At 14, Robert James "Bobby" Fischer became the youngest person ever to win the U.S. chess championship, a feat he would repeat six more times by the time he was 20. When Fischer defeated the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky, then the current world champion, to become the world chess champion in 1972, he scored a symbolic victory for the United States in the Cold War by breaking the Soviet Union’s hegemony in the chess world.

Fischer forfeited the title in 1975 when he refused to defend it.

"He changed the world with his personality," said grandmaster Boris Gulko of Fair Lawn. "He was very special because he was an unusual personality — the only American who destroyed the monopoly of Soviet chess players. Suddenly a person from the United States could beat the greatest players of the Soviet Union. He made chess an international struggle. He became a symbolic victory of America over the Soviet Union."

In 1987 the House of Representatives passed a bill recognizing Fischer as the world chess champion.

Despite his newfound status in American mythology, he became a fugitive in 1992 when he came out of his 20-year retirement to face his old foe Spassky in Yugoslavia. He defied an order from the U.S. Treasury Department not to play and faced 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for breaking U.N. sanctions on that country. Rather than pay the fine and hand over his prize money from the rematch — which he won — Fischer fled. He disappeared from the public eye after that but made several appearances on a Manila-based radio show beginning in 1999.

He had begun to deny his Jewish heritage and lash out at his Jewish mother and worldwide Jewry in the 1960s. Using his new soapbox in the Philippines, he blamed world Jewry for conspiring against him and called the U.S. government a "brutal, evil dictatorship." He accused former New York Mayor Ed Koch, Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and the Times Mirror Corp. of being "Jews, secret Jews, or CIA rats who work for the Jews."

Even the chess world was not immune from his rants. Fischer, who had once said on the Dick Cavett show that what he enjoyed most about chess was "crushing an opponent’s ego," accused FIDE and then-champion Kasparov of rigging games to keep real challengers away.

On Sept. 11, 2001, just a few hours after the towers fell, Fischer said in a broadcast that the United States deserved the attack because it and Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians for years.

His views were as bizarre as those of someone "who believes in witches or ghosts," Gulko said. "He spent the last part of his life in a delusional world."

When Fischer’s passport expired in 2004, he was living in Japan, and the United States tried to extradite him for violation of the Yugoslavian sanctions. After nine months in a Japanese holding cell, the reclusive grandmaster fled to Iceland, where he lived until his death from degenerative renal failure earlier this year at the age of 64 — the same number of squares on a chessboard.