Two months later Joan and I and our children flew to Iceland to watch Joan's brother Bobby Fischer compete for the chess championship of the world against then-champion Boris Spassky from the USSR. Joan had taught Bobby to play chess when they were children on vacation in an old seaside cottage by the New Jersey shore. Joan was ten and Bobby was five when they serendipitously came across an old scrapbook containing several years of carefully collected chess puzzles from a local paper. Joan taught her little brother the moves with the aid of a one-dollar plastic chess set, and the rest, as they say, is “history.”
It had been a tremendous struggle to get notoriously tem-peramental Bobby to agree to sign up for any financial or official physical arrangements. Finally, with tireless handholding and brilliant negotiation at home and abroad by my attorney Andrew Davis—for which he was of course unpaid—Bobby actually got on a plane to Iceland. After forfeiting a game over playing conditions (a TV tower on the stage), Bobby won the match 12½ to 8½ and became the first and thus far only U.S. Chess Champion of the World. The gentlemanly Spassky came to Iceland to celebrate chess. Bobby came to Iceland to crush Spassky.
That's what we call single-pointed focus of attention. And the outcome is what one would expect. The Hindu sage Patanjali taught that with this intense focus, you can learn to see into the distance as well as the future. You can even heal the sick and diagnose illness and that teaching corresponds to my own parapsychology research findings through the years, as well as the Russians', though at that time the Russians were mainly interested in distant behavior modification (things like remote strangulation, described in my book The Mind Race). The Russians were afraid that Bobby was using some kind of ESP trick to crush Spassky, so they insisted on taking apart his special leather chair. But, when asked about ESP and mental conditioning, Bobby said in an interview before the match, “I don't believe in psychology. I just believe in good moves.”
One bright night while we were still in Iceland with Bobby (it was July), we all went bowling at the U.S. Army base. Of course I can't see bowling pins very well, but I throw the ball really hard, and it often hits something. The next day, newspapers published a story about how Bobby had rudely thrown food at a waiter in the hotel restaurant that evening. He wasn't even in the hotel! But newspapers have never been kind to Bobby. In fact, whenever I have been personally involved in a news story—whether about lasers, ESP, or Bobby—the story has been significantly bogus or distorted, offering more opportunities to question reality.
(...)
THE BOBBY SAGAIn the winter of 1992, Joan went to Europe for an extended visit with Bobby, whom she had seen very little of in the past twenty years, since he'd won the World Chess Championship in Iceland. Bobby had just won a twentieth anniversary rematch of that famous event with Boris Spassky—with a score of ten wins, five losses and fifteen draws—at a seaside resort in Yugoslavia. Because of the regional conflicts in various parts of that country, the first President Bush had declared a trade embargo on Yugoslavia, but Bobby chose to play there anyway. By winning the match, he came away with about $3.5 million. Since the president apparently had no other ideas about what to do regarding the Yugoslav situation, he declared the Chess Champion of the world to be persona non grata, and subject to immediate arrest should he appear in the U.S. Bobby wisely decided to go to Budapest and stay with his good friends the Polgar family and their three attractive, chess-playing daughters—grandmaster Judit, along with Zsuzsa and Sofia. Judit became a grandmaster at fifteen, making her the youngest in history—even younger than Bobby. Today at thirty, she is still the strongest woman chess player, having beaten many of her male counterparts. There in Budapest is where Joan met up with Bobby.
Bobby Fischer never returned to the U.S. He lived in Hungary, Germany, and Japan. He was greatly celebrated in Japan, even though that country is not usually thought of as a chess-playing people. But in fact, there is an active chess community, and in August 2004 Bobby became engaged to marry Miyoko Watai, the Japanese women's champion and president of the Japanese Chess Association. He had been happily living with Watai in Japan and traveling with her all over the world for the previous four years, when he was suddenly and unexpectedly arrested on July 14, 2004, at Tokyo/Narita airport while on his way to the Philippines. Japanese immigration told him that he was on a U.S. watch list because his U.S. passport had been cancelled—in spite of the fact that he had renewed it at the U.S. embassy in Switzerland only three months earlier. Since he no longer had a valid U.S. passport, the U.S. government connived with the Koizumi government to imprison Bobby for the crime of being in Japan without a valid passport! Bobby was forced to spend the next eight months of his life in a stinking Japanese jail for absolutely nothing—on this bogus Kafkaesque charge.
