Bobby Fischer, chess prodigy and self-hating Jew, has died at the age of 64: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22724870/. I am old enough to remember Fischer's confrontation with Soviet chessmaster Boris Spassky in 1972. It's one of the only two times I can recall there being a "buzz" about chess, with the other time being Gary Kasparov's matchup with the computer back in the 1990s.
Still, Fischer's brilliance on the chessboard was overshadowed by his increasingly bizarre behaviour, which included rants about the United States and bizarre anti-Semitic pronouncements (Fischer's mother was Jewish, hence my description of him as a self-hating Jew). All in all, despite his genius, Fischer's legacy will never be what it could have or should have been.
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