Word: chess
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Both sides are playing the campaign as if it were an intricate daily chess game. Take the subtle feints and counterfeints behind last Tuesday's back-to- back appearances by Bush and Clinton before the National Guard convention in Salt Lake City. Even the Clinton team admits that Bush played like an international grand master. The first move belonged to the President, who announced at the last minute that he would speak to the National Guard, presumably to attack Clinton on the draft. Clinton responded by scrambling his schedule and racing to Salt Lake City...
...return of Bobby Fischer, the biggest comeback since Napoleon sailed a single-masted flat-bottom out of Elba (on his way, mind you, to Waterloo), has been widely noted but quite misunderstood. After 20 years of self-imposed seclusion, the greatest chess player of his time returns to life by way of a rematch with Boris Spassky (the man from whom he took the world championship in 1972) in, of all places, Yugoslavia. The picture flashed around the world is that of Fischer spitting on a U.S. government order charging him with violating the U.N. embargo on Yugoslavia. The papers...
Fischer's deranged politics, indeed his thoughts on anything other than chess, are of no interest. One does not learn asceticism from Elvis. One does not learn social etiquette from Howard Hughes. One does not learn politics from Bobby Fischer. Fischer once said, "Chess is life." We should take him at his word. There is no more to his life than chess...
...looniness. Someone seized with his hallucinatory visions may be playing in embargoed Yugoslavia but is living on the moon. Fischer is no more situated in this world than was another world champion, Alexander Alekhine, who, when apprehended at the Polish frontier for lack of papers, retorted, "I am Alekhine, chess champion of the world. This is my cat. Her name is Chess. I need no passport...
...Fischer phenomenon is more poignant still. He never was the Crosby, Stills and Nash of chess. He was the Beatles -- the greatest player of his age, probably the greatest player ever. Wayne Gretzky once won the scoring championship of the National Hockey League, with 205 points. The runner-up had 126. There was once that much distance between Fischer and the world. His play was incandescent. Moreover, his mysterious exile, his 20-year disappearance into a netherworld of shabby Pasadena hotels, only added to the legend...