While conducting a search that turned into an obsession, the author discovers a great deal about the chess genius who drifted into seclusion after winning the world title.

In 1958, at age 15, Bobby Fischer became the youngest chess player in history to become a grandmaster. AP

RELATED • Chess champion Bobby Fischer dies at 64

By William Nack

About six years ago, sportscaster Dick Schaap was visiting Wilt Chamberlain in Wilt's celebrated California mansion when Schaap got the idea of trying to get in touch with his old friend Bobby Fischer. Schaap had known him since the 1950s, when Fischer was a rising chess star in New York and Schaap was a young magazine reporter assigned to cover him.

So Schaap called Fischer's closest friend and confidance, Claudia Mokarow in Pasadena, and asked her to tell Bobby to contact him at Chamberlain's home.

Soon afterward, Bobby rang back.

"Are you really at Wilt's house?" an astonished Bobby asked. Schaap assured him he was.

"I'd reallylike to see that house!"

"Would you like to join us for dinner?" Schaap asked.

"I'd like to," Bobby Fischer said, "but I'm not seeing people."

At 7:51 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, April 3, this year, as I was walking out of the history department of the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, I stopped for a moment by the card-catalog files in the library's second-floor rotunda. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, I had one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

The library was closing in nine minutes, and for about the last half hour I had experienced that hollow sensation I had grown to know so well, the one that always accompanied the awareness of another day lost in Palo Alto, another afternoon misspent in Pasadena, another evening busted and shot in Los Angeles. Off and on for almost two years, I had been to all those places and more looking in vain for Robert James (Bobby) Fischer.

To find him, to see him, had become a kind of crazy and delirious obsession, the kind of insanity that has hounded other men in search of, say, the Loch Ness monster. Fischer was the most gifted prodigy in chess, the game's equivalent of Mozart. At age 15, in 1958, he became the youngest player in history to become a grandmaster, and his performance at the Interzonal and Candidates' matches in 1970 and 1971 -- in which he won an unprecedented 20 straight games against some of the strongest players in the world, without playing a single game to a draw -- remains today the most enduring signature of his art and skill. When, in the summer of 1972, he overwhelmed Soviet world champion Boris Spassky in Iceland to win the world title, he merely reaffirmed what most chess masters already believed and still believe today. By a consensus of grandmasters, he had become the strongest chess player in history. "The greatest genius to have descended from the chess heavens," Mikhail Tal of Latvia, the forrner world champion, once said.

During those two months in Iceland, Fischer attained a folkloric celebrity that attracted millions of Americans to a game they had long associated with the relative obscurity of park benches and coffeehouses. Looking out from the cover of national magazines that wild summer, he was depicted as a gallant cold warrior, a solitary Arnerican genius taking on and crushing the Soviet chess juggernaut, with its Moscow computers and its small army of grandmasters arrayed against him.

The 29-year-old Fischer emerged a hero, of course, but he promptly rejected scores of offers, worth millions of dollars, to capitalize on his fame. In fact, though promising to be a fighting champion, he turned back every offer to play chess again. To this day, since Spassky resigned in the 21st and final game on Sept. 1, 1972, Fischer has not played a single game of chess in public. He forfeited his world title in 1975, turning down a multimillion-dollar offer to play challenger Anatoly Karpov in the Philippines when the world chess federation refused to meet all his conditions for the match.

So Bobby Fischer was gone. Ever since he won the championship, Fischer had been drifting quietly into seclusion, finding refuge in Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, a fundamentalist cult that observes Saturday as the Sabbath and believes in the Second Coming. After several years of serving as what is called a coworker -- Fischer hadn't been baptized -- he left the church, too, and since then has retreated even further into his own private world. It is one in which journalists are not permitted. Indeed, his closest friends are sworn not to speak about him to the press, under the threat of Bobby banishing them forever from his life.

After Fischer relinquished the title, Karpov was named champion. Karpov still holds the title, but his crown has not been without a singularly painful thorn, for Fischer is still alive, out there somewhere in Southern California. No longer merely a former world chess champion, he has grown to almost mythic size, leaving behind him a trail of rumors and a chess world that is still reaching out for him in the void.

Much the same kind of effect was created in the 1850s when Paul Morphy, a New Orleans chess prodigy then recognized as the world champion, returned in triumph from Europe and soon simply stopped playing. Morphy was regarded as one of the game's true innovators. Fischer revered him. They are the only two Americans ever acclaimed as world chess champions, and there remains that striking parallel in their careers. "Fischer's like Morphy," says international master Igor Ivanov, a Soviet defector. "What's the story with you Americans? You win the title, go home and don't play any more."

Later in his life, after abandoning chess altogether, Morphy suffered from delusions of persecution and withdrew into his own private world. Occasionally he strolled the streets of New Orleans, muttering, in French, "He will plant the banner of Castille upon the walls of Madrid, amidst the cries of the conquered city, and the little king will go away looking very sheepish." He died of apoplexy, at age 47.

But Fischer is still alive, and still very much on many minds. Until recently Robert J. Fisher lived in Pasadena, just about a mile east of where Bobby was arrested in 1981 for allegedly holding up a bank. Fisher installs cable television and spells his name without the "c," but over the years he has received telephone calls from all over the world, often at three in the morning, awakening to hear:

"This is the international operator, Mr. Fisher. You have a telephone call from Yugoslavia." Or the Soviet Union, or Czechoslovakia, or Bulgaria, or Germany.

Almost invariably, the voices speak broken English and cry out, "Boooby! Are you Booby Fischer, the chess player?"

To which Bob Fisher will sing back, "Wrong number! This is Bob Fisher, the cable-television guy."

Fischer is out there, to be sure, but so elusive as to be almost a figment of the imagination. "It's like this god of chess hanging over everybody's head," says American grandmaster Larry Christiansen.

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