still have the commemorative booklet of the Fischer-Spassky match, though I think I’ve long since let go of the newspaper clippings of the games and analyses.

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