The fact that Bobby Fischer would eventually be caught was known in advance, writes Gazeta.Ru. The thing is that since 1992 he had been fleeing American authorities using a perfectly valid, genuine American passport No. Z7792702, issued at the time by the US Embassy in Bern. But not long ago the US Customs Service, as if suddenly learning that Fischer had received a 90-day visa for Japan, annulled his passport. Everything after that was a matter of technique. E2-E4.
As a result, Fischer, caught at Narita airport, had to somehow defend himself. He had to, because Japan, due to its especially friendly relations with America, has a treaty with it on direct extradition of criminals. And had he been extradited, Fischer would have gotten about 10 years in prison.
As is known, the matter is by no means about sport, which some consider chess to be, but about politics. This was characteristic of many talented athletes accustomed to winning. At some point they would take a stand and become politicians. Soviet weightlifting legend Yuri Vlasov, after leaving sport, wanted to become Russia's opposition presidential candidate. In America, his main hero was Muhammad Ali, who befriended black radicals and communists and ultimately demonstratively refused to fight in Vietnam.
The pinnacle of sports-political satire of that time was the newspaper headline 'Ali Refuses to Join the Army, Although Vietcong Have Already Surrounded Las Vegas.'
From the standpoint of the American authorities, Bobby Fischer is the same kind of political villain. In his time, he demonstratively insulted George H. W. Bush, for which he will probably be imprisoned under George W. Bush.
Many remember what Fischer did in 1992. America and NATO then imposed economic and humanitarian sanctions against Yugoslavia for its possible involvement in the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia. Fischer paid no attention to this and went to Belgrade to play an exhibition match against his arch-rival Boris Spassky (Fischer had defeated the former Soviet chess player in 1972 in the most famous chess game of modern times). Few remembered that Bobby won in Belgrade; everyone remembered that from that moment he became a big politician. Naturally, a warrant was issued for him for violating the presidential decree of Bush Sr., and they began to pursue him around the world. The French, by the way, did not chase Spassky at that time.
Of course, Fischer did not just run around Hungary, Japan, and the Philippines; everywhere he said something bad about the Bush family and their policies. He defended Serbs and Arabs from America. He attacked American Jews, using alternately or together the weighty English words 'fucking' and 'dirty'. After all, there are plenty of Jews among anti-Semites, but there had certainly been no Jewish chess-player anti-Semites before Fischer.
In the Jewish theme of Bobby Fischer, there is, by the way, another aspect. His supporters around the world know the dark story of how in 1998 a California Jew, Bobby Ellsworth, allegedly stole something from a Chicago Jew, Bobby Fischer. What and how, I barely remember. It seems it was a collection of gold coins gathered by Fischer.
Now Bobby is in time trouble. Under administrative arrest in Tokyo, he is waiting for Japan to decide on his extradition to America. The decision will most likely be quick, despite all protests. Fischer has few countermoves, and all of them are dubious. Today he attempted one of them. The chess player's defenders distributed in Tokyo a letter from the grandmaster in which he renounces his American citizenship (earlier the media cited Fischer's statements about his intention to obtain citizenship of third countries - Montenegro, the Philippines). Formally, Fischer could be handed over to Washington even if he became stateless, but apparently it won't even come to that. In American consular practice, a decision to strip a person of citizenship is made only after a personal meeting between the applicant and the consul. Such a meeting, naturally, has not taken place and is not planned so far.
And so Fischer will end up in an American prison. Yet he was once an undefeated world champion on the board, a one-man destroyer of the entire Soviet Union.