"The Wonder Match" NY Times Article
By MICHAEL PATERNITI
Published: December 23, 2008
“Before he was secretly buried on a dark winter morning in a lonely Icelandic churchyard at the age of 64 (there were only four people in attendance at the hastily arranged funeral) . . .”
“…on an October day in 1956, Bobby Fischer eagerly took his seat at the Marshall Chess Club in the West Village. All gangly arms and legs, he’d been invited to compete with the country’s 11 best players in the Rosenwald Memorial. In a way, it was his coming-out party. With his supposedly preternaturally high I.Q. (181, higher than Einstein’s) and capacious memory (where he stored the positions, annotations and analysis of a century’s worth of games, many played out while sitting at school), it was said that the child prodigy loathed losing and had just learned to do so without crying. Among the erudite, gentleman competitors in dapper suits and thin ties, he wore a striped, collarless, short-sleeve shirt, hair cut short and neat, a true boy among men. He looked as if he had a stickball game to get to.”