Bobby Fischer died

I know that I said that Friday's would be sports blog days and Chess is clearly NOT a sport, but instead a game like checkers and char, but I wanted to weigh in on this one.

Bobby Fischer the youngest chess champion in US history and the man many believe to be the best chess player ever died in Iceland yesterday. He won the title of grand chess master at age 15 and he beat some Russian guy (does the name really matter?) in 1972 for the title of world's best. he held onto the title until he forfeited it in 1975.

But what I really wanted to talk about was back in 1992 when the US turned on him for playing a match against a Yugoslavian right in the middle of some ongoing problems the US had with the Yugoslavians. According to reports, "the U.S. government said Fischer's playing the match violated U.N. sanctions against Yugoslavia, imposed for Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic's role in fomenting war in the Balkans." Interesting. A chess game violated sanctions. Apparently tic-tac-toe was the only game the UN was allowing.

But this guy was made at the US for admonishing him. And what did he do? Did he talk about how much he hated the gov't and blame the president? NOPE. He just withdrew his citizenship and moved to Iceland. Became an official Icelander. Yep. Unlike all of those poseur jerks in Hollywood that want to say how much the US stinks, but they stick around to make their millions, this guy ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. He said talk is cheap, actions are meaningful. While I don't agree with some of his stances, he at least followed through and did something. It is so hard to take Tim Robbins and Alec Baldwin seriously when they stick around in the country they seemingly hate just to make money. Rage against the Machine, if you hate "the machine so much" then take your Rage to Reykjavik.

And now Fischer is dead at 64. Too young, who knows? But I wanted to at least tip my cap to the dead guy that did something that these wussy Hollywood "activists" are too afraid to do.

On a related note:
Sports include tennis, golf, track and field, baseball, football, basketball,gymnastics, handball, racketball, squash, among others
NOT sports include: chess, cheerleading, dogfighting, bowling and armwrestling.
I should really do a blog on this all by itself. But that topic has been done so many times