Bobby and Me, Partners in Crime
Bobby Fischer’s been in the slammer in Japan of all places, since last summer. Never having seen the inside of a Japanese prison, my prejudices have me imagining it as squeaky-clean, super efficient and strict-but-fair in the best traditions of the Samurai. I could be wrong. Quality-control wise, prisons are unreliable places.
But all that’s about to change and may already have changed by the time you read this, because Iceland’s Parliament jumped through the proscribed legislative hoops pursuant to granting our wayward American chess champion Icelandic citizenship. If all goes well, Iceland will send a diplomatic delegation to Japan and spirit the spirit of chess from the clink to Reykjavik, the city of his thirty-three year ago defeat of Russian champion Boris Spassky.
Bobby got in trouble with America when he went to Belgrade in Yugoslavia to play an exhibition match in 1992. All of this is very ancient history, but the U.S. is amazingly unforgiving when their nose has been tweak…