REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) - Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War icon by dethroning the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died, his spokesman said Friday. He was 64.
Fischer spokesman Gardar Sverrisson said Fischer died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday. There was no immediate word on cause of death.
U.S.-born Fischer, a fierce critic of his homeland who renounced his U.S. citizenship, moved to Iceland in 2005.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.
An American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer dethroned the Soviet Union's Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
The match, at the height of the Cold War, took on mythic dimensions as a clash between the world's two superpowers.
But Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press
