This blog started shortly after the death of the paleomythic competitor Bobby Fischer. The forms he lived out were not recognized by his obituary writers and deserve some mention.The pattern of Fischer's early- to midlife confirms the innermost fantasy of many a former champion in whatever field: music, sport, games. The form is this:
- An epic victory is attained amid much acclaim
- The victor descends into the slough of everyday life, a vanished legend
- The competitor rouses himself and reclaims his crown amid even greater acclaim
The public saw this in the George Foreman story while the Glenn Gould form stopped at the second bullet.
Fischer's additional appeal was in his disintermediation of all the usual hangers-on, the coaches, the teachers, the promoters. To the extent a champion believes in his own talent, Fischer represented not just the resurrection of hope but the validation of that very personal talent, the talent that mediators tell you is worthless without training, without regimen, without their expert guidance.
As a champion once told me about her planned comeback, "I'm going to do this on raw talent." In other words, she was going to Bobby Fischer that thing.
This maps to an earlier American archtype, "the native genius." That term is actually used in public discourse in the Civil War not merely to justify the appointment of civilians as generals but to argue the case for shutting down West Point entirely.
Professionalism, as precept, has won battles with "genius" in every sphere of life since, but it did not stamp out widespread, personal, folkloric belief in "genius." (And by genius I mean superior innate talent not brains.) Every competitor now yields to his coach's demands for discispline, training, etc., without dissent but hears within the distict voice of individual talent.
We could extend the form with a fourth bullet:
- The champion returns to obscurity
And a fifth:
- The champion embarasses himself in further competition
... and these extensions of the form would cover not just Fischer but a great many cases. But loving beautiful form, we truncate the Bobby Fischer effect to its most satisfying platonic dimensions.
***
On the topic of Fischer, I would be remiss in a blog about politics if I did not mention the publicity of 1972.
It was very difficult being a public anti-communist in the northeast at that time. Anti-McCarthyism was still running its course, anticommunists were saddled with the Vietnam War, and the national media was at least as reflexively hostile to anticommunism then as now.
I don't know whence the American Fischer got his anticommunism, but it was powerful and public.
Now in chess, we have what are called combinations, and it seemed to me that Fischer had engineered a massive publicity combination in Reykjavik for his private beliefs, one that would turn the reflexive, unthinking boosterism of the American media against the Soviet chess machine specifically and the Soviet system in general. In other words, media interest in Fischer necessitated the media's development of a master narrative the non-chess playing public could understand and that narrative bias built on the logic of the situation, generated a constant anticommunist drumbeat as long as the match lasted.
The types and shadows were irresistible: the immense Soviet staffs, the unbroken Soviet record, the maverick against the machine, the value systems in tournament. As Leornard Barden put it, "1972 captured public and media imagination with its image of a lone American eccentric defeating the massive resources of the Soviet state."
And so, Fischer's internal politics became a matrix out of which the chess drama was reified by an unwitting media compelled, by Fischer's larger combination, to act out its prescribed part.
I loved it. It was the last chapter in an unwritten Ayn Rand potboiler. It was awesome to see the nightly news day after day in zugzwang.
No one reading this blog will ever see anything like it again.
