Fischer on Television

One dubious advantage of Bobby Fischer's 2004 arrest in Japan and 2005 release to Iceland is that he is getting more airtime on television. Two recent examples are a one-hour profile that re-aired 12/7/05 on the Biography Channel and a one-hour episode in a series called Anything to Win that aired 4/9/06 on the Game Show Network.

The difficulty in chronicling Fischer's life is that there are new chapters still to be written in this seemingly never-ending saga. The Biography Channel show ends with Fischer imprisoned in Japan and dire forecasts by the narrator of a tragic outcome although Don Schultz provides some comic relief when he predicts that the Justice Department and State Department "don't have a chance" in this "unfair match" versus Fischer. The list of interviewees is impressive, including grandmasters Anatoly Karpov, Susan Polgar, Walter Browne, Arthur Bisguier, and the late Arnold Denker; biographers Frank Brady, Rene Chun, David Edmonds, and John Eidinow; executives Al Lawrence and Don Schultz; attorney Paul Marshall; and childhood friend John Rinaldo who offers one of the most penetrating insights into Fischer's behavior by ascribing it to a form of autism known as Asperger's Syndrome.

The best parts of the Biography Channel special include rare footage from game one of the Spassky-Fischer match in 1972, snapshots of Fischer appearing with celebrities Dinah Shore and Bob Hope, and an excerpt from the interview where Fischer praises Spassky for not crumbling against him as his other opponents had done.

The worst parts include Fischer's anti-American rant on 9/11/01 while the World Trade Center is burning, his jailing in Pasadena and subsequent "cult classic" book describing his ordeal, and scenes of his spitting on the State Department document warning him not to play Spassky in 1992.

There is also the factual error in claiming that Fischer went undefeated in the 1971 candidates matches when in fact he lost a game to Tigran Petrosian.

Probably the low point from a TV critic's standpoint occurs when journalist Rene Chun commits the following redundancy in explaining why Fischer decided to end his 20-years retirement, saying that Fischer was "broke, destitute, homeless, and he needed money."

The subtitle of the Game Show Network's documentary The Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer foreshadows a much harsher treatment of Fischer than he got from the Biography Channel. The fact that a prior episode in the Anything to Win series featured figure skater Tonya Harding indicates that the subjects were chosen for their notoriety. Here there is a lot of Freudian psycho-babble about "paranoia", "psychopathic tendencies", and "mentally ill", not to mention plain insults like "something wrong with the man" and "he's become rotten inside."

Many of the same people who were interviewed by the Biography Channel also appear here, but some new interviewees are grandmasters Robert Byrne and Helgi Olafsson; international master Anthony Saidy; FIDE master Asa Hoffmann; executives Allen Kaufman, Gudmundur Thorarinsson, and Lilja Gretarsdottir; Worldwide Church of God member Harry Sneider; ESPN sports correspondent Jeremy Schaap; journalists Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson; and Shelby Lyman of public television fame.

The best parts of this documentary come from TV archives: 15-year-old Bobby Fischer's appearance on I've Got a Secret in 1958, and the newly-crowned World Champion's triumphant entrance onstage at the Bob Hope Show in 1972.

The worst parts include Fischer's anti-Semitic rants on Philippines radio, his infamous televised encounter with Dick Schaap's son Jeremy in Reykjavik on 3/25/05, a ridiculous photograph of Fischer wearing a party hat while living at Ambassador College, and the inexplicable fact that both Saidy and Kaufman are given the label "childhood friend" in the TV graphics instead of their true titles. Worse still, a photograph of Robert Byrne, instead of his brother Donald, is mistakenly shown during a discussion of "The Game of the Century."

Despite these shortcomings, I liked the GSN presentation better than the one on the Biography Channel for two reasons. First, it openly discusses the likelihood that Fischer's biological father was Paul Nemenyi and even shows side-by-side photographs of Nemenyi and Fischer where a clear resemblance can be seen. And, second, it shows a Fischer who is "content with himself" in Iceland, as Helgi Olafsson describes him. In other words, this is a happier ending to the work in progress known as Bobby Fischer's life.

{This article originally appeared in the January-March 2006 issue of Atlantic Chess News}