Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [301]
Nobody could find him. I mean literally no one in the West interviewed him in twenty-five years, maybe more than that. He was a white whale for a lot of reporters. Then, in 2004, he surfaces in Japan, where he gets arrested on a passport violation. His U.S. passport had expired, and they put him in jail. So now at least we know where he is. And a producer I worked with a lot named Jon Fish told me there were rumblings that he was going to be released. Then we hear that the Japanese are letting him go and that Iceland is going to grant him citizenship. We also found out a private plane is going to take him all the way to Iceland from Japan. He’s going to be in the air for sixteen hours.
Some of ESPN’s loftiest qualities came together in that moment and in the buildup to it, turning the encounter into a stunning piece of personal and yet professional journalism. ESPN also showed itself, perhaps contrary to its reputation, willing to spend whatever was necessary to chase down a big story, even if superficially it seemed to have little to do with sports.
JEREMY SCHAAP:
I knew I had to get to Iceland. This might be our only chance to get the guy, ’cause he’s going to step off that plane and then probably go back into seclusion. So I’m looking at the flights. There’s one flight a day from the United States to Iceland and it was at 7:30 in the evening. It’s now 3:30 in the afternoon. So I call Glenn Jacobs, who at the time was coordinating producer and number two in the feature story unit, and explain the situation. I said, “You gotta make a decision right now. I need a crew, and you gotta get us on a plane tonight.” I knew it was going to be an expensive proposition. And he just said, “Go.” I threw some clothes into a bag and ran for the airport. We landed at two in the morning in Iceland.
When Bobby arrived at the airport, he looked very scary. He was hustled off right away. I did get a chance to say my name, but he didn’t stop, he didn’t even blink. I spent the entire night thinking he must have forgotten my father. The next day was bizarre at every level. I was shocked he decided to hold a press conference—he hadn’t done one since 1992—and he did it at the same hotel where he stayed during the ’72 match with Spassky. There were only two American news organizations, the rest were Russian, English, Icelandic, and a couple other places. The room was packed. I was expecting a typical press conference and was hoping I’d get in some questions. It never occurred to me for a second that that thing would deteriorate into a one-on-one confrontation. None of my questions mentioned my father. I was trying to ask questions that any American media would be asking, like why he thought the attacks on 9/11 were the chickens coming home to roost for the United States. I asked him why he went into seclusion. He had never before put himself in a position to be asked, and I was thinking about all the ground I had to cover. But I was getting no help from the rest of the media. They wanted to know if he was going to learn the Icelandic language. There was a question: Would he plan to go whale watching? And there were a number of specific questions from the Russians about chess. I was literally standing there thinking, these people are crazier than Fischer.
Then he started ranting about the Jews and the U.S. and George Bush and said he wanted to come back to me. He looked over at me and said, “Your father was Jewish, wasn’t he?” I said, “Yes, as are you.” If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have said that to him, but it was very emotional, I was in the middle of this island in the Atlantic Ocean, and I was feeling disoriented.
Then, we’re having this strange, bizarre, intense back-and-forth. He’s saying the most horrible things to me while explaining to the entire room the relationship he had with my father. There were moments of lucidity throughout and almost sweetness in the