American Bobby Fischer became the International chess champion in Reykjavík, Iceland, following the withdrawal from match 21 by Soviet player Boris Spassky.
I can dimly recall this, as it was really followed at the time, even though I was only nine years old. Then, as now, it was hard for me to really grasp the interest in this event. I like the game, but as an international sporting event, if that's what we'd call it, it's a little hard to grasp.
The Cold War must principally explain it.
Fischer's prize was $154,677.50, a substantial haul nor or then.
Fischer was an odd character and hard to like. He was anti-Semitic and became a Holocaust denier, even though his mother was Jewish. After the 1972 victory, he didn't play a competitive game in public for another 20 years, although he did play against MIT's Greenblatt computer in 1977, beating it three times. In the early 1990s he replayed Spassky in Yugoslavia, where he won again but where he also didn't seem to have evolved in the game. Spassky remained friends with Fischer throughout his life and introduced him to a known serious love interest of Fischer's, with that latter relationship not lasting, not too surprisingly.
The Yugoslavia match violated economic sanctions in place and made Fischer a fugitive from justice from the United States. He lived in various places before going back to Reykjavík, where he died in 2005 at age 64. A member of the Worldwide Church of God for much of his life, just prior to his death he became intensely interested in Catholicism and requested a Catholic funeral.
The United States dropped its claims on the Swan Islands in favor of Honduras.
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