I first heard about the troubled chess master in a column in Boys’ Life magazine. This would have been circa 1969-70. Fischer was depicted as the teen genius he had been a decade before. He (or his ghost writer) gave helpful tips each month to kids just learning the game.

Then, in 1972, Fischer became a full-fledged media manipulator. He took all the tricks of the era’s alpha-male rebel gods and applied them to one of the world’s most staid, insular pastimes. He promoted a made-for-TV match with Russian champ Boris Spassky in exotic Iceland. Then he declared he couldn’t perform with the film cameras whirring, and demanded to play the match’s remaining games in a more private setting.

Up to this point, Fischer had followed all the “breaking all the rules” rules.

Then he really belied all expectations.

He retired, not just from chess but from public life. He became a jet-set hermit, living alone in a succession of Eastern Hemisphere locales. He occasionally emerged to spout bizarre, often anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (he was half Jewish himself).

In retrospect, Fischer had obviously retreated into his own head, into a world of ideas that made perfect rational sense to him, no matter what anybody else said. Then again, he’d probably spent his whole life looking down on those idiotic ordinary people who could never understand what he could cognate.