Growing up dirt poor in Arizona’s Church of Immortal Consciousness, I showed an early talent for the game. Soon the cult’s leader began grooming me to become a grandmaster – even if it meant separating me from my mother …
When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Because of its title, many people think the film is about Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who bested the Soviet Union in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky to become the first US-born world chess champion in history. Really, it’s about how the American chess world was desperate to find the next Bobby Fischer after the first one disappeared. The story follows Josh Waitzkin, a kid from Greenwich Village in New York, who sits down at a chess board with a bunch of homeless dudes in the park one day and miraculously discovers that he’s a child prodigy – at least that is the Hollywood version of the story.
Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years older. I didn’t simply love the movie. I was obsessed with it. Any kid who’s ever felt lost or misunderstood or stuck in the middle of nowhere has dreamed of picking up a lightsaber and discovering the Jedi master within. That was me in the summer of 1995, only with chess.
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