How Bobby Fischer brought chess to America.

Bobby Fischer, the American chess icon whose name became synonymous with the game in the United States, died of kidney failure in an Iceland hospital Thursday. Fischer, who was 64, won the world chess championship against Russian Boris Spassky in 1972, making him the first American in more than a century to take the prize. In a "Sandbox" column published last May, Ann Hulbert discussed how Fischer popularized the game—and how his decline and disappearance, ironically, kept it going. The article is reprinted below.

In January of 1958, three months after Sputnik triggered an educational panic in America much like today's angst about the global talent race, a 14-year-old boy from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn made headlines: Bobby Fischer became the youngest U.S. champion in a cerebral sport long associated with genius—and long dominated by the Russians. The game, of course, was chess, and 15 years later—during his antic showdown with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972—Fischer became, of all things, America's best-known sports celebrity. For the football nation, heretofore bored by the slow-moving board game and generally ambivalent about super-braininess, Fischer ("the greatest natural player in history") had become an emblematic figure: proof that innate talent will triumph in America, even—or especially—without Soviet-style systematic, elite, professionalized training. It didn't hurt that Fischer, with his fabulous suits and snits—even the way he snatched up an opponent's pieces—had a rock star's gift for upstart drama.

It's a whole different ball—I guess I should say chess—game now than when Fischer was growing up, due in no small part to Bobby himself. His triumphs and the prize money he demanded helped transform what had been considered an obsession of "shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men" (as H.G. Wells put it) into an alluring form of mental recreation in the 1970s. Chess clubs surged, then faded again when Fischer failed to resurface after his disappearance. But by the late 1980s, chess had acquired cachet as a cutting-edge youthful extracurricular pursuit and began to infiltrate high-priced private schools and inner-city public schools. In the early 1990s, the successful film version of Searching for Bobby Fischer, Fred Waitzkin's memoir about his chess-prodigy son, Josh, confirmed that the "sport of thinking" was on the cultural map for kids and parents. Just last month a record number of players—1,448—showed up for the 2007 National High School Chess Championship in Kansas City. The top group was especially strong. In the lead were two international masters, Alex Lenderman and Salvijus Bercys. They are members of the championship chess team at Edward R. Murrow High School, a couple of miles from Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn—and along with their teammates and coach, a math teacher named Eliot Weiss, they are also the stars of Michael Weinreb's new book, The Kings of New York,an account of a mercurial year spent with the (mostly) boys and their boards.

In one sense, what has happened over the past 35 years could be described as the domestication of chess: the transformation of an abstruse game allied with innate brilliance (and madness) into an educational tool for training mental skills and attitudes. The new guise goes against the Fischer image—the temperamental, egocentric high-school dropout who cultivated his American rebel aura. It may even be that the mainstreaming of the game contributed to driving the chess monomaniac underground. (One Fischer fan, a clinical psychologist, speculates in Waitzkin's book that the famously oppositional figure balked at the chess fad, devoting himself instead to an obsession—anti-Semitism—he could be sure wouldn't catch on.) In turn, Fischer's eclipse has inspired a chorus of nostalgia. Weinreb joins Waitzkin and others in lamenting the blow to the chess brand: With Bobby's sustained star power, the game could have been permanently rescued from the underpaid margins and established as a well-remunerated, publicly venerated career.

Yet getting the overweening Fischer off the stage was also arguably—and ironically—what saved chess from becoming too, well, Russian: a professional, hierarchical, instrumental enterprise aimed at precociously winnowing, honing, and systematically steering hyped young talent toward the rewards not just of expertise but of officially sanctioned status and privilege. (To be sure, the Soviet system wasn't as well-oiled as lore would have it: Poor Spassky was surrounded by hapless advisers in Reykjavik.) Instead, chess has held onto a certain purity, along with its penury. In an era when sports in the United States are a big business, as well as a fraught element of college admissions, chess offers kids in our overprogrammed youth culture a rare exposure to the real meaning and value of amateurism—the mastery of something for its own sake. Chess isn't going to earn anybody much of a living, but it can teach kids about learning—though it tells them absolutely nothing about how to apply that to life, or, for that matter, even to school. How is that for liberating?