The Unknown Florida

By now it is well documented that during the pandemic many people got tired of online work, online school and too many Zoom meetings. Because of that, many folks and families started to look for social off-line distractions like board and card games or puzzles. In fact, puzzles and board games saw their strongest sales in years. That boom was amplified by a well-received Fall 2020 TV series that follows an American (female!) chess prodigy on her rise to the top of the chess world: The Queen’s Gambit. The series is actually based on a 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis (1928-1984). As in many chess novels or movies, in particular those from the Cold War era, the climax involves a match between an American and a Soviet/Russian grandmaster. In the real world, the Cold War adversaries remembered today are Bobby Fischer (1943-2008) and Boris Spassky (still alive in May 2023, age 86), who played against each other at the World Chess Championship 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Appropriate for the Cold War, Bobby Fisher won. After that, Fischer lived a troubled life. At one point, in 1992, he ran afoul of a United Nations embargo of Yugoslavia, playing an unofficial rematch against Spassky there; Fischer won again. Because of the embargo, the United States issued an arrest warrant for Fischer and he never returned to the USA. Eventually, he was granted Icelandic citizenship, allowing him to live in Reykjavik, where he is also buried, until his death in 2008. Notably, one of my favorite authors (and musician), Patti Smith, met Bobby Fischer in 2007 while in Reykjavik. That odd story is described in Patti Smith’s 2015 book M Train.

As we were occupied with our nightly bicycle rides during the pandemic we never caught the chess or board game bug. However, recently I was reminded of the Bobby Fischer story when we saw two guys playing chess outdoors in Frenchtown, which is the oldest predominantly African American neighborhood in Florida. Ray Charles and Cannonball Adderley (who played with Miles Davis on “Kind of Blue” and other albums) lived there. Obviously, some folks also like to play chess in Frenchtown.