Review: ‘Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall’

It starts sunnily, with Fischer as a chess prodigy in Brooklyn (he was born in Chicago, at Michael Reese Hospital, but his homeless, single mother soon left the city) haunting the New York chess clubs and quickly rising to prominence. It’s the most appetizing part of the book, reading how high school classmate Barbra Streisand had a crush on him (“I found him very sexy,” the singer later said).

Chess was everything to Fischer. He studied constantly, working out games on a tiny board, furious at being beaten, muttering that his opponents had been “lucky.”

A fan of the radio, he became friends with Jean Shepherd and followed Herbert W. Armstrong’s “Radio Church of God,” the beginning of a lifelong adherence to fringe evangelical churches (though his mother was Jewish, Bobby never practiced the faith).

The deterioration started early.

“He was becoming a super-celebrity in the world of chess, but the more fame he achieved, the more unpleasant his behavior became,” Brady writes. “Inflamed by his successes on the board, his ego had begun to shut out other people. Gone was Charming Bobby with his electric smile. Enter Problematic Bobby with the disdainful attitude and frequently flashed warning scowl.”

Brady gamely chronicles Fischer’s astounding lapses and vengeful pronouncements, but his heart isn’t in giving Fischer the revulsion he deserves. Brady has the tendency to blurt out sentiments such as, after watching Fischer explain chess strategy at a Greenwich Village bar: “I began to weep quietly, aware that in that time-suspended moment I was in the presence of genius.”

It skews his judgment. Whatever living in L.A. flophouses and wandering around with your possessions in shopping bags while handing out hate tracts represents, whatever serving as a paid propaganda tool for Serbian butcher Slobodan Milosevic illustrates, “different-drum sensibilities” doesn’t seem to cover it. “He often preferred to dine alone; like Thomas Jefferson in the White House,” Brady writes. “He enjoyed his own company.” At least someone did. Brady ends the book by quoting one of Fischer’s Icelandic fans — that country was one of the few places in the world where Fischer could find refuge, in gratitude for bringing them international notice — deeming him “a caring and sensitive person.”

One of the Polgar girls — chess play-prodigies who tried to befriend Fischer — sum it up far more accurately: “He was an extremely great chess player, but crazy, a sick psycho.”

Brady does generally keep his panting fandom in check, enough to offer his unique perspective into the sad spectacle of Bobby Fischer’s life, a fascinating, depressing tale of how a person can be so good at one thing and so bad at everything else.