Not a jock, and not a Jew by any definition richer than heredity, Bobby Fischer was the quintessential Jewish Jock. He worked harder than any of his peers. He attempted to conceal his insecurity behind an ego built for 20, and his self-love behind self-hatred behind self-love. And perhaps more than any human who has ever lived, he kvetched: The board is too reflective, the presence of breathing humans too distracting, the high-frequency sounds—which only he and Pomeranians could detect—made game play utterly impossible. Some loved him for his loony obstinacy. Most didn’t.

Contrary to our notions of a chess prodigy and the accepted version of Bobby Fischer’s biography, he was not magnificent from the start. He had to learn, practice, and mature. As an adolescent in Brooklyn, he developed an unusually strong passion for a game that he was not unusually good at. (Children his age regularly beat him.) While he did clearly come into some innate prodigious talent—hard work might unleash genius, but it never creates it—what distinguished him, both in his formative years and through his career, was his single-minded, obsessive devotion to the game. He was known to practice 14 hours a day, and fall asleep with one of his several hundred chess books and journals on his chest. (‘I give 98 percent of my mental energy to chess,’ he once said. ‘Others give only 2 percent.’) Like a good Jewish boy, he outworked his peers and brought the A home to Mama. And like a good Jewish boy, he couldn’t stand Mama—her politics, priorities, relationship to money, or religion.

He got better. And better. “

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