22 Volume 33, I s sue 5 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

THE SKEPTICAL PSYCHOLOGISTR O B E R T E P S T E I N

Is it possible for someone to be ex-tremely intelligent and creative in acertain field and at the same time, in

other respects, to be simple minded?The answer is yes.

Consider Isaac Newton. He was cer-tainly a genius in the fields of mathe-matics and physics. On the other handhe devoted most of his life to studyingthe prophecies of the Bible, calculatingthe year in which God created theentire universe in six days, and deter-mining the probable year that Jesuswould return!

Consider Arthur Conan Doyle. Hewas a brilliant writer, creator ofSherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, yethe firmly believed in the reality offairies. He even wrote an entire bookdefending the authenticity of severalcrude photographs of the tiny wingedfairies taken by two little girls.

My third example is Bobby Fischer,perhaps the greatest chess player of alltime, certainly the best known. I havewritten elsewhere about Newton andDoyle. Here I will tell briefly the sadstory of Fischer.

Robert James Fischer was born in

Chicago in 1943 the illegitimate son ofJewish parents. His Polish mother,Regina, was an active Communist anda great admirer of the Soviet Union.She had a brief affair with Bobby’sGerman father.

Bobby grew up in Brooklyn. At agesix he became captivated by chess. Atfourteen he was the U.S. chess cham-pion. The following year he was declareda grandmaster. In 1972 he became worldchampion by defeating Boris Spassky ata tournament in Iceland. There is not theslightest doubt that Bobby was a genius,with a mind that could have made him a

great mathematician had events in hischildhood taken a different turn.

Aside from chess, Fischer came closeto being a moron. I once thought hisrefusal to play chess on Saturday wasbecause he was Jewish. No, it was be-

cause he had become a convert to theWorldwide Church of God, a strangesect founded by former Seventh-dayAdventist Herbert W. Armstrong. Likethe Adventists, Armstrong believedthat Saturday is still the God-appointed Sabbath. In 1972 Bobbygave $61,000 to Armstrong, part ofthe prize money he had won by defeat-ing Spassky.

The Worldwide Church of Godwas soon scandalized by the womaniz-ing of Herbert’s son Garner Ted. Afterbeing excommunicated by his father,Ted moved to Tyler, Texas, where hecontinued to preach his father’s doc-trines. Disenchanted by this rift in theWorldwide Church—and on oneoccasion physically assaulting a ladyofficial of the church—Fischer left thefold to become an ardent admirer ofHitler and the Nazis!

Fischer’s hatred of Jews turned para-noid. Pictures of Hitler decorated hislodgings. He denied the Holocaust.America, he was convinced, had falleninto the hands of “stinking Jews.” Whenthe September 11, 2001, attacks oc-curred, he called it “wonderful news.”Wanted by the U.S. government for vio-lating an order not to play a return

NOTES OF A FRINGE WATCHERM A R T I N G A R D N E R

Bobby Fischer:Genius and Idiot

Chess legend Bobby Fischer, the former U.S.champion turned fugitive from U.S. authorities

Martin Gardner is author of more thanseventy books, most recently The Jinnfrom Hyperspace. His next, When YouWere a Tadpole and I was a Fish, andOther Speculations About This andThat, is forthcoming from Hill and Wangin October 2009.

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match with Spassky in Yugoslavia,Fischer renounced his U.S. citizenshipand settled in Iceland.

Fischer died of kidney failure in2008. His Japanese wife, Myoko Wakai,flew to Iceland for the funeral. A devoutBuddhist and the woman’s chess cham-pion of Japan, she and Fischer werelegally married after living together for ashort period. Presumably she will inheritFischer’s sizeable fortune.

John Carlin, in an article titled “TheEnd Game of Bobby Fischer” in theObserver/Guardian (February 10,2008), described Fischer, during hisfinal years, as looking like a homelessbum. “His teeth were rotten, and hiswhite hair and beard were long andunkempt.” Bobby had a low opinion ofdoctors and dentists. He had all themetal fillings in his teeth removedbecause he thought radiation fromthem was injuring his health, or per-haps American or Russian enemies werecausing the harmful radiation from hismolars. Fischer seldom changed his

clothes or removed his baseball cap.After his death in 2008 at age sixty-four, he was buried late one night neara tiny church in Iceland. A brief, shabbyfuneral was attended by a Catholicpriest he had never known.

Fischer had an older sister, Joan, whodied a few years earlier. She was the wifeof Russell Targ, the physicist and para-psychologist whose chief claim to fameis having validated the psychic powers ofUri Geller. !

In 1972, in Helsinki, Bobby Fischer broke twenty-four years of Soviet dominance by defeating Boris Spassky.

There’s much more SKEPTICAL INQUIRER content available on our Web site!

Karen Stollznow’s column The Naked Skeptic:“Psychics Aren’t Psychic Anymore” discusses the trendaway from the word psychic in favor of intuitive.

Austin Dacey’s column Circumnavigations:“Does Science Unite?” asks, does science foster a universal culture? Julian Huxley thought so,and wrote this into the mandate of the U.N.What happened?

For more online columns, features, and special content,visit www.csicop.org/whatsnew.

Here’s a sample of what you’ll find atwww.csicop.org:

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