REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died. He was 64.
Fischer died Thursday in a Reykjavik hospital, his spokesman Gardar Sverrisson said. There was no immediate word on the cause of death.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, Fischer was a U.S. chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15. He beat Spassky in a series of games in Reykjavik to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
But his reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed by his idiosyncrasies.
A few years after the Spassky match, he forfeited the title to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it. He then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to win a 1992 exhibition rematch against Spassky on the Yugoslav resort island of Sveti Stefan in violation of sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic.
A fierce critic of his homeland, Fischer became wanted in the United States for violating the sanctions.
He renounced his American citizenship and moved to Iceland in 2005.