During Bobby's imprisonment, I worked with Bobby's fiancée, Watai, and a very hardworking Canadian reporter in Japan, John Bosnitch, to try and get Bobby a German passport, since his father of record, Gerhardt Fischer, was a German citizen at the time of Bobby's birth. Although we made many calls and I miraculously located and sent all the required passports and birth certificates for both Bobby and Gerhardt to the German Bureau of Citizenship, they dragged their feet, and nothing happened. We were told through back channels at the German Consulate in the United States that the powerful German foreign minister, Joshka Fischer—no relation—didn't want to grant Bobby German citizenship because of his outspoken and quite crazy anti-Semitic remarks. In fact, from the perspective of German Blood Law, Bobby was a German citizen ipso facto because of his father's native-born citizenship. But, it didn't help.
Just as Bobby was about to be turned over to the U.S. marshals to be brought back to the U.S. in chains for a “show” trial and to spend the rest of his life in prison, the Icelandic government decided—through the passionate urging of his many friends in Iceland—to give Bobby full Icelandic citizenship because of the great credit and celebrity he had brought to Iceland during the 1972 World Championship match. We all were thrilled. Watai and his Icelandic friends, who had come to Japan to pick him up, were especially thrilled. But Bobby, as usual, was marching to a different drummer. On his supposed last day in jail in Japan, the guards were serving hard-boiled eggs for breakfast to the low-security inmates, and they gave Bobby an egg. But Bobby wanted two eggs, and a scuffle ensued between the diminutive guards and six-foot-three-inch, 220-pound Bobby. That landed him in solitary confinement, instead of on a plane to freedom in Iceland. We all had to beg the Japanese to let the rascal go. On March 25, 2005, after four days of face-saving, he was finally released, and he and Watai successfully left for Iceland, where they were living very quietly on Bobby's winnings from the Yugoslav match until Bobby's untimely death on January 17, 2008. Bobby's situation in Iceland was akin to the chess position called zugzwang, where a player is safe in his present position, but will greatly worsen his position wherever he moves. Bobby was safe in Iceland, but he could have been arrested by Interpol at any foreign airport.
(...)
Exploring the Survival of Bodily Death
We now have, for the first time in the history of our species, compelling empirical evidence for belief in some form of personal survival after death.
—Robert Almeder, PhD, professor of philosophy, Georgia State University
It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.
—Voltaire
Throughout my life and my work, I have continually been impressed by the evidence, everywhere I turn, that awareness, which is what we are, can in-flow information from all of space-time and out-flow healing intention to the present, and perhaps the future and the past. This all happens because space-time is nonlocal, and there is no separation in consciousness.
The Buddhist Four Noble Truths teach: First, that there is suffering in the world, and second, we don't like it. I have not found any disagreement with this so far. Third, the source of that suffering is said to be impermanence, craving, and the fear of death. That's the one that we all are principally worried about. The fourth Noble Truth teaches that there is a path to the end of suffering—it is called The Eightfold Way. But, regarding impermanence, there is evidence from many sources that something does indeed survive death. This includes F. W. H. Myers's mediumistic studies and a very exciting, recently published scientific paper that indicates how much of our personality may indeed survive death and bodies.
Twenty years ago a chess match was apparently played between living and deceased chess grandmasters. A German psychologist and a Swiss investor were involved in this remarkable investigation of survival. Wolfgang Eisenbeiss and Dieter Hassler published this grandmaster game from the beyond, “An Assessment of Ostensible Communications with a Deceased Grandmaster as Evidence for Survival,” in the British Journal of Psychical Research in April 2006. The trance medium, Robert Rollans, who worked with the researchers, was asked to psychically find a deceased grandmaster who was willing and able to play a match with the living grandmaster Victor Korchnoi. He found the Hungarian grandmaster Geza Maroczy who had died in 1950. I sent the reported final chess score to Bobby Fischer— who, as I mentioned earlier, lived in Iceland, having been rescued from a Japanese jail by the kindness of the Icelandic government. Bobby wrote to me saying that “anyone who can go fifty-two moves with Victor Korchnoi is playing at a grandmaster level.” This case is of great interest to survival researchers, because it shows that a medium can demonstrate a skill of the deceased communicator, in addition to just information. Grandmaster Maroczy provided, through the medium, all sorts of personal, intimate, and humorous information about his life and his interactions with the grandmasters of his day, including the Cuban José Raul Capablanca and the Russian, Alexander Alekhine (both world champions). Korchnoi said that Maroczy played the same kind of intensely complicated middle game he was famous for in the 1920s. In his prime, Maroczy was the second strongest player in the world, just as Victor Korchnoi was. It was a hard-fought match. But, in the end the living player won. Incidentally, the match was held in the late 1980s, when there was no computer that could have stood in for Maroczy.
