Every move you make

Bobby Fischer, who died last week, was an unlikely superstar of a time when chess mattered

Chess is not friendly to prose. Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what8217;s exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game. 8220;Then, on move 21, came Black8217;s crusher: a6!8221; 8212; totally opaque, as are references to the

Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense, the Giuoco Piano, and the Queen8217;s Gambit Declined. You can ignore the technical stuff and write about powerful queenside attacks, hammering rook assaults, intense positional struggle, and so on; but the truth is that the game is the technical stuff. A move that counts as dramatic is a move disclosed after an exhaustive analysis of all other possible moves, and the analysis can take forty minutes or more. Then someone reaches out and pushes a little piece of wood two inches. To readers who have not pondered the alternatives themselves, and who already think that the huddles in football take too long, it8217;s hard to communicate the thrill8230;

An activity this resistant to the usual blandishments of sports journalism attracts public attention only when something besides chess seems to be at stake. No other chess match has ever come close to attracting the kind of attention that the 1972 world-championship match, between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, did. It was advertised as 8220;the Match of the Century.8221; It inspired a pop song, 8216;The Ballad of Bobby Fischer,8217; performed by Joe Glazer and his Fianchettoed Bishops. Fischer8217;s face was on the cover of Life, the Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, and Der Spiegel. Life reported on the match8230;

One possible reason for the world8217;s interest was the Cold War8230;After Reykjaviacute;k, and a few grudging public appearances, Fischer went off the radar screen. Fischer gave an interview on a Philippine radio station on September 11, 2001, in which he said that 8220;America got what it deserved.8221; 8230; In the end, he revealed himself to be not a rebel or a mad genius but 8212;what was fairly obvious all along 8212; a delusional paranoid. As a chess-playing psychologist, William Hartston, said: 8220;Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.8221;

Excerpted from Louis Menand8217;s 8216;Game Theory8217; from the January issue of the 8216;New Yorker8217;