Fischer and Belichick share something in common

Bobby Fischer, Bill Belichick share something in common
By Michael Weinreb
Special to Page 2
ESPN

In the early 1970s, long before he began ranting about Jews who kill Christian children and wield their blood in black-magic ceremonies, long before he had his dental fillings removed for fear of signals being monitored by unspeakable forces through his mouth, Bobby Fischer won 20 consecutive chess matches against some of the best competition on earth, on his way to qualifying for the world championship. In a confounding game with an endless number of permutations, where draws are commonplace and losses are inevitable, it was one of the great competitive accomplishments of the 20th century, a streak of such proportion that in the midst of it one Soviet news agency declared, “A miracle has occurred.”

Fischer died last Friday at age 64, reportedly because he refused medical treatment for an illness that led to kidney failure. He was, then and now, the greatest American chess player who ever lived; he eventually won the world championship in 1972, against a Russian named Boris Spassky, briefly propelling chess into mainstream culture. And yet his aloofness and acute paranoia, his weird single-minded insistence upon seeing everything in life through the veil of a game, ultimately obscured his legacy.

If that sounds like a familiar story line, it should. We see it all the time these days in sports, if only on a less exaggerated scale. Barry Bonds: paranoid, aloof. Bill Belichick: paranoid, aloof. “Bill Belichick actually had two childhoods: A normal American childhood and then a football childhood as well,” David Halberstam wrote in his book, “Education of a Coach.” “As a boy he spoke two languages — English and coach-speak, football version. Other kids had their hobbies; some collected postage stamps and others had baseball cards, but Bill studied football film.”

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