The nineteenth century English scholar F. W. H. Myers spent a good part of his life investigating mediumistic evidence for survival of human personality after death of the body. His great book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, gives many examples of spirit communications that sound surprisingly like long-distance phone calls from the dead. Nonetheless, he felt that the only way one could be certain that a spiritual communication could be definitely assigned to a previously alive person, rather than just clairvoyance on the part of the medium, would be for the spirit to communicate information that the medium could not know, even psychically. That's why the previously described postmortem chess game is so important. This would be the only way to falsify the so-called super-psi mind-reading/clairvoyance hypothesis. After Myers died, he apparently carried out this experiment posthumously. The deceased Myers sent independent fragmentary messages to three well-known and widely separated mediums—in England, India, and the United States. The messages made sense only when they were combined and analyzed at the Society for Psychical Research in London. These celebrated communications are known as the “cross--correspondence cases.” They are like three meaningless pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that show a recognizable picture only when all three are put together. Many of these complex transmissions were drawn from Myers's extensive knowledge of Classical Greek and Roman plays and poetry, described in Francis Saltmarsh's fascinating analysis of this cross-correspondence material in his book, The Future and Beyond.
(..)
The Return of the Bobby Snatchers (or Bye-Bye Bobby)
I played my first game of chess with Bobby Fischer more than fifty years ago. I was courting his sister, Joan, and he was fourteen. He beat me, even though he was playing blindfolded, eating a bowl of chicken soup in the kitchen, and I had the pieces and the board right in front of me. But it took him more than five minutes. The greatest chess player the world has ever known died on January 17, 2008. After traveling around the sun once for each of the sixty-four squares on his chessboard, Bobby Fischer died of kidney failure, after many months of distress, in a Reykjavik, Iceland, hospital. He refused medical treatment until the very end. In death, as in life, he wanted to do it his own way.
Although there have been many fabulously brilliant chess players, such as Alekhine, Capablanca, Gary Kasparov, and the astonishing American Paul Morphy, none have ever shown the analytic genius and demonic will to win that Bobby showed in his brief career. On my way home to America from Bobby's funeral in Iceland, I had a chance to discuss this with Icelandic grandmaster Throstur Thorhallsson, who happened to be sitting just in front of Patty and me on the plane. (Little Iceland with 300,000 people, has nine grandmasters.) In the 1971 Candidates Tournament leading up to his world championship bid, Bobby cleanly knifed through his grandmaster opponents Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen with the unprecedented and likely unrepeatable scores of 6–0 and 6–0. This would be like winning a Grand Slam tennis tournament without your opponent ever hitting the ball—like a match between Targ vs. Federer. Fischer went on to beat the great Tigran Petrosian 6.5–2.5 and qualified to challenge Boris Spassky for the World Championship in 1972.
That so-called Match of the Century, possibly the most famous match in chess history was played in Reykjavik. It had a shaky start. Bobby lost the first game. He then forfeited the second, complaining about the large canvass-wrapped TV tower on the stage creating visually distracting playing conditions. But he turned up for the third game and won it brilliantly. The great Spassky, then World Champion, won only one more game in the rest of the match and was eventually beaten by Fischer by a score of 12.5–8.5. Bobby thereby crushed the Russian chess machine at the height of the Cold War, and became an enduring world celebrity.
Many years ago, I was standing in Washington Square Park with the renowned mathematician Prof. Kurt Friedrichs, who was cofounder of the New York University Math Institute. I asked the young man standing next to me if he was in Prof. Friedrichs's class. He said, “No. I'm Professor Kranzer. Professor Friedrichs is in a class by himself!” Similarly, it is generally agreed that even among the great grandmasters of chess, Bobby Fischer was in a class by himself.
Bobby's last years were, in their own way, as spectacular and bizarre as his earlier years of glory. In July of 2004, Bobby was at Narita airport outside Tokyo on his way to visit his (we believe) daughter, Jinky, and her mother, Marilyn Young, in the Philippines. As I described earlier, his passport was grabbed by Japanese Immigration officials because it had been declared invalid by the U.S. government, who wanted him in the U.S. for a show trial just before the 2004 presidential election. Bobby was taken to a Japanese jail where he languished for he next eight months, “because he was in the country without a passport!” Just before he was to be deported to the U.S. in March of 2005, to be tried for playing chess in Yugoslavia, he was generously granted Icelandic citizenship, so that he could leave prison and move to Iceland, where he remained for the next three years. He lived in an apartment overlooking the Reykjavik harbor, where he frequented the nearby restaurants and bookstores.
