Chess legend and egocentric Bobby Fischer died yesterday. A more then erratic, sometimes dangerous character. After his legendary match in 1972 in Island, where he defeated russian chess-guru Boris Spassky, he became the symbol of "beating the sowjet powers" in the cold war for the US. Not happy with that image, his life was pretty much a complete escape after that. He disappeared for 20! years until a new match against Spassky in 1992 in Belgrad/Jugoslavia (a country that was then under an US-embargo). He was sentenced to jail by the US for playing the tournament in Belgrad, and therefor never came back to USA again. Instead he disappeared for another 12 years without being seen until he was arrested in Tokyo in 2004 in a poor mental and physical condition (foto). By then he was obviously eaten up by his ever growing hate for... well, almost everything, besides chess. That's why he will not only be remembered as one of the best chess players in history, but also for turning into a weirdo, becoming an ugly anti-semit, denying the holocaust, welcoming the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and wishing the demise of the USA.
Prefab Sprout wrote this fantastic weird-but-beautiful pop-song about him on their first album SWOON in 1982, which is - suitably enough - also quite erratic... Unfortunately my english is not good enough to understand the lyrics well. In case you don't know the unique music of Paddy MacAloon's PREFAB SPROUT: this is another case of "everybody should own at least one album of PREFAB SPROUT before dying". I recommend "STEVE MCQUEEN", which is definetly one of my ALL-TIME-Favorite albums. Jaja!
