Bobby Fischer's longtime companion still angry over treatment of chess icon

DOHA, Qatar (AP) - Bobby Fischer is still living the quiet life in Iceland, the home he adopted after being held in Japanese custody for nearly a year. He still refuses to play chess, at least the version that everybody else plays. And he's still a wanted man, as far as the U.S. government is concerned.

Beyond that, there are many things the world may never know about the reclusive chess icon, and Miyoko Watai, Fischer's longtime companion, says she isn't going to break the silence.

"I prefer not to talk about private things," said Watai, who is in Qatar to manage Japan's chess team at the Asian Games.

Watai got swept up in the Fischer saga after he was detained, "kidnapped" is the word she and Fischer use, by Japanese authorities at Tokyo's Narita airport in July 2004. He ended up staying in a Japanese immigration detention center for nine months fighting extradition to the United States before fleeing with Watai to Iceland.

While he was in Japanese custody, Fischer and Watai, who is also head of the Japan chess association, were engaged to be married. At a news conference before leaving Japan, she denied allegations the engagement was just a ploy to confound the Japanese immigration officials, saying Fischer was her king and she wanted to be his queen.

"I'd rather not say," Watai said Thursday in a rare interview with The Associated Press. "I live in Japan now. But I go back and forth."

She does not hesitate, however, to say how bitter she remains over the way Fischer was treated.

"It's very sad," she said. "He can't travel anywhere. He's still on their list. He can't go back."

The Chicago-born, Brooklyn-bred Fischer is wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Cold War rival Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.

The American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer became an icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.

But his reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed for many by his idiosyncracies..

A few years after the Spassky match, he forfeited the title to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it. He then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to play the exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan. Fischer won, but the game was played in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic.

He faces severe punishment in the United States, if convicted, he could face 10 years in prison and a fine of US$250,000.

Watai, who is 61, said Fischer stopped playing chess long ago, giving it up for a version of his own known as Fischer Random, or chess 960.

The idea behind the changes is that they reduce the usefulness of memorizing old strategies and make each game more unique, forcing players to think faster on their feet.

"Grandmasters play it sometimes," Watai said. "But it has been slow in catching on because too many people make their livings writing books about how to play the game the way it is."

Watai, herself an established expert in the game, said she agrees with Fischer that the chess world is in need of a shakeup.

"People now have memorized all the variations for the first 20 or 30 moves," she said. "It has become boring, rote. It has lost the dream."

Even so, she is hoping to lead the Japanese team, two high school boys and a 65-year-old grandmother, to a top 10 finish at the Asian Games, a sort of regional Olympics where the traditional style of chess is being included as a medal-producing sport for the first time.

You recall correctly. From Wiki:

Anti-Semitic radio interviews
Fischer, whose mother and possible biological father Paul Nemenyi were both of Jewish descent, made occasional hostile comments toward Jews from at least the early 1960s. From the 1980s, however, anti-Semitism was a major theme of his public remarks. He denied the "Holocaust of the Jews," announced his desire to make "expos[ing] the Jews for the criminals they are [...] the murderers they are" his lifework, and argued that the United States is "a farce controlled by dirty, hook-nosed, circumcised Jew bastards." [11]

In 1999, he gave a call-in interview to a radio station in Budapest, Hungary, during which he described himself as the "victim of an international Jewish conspiracy." Fischer's sudden re-emergence was apparently triggered when some of his belongings, which had been stored in a Pasadena, California storage unit, were sold by the landlord, who claimed it was in response to nonpayment of rent. Fischer interpreted this as further evidence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy perpetrated by "the Jew-controlled U.S. Government" to defame and destroy him [12]. In 2005, some of Fischer's belongings were auctioned on eBay.

Fischer participated in at least 33 such broadcasts between 1999 and 2005, mostly with radio stations in the Philippines, but also with stations in Iceland, Colombia, and Russia. Fischer made disparaging remarks about the political situation in chess, alleging that every World Championship match since he had left the scene in 1975 had been pre-arranged.

For some years Fischer lived in Budapest, where he became acquainted with the Polgár family. He played Fischer Random Blitz as well as analyzed many games with Zsuzsa Polgar. He did not get along with her two younger sisters Judit and Zsofia. He later lived in Japan.

Radio interview after the September 11, 2001 attacks Hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks Fischer was interviewed live[6] by Pablo Mercado on the Baguio City station of the Bombo Radyo network, shortly after midnight September 12, 2001 Philippines local time (or shortly after noon on September 11, 2001, New York time). Fischer commented on U.S and Israeli foreign policy that "nobody cares ... [that] the US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians for years". Informed that "the White House and Pentagon have been attacked", he proclaimed "This is all wonderful news". Fischer stated "What goes around comes around even for the United States" and said that if the U.S. fails to change its foreign policy, it "has to be destroyed." After calling for President Bush's death, Fischer also stated he hoped that a Seven Days in May-type military coup d' etat would take over power in the U.S. and then execute "hundreds of thousands of American Jewish leaders", "arrest all the Jews" and "close all synagogues".

Subsequent to that interview, Fischer's "right to membership in the United States Chess Federation [was] cancelled" by a unanimous 7-0 decisionof the USCF Executive Board, taken on October 28, 2001. In 2006, that decision was subsequently "vacated" by the same Board.

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