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Booth certainly was famous in his lifetime before he shot President Lincoln, so you are off base with that,
And even if you don't care for that analogy, we could say that when we talk about O.J. Simpson, we must limit ourselves to his football and show business career.
In short, there is no reason to limit ourselves at all, is there? If someone wants to talk about Bobby Fisher as a chess player, swell, who is stopping anyone from this? If someone wants to talk about Bobby Fisher the mentally unbalanced anti-Semite, why shouldn't this be a permitted topic as well?
Yeah but would we know about John Wilkes Booth today?
I was actually going to suggest the OP change his topic to the cold war impact of Bobby Fischer, which is of some interest as a historical topic. But once again I think he just used it as an excuse to discuss the exploitation of native americans. That's OK - been discussed a hundred times before, but at least it beats beats a discussion on the ravings of a lunatic anti-Semite.
Yeah but would we know about John Wilkes Booth today?
.
Just how famous do you expect Bobby Fisher to still be in another 70 or so years? There won't be anyone left alive who remembers the famous chess duel in Iceland except chess history buffs.
John Wilkes Booth wasn't famous for his acting talent, but for assassinating the president.
Bobbie Fischer isn't famous for comparing an elephant trunk to a penis in explaining why "the jew" wanted to exterminate elephants, but for his abilities in the game of chess.
Just how famous do you expect Bobby Fisher to still be in another 70 or so years? There won't be anyone left alive who remembers the famous chess duel in Iceland except chess history buffs.
People learning chess strategy will still study his games.
People learning chess strategy will still study his games.
Sure. And maybe he will turn up as a crossword puzzle answer or as a question on Jeopardy 2086!
The most famous man in America during the 1850's was the Central American filibusterer, William Walker. (He was displaced at the end of the decade by John Brown.) While here on the history forum I suspect there are many who are familiar with Walker's story, I doubt that the average person can identify him.
What really made Fisher famous wasn't chess and it wasn't his moronic commentaries on history and race relations. What made Fisher famous was that the Fisher-Spassky collision was being viewed as heroic single combat in the ongoing Cold War. That was what drew interest, most people didn't know anything about chess but they knew this was Uncle Sam vs the Red Bear.
Same deal eight years later with the "Miracle on Ice." Most Americans are not hockey fans, but that game wasn't really about hockey. I can't say with certainly, but I suspect if asked, most would answer that the Miracle on Ice was when the US hockey team beat the Russians for the gold medal in the Olympics. They of course did not, the Russian game was not the gold medal round, the US still had to go on and defeat Finland after the miracle. How many could readily identify that it was Finland? Not many, because we were not in a Cold War with Finland.
Fisher also drew more attention to himself than would be expected of a chess player because of his demanding prima donna behavior in Iceland. People who didn't know a rook from a knight, knew that Fisher had jeopardized the meeting by holding out for more money, showed up late and didn't agree to play until a postponement, made all sorts of eccentric demands about the physical setting and made outrageous comments to the press when he wasn't shunning or insulting them.
You should watch the 1993 movie, "Searching for Bobby Fischer". There was a theory that his behavior might have been partly intended to confuse his opponent and cause him to make mistakes in the chess games.
In any case, what people will really remember Bobby Fischer for, is for being the best chess player in history. Chess has a long and interesting history. There was a time, a long time before Mario Brothers, and even a long time before Parker Brothers, when a big part of the world considered chess to be the ultimate board game. There are zillions of books about it, in zillions of languages. It's likely to have reduced the total amount of warfare in the world over the last thousand years, because chess tournaments are an opportunity for people from different countries and cultures to get to know each other, and be less inclined to wage war against each other.
If Bobby Fischer's mother was a Jew, wouldn't that make Bobby Fischer a Jew by definition? Then if he hated Jews, it implied he hated himself.
Exactly! And doesn't that seem that self-hatred is a common symptom of those that commonly lash out in anger at others?
He needed mental help, no doubt.
So are we back on the topic of Bobby Fischer?
As was pointed out, he was something of a cold war hero when I was a kid, this was in the 70s...beating "Ivan" in the chess match. But no one really knew his personality and after he talked more and more in the 1980s it was like "huh? what?"
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