Late in the evening of Thursday, January 17, 2008, I received a phone call from Gardar Sverrisson, Bobby's neighbor and one of his closest friends of the last few years. He told me that Bobby had died in the hospital that evening. I knew that Bobby had been very ill. The previous week, our family had sent him photos of his mother Regina at his request. I told Gardar that my wife and I would come to Iceland that Sunday to help arrange the burial and put Bobby's affairs in order in a respectful manner. Patty and I took the red-eye and arrived at Reykjavik airport early Monday morning. We visited a lawyer that my son had found and then took a nap.
At two o'clock that afternoon, we were awakened by the lawyer to learn that Bobby's body had been taken from the hospital at midnight by Miyoko Watai (a Japanese woman's chess champion) and Gardar. Miyoko was waving a Japanese document which she claimed was a Japanese marriage license and consequently the hospital released the body to the pair. The document turned out to be her Japanese identity papers. With the body in the back of his station wagon (hopefully in a coffin), Gardar and Miyoko drove to the town of Selfoss, 60 km south of Reykjavik. According to the lawyer, the grave was dug secretly in the darkness of the white frozen landscape—ready for Bobby Fischer's last getaway. All this covert rush made it impossible for our family to participate, which was probably their desire. Not even the minister, whose churchyard it was, knew of the burial planned for the following morning.
According to the news reports, only five people attended that brief service early on Monday, conducted in darkness before the short Icelandic day had properly begun. Among them was Gardar, who had organized the digging of the grave, bypassing the customary process of requesting permission of Iceland's Lutheran Church or of the State authorities. Recent reports in the press suggest that the legality of Bobby Fischer's quiet burial in the small cemetery at Laugardalur church may be called into question. Gardar had also secured the services of a Roman Catholic priest from Reykjavik. Bobby was not a Catholic, of course. Another mourner, who may or may not have been Fischer's wife, was Miyoko Watai. Canadian journalist John Bosnitch, who worked tirelessly to free Bobby from jail, swears she was indeed Bobby's wife. However, the people I talked with in Iceland all claimed that Bobby said he wasn't married nor did he intend to be married. I trust we will know soon enough.
The following day, Tuesday, Patty and I met the very congenial Lutheran minister Kristinn Agust Fridfinnsson, in whose front yard Bobby had been planted. Rev. Fridfinnsson conducted a very thoughtful and moving memorial in English for Patty and me and three members of the Reykjavik Spiritual Association. These three men, who surprisingly located us the day we arrived, had been of enormous help to us in understanding what was going on and dealing with the impossibly difficult Icelandic language. (They have six more consonants than we have in English and they use every one of them.) Rev. Fridfinnsson said that although he had no prior knowledge of the burial right in front of his church, he was happy to take good care of Bobby, who is a hero in chess-crazy Iceland. Although a peaceful man, he wasn't thrilled that a Catholic priest from Reykjavik had performed a service in his churchyard without asking.
As we sat in the little church listening the service conducted for our group, artist Patty noticed that the large oil painting behind the alter contained a figure of a man who greatly resembled Bobby, looking adoringly at Jesus. The photo below, shows Bobby shortly after he arrived in Iceland from the Japanese prison and the head of the Bobby look-alike in the painting. We all thought that this striking likeness was a good omen for his happy resting place.
Patty, me, and the minister, Rev. Fridfinnsson, standing in front of the altarpiece which includes the Bobby figure
The following day, we attended an art opening at the Reykjavik Art Museum, where the president of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson would formally open a new exhibition. I was happy to have an opportunity to express our family's gratitude to him and the people of Iceland for generously providing Bobby sanctuary from the Japanese jail. I also wanted to discuss a concern I had over the proposed grave marker, which was to be a crucifix. Since at least one of Bobby's parents was Jewish (another contentious issue we won't dwell on here), I thought that this was not an appropriate memorial, although it was approved by the Catholic priest who buried him and the Lutheran minister who owns the churchyard where he is buried. I proposed to President Grímsson that, in the interest of religious harmony, a chess king would be a more suitable marker. Since that chess piece already has a little cross on top, it should be acceptable to all factions. Grímsson said that religious peace between Lutherans and Catholics had been an issue for hundreds of years in Iceland, and my proposed solution might be just the thing. What a wonderful country where the President has time to try to soothe everyone's sensibilities! Finally, what we remember is that Bobby had an inventive and brilliant mind, which was the hallmark of his genius. As a chess player and an American, he achieved real victories and, for a moment, carried the freedom torch during the Cold War when he won the World Chess Championship. Unmistakably, he also faced some great personal challenges. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was capable of great warmth. Bobby was a loved part of our family and he will be deeply missed. May he finally rest in peace.
Do you see what I see? : memoirs of a blind biker
Russell Targ.
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