Picture someone with the dominance of Michael Jordan, the flamboyance of Muhammad Ali and the muddled misanthropy of John Rocker then seat him icily at a chess board and you had Bobby Fischer.

In a life that blended brilliance and madness — one that ended yesterday at age 64 — Fischer's magic wasn't only what he did on the board, where he won world championships, but that he could make all that surrounded it compelling theater for a vast audience beyond chess.

The fact that his death rates such coverage today speaks to the following he commanded and the legacy he leaves. It was an audience that didn't need to know a Sicilian Defense from a man-to-man one to find him a forceful character.

In 1972, the year he beat grand master Boris Spassky, becoming the only American to win the championship, his saga was as widely followed as major league baseball. Fischer took the sport of chess to unimagined heights and unrivaled recognition, especially in the United States. The match was televised, moves published and strategy debated. Overnight the sport took on a new image.

His subsequent matches drew million dollar bids from countries, not unlike the auctions that took place for Ali's fights. Twenty years after the championship match Hollywood made an award-winning film about an anti-Fischer in "Searching for Bobby Fischer."

The real Fischer emerged at a confluence of the Cold War and a time when the concept of America's sporting heroes was changing. Spassky was a Russian icon, representative of a country that had dominated chess for a half-century and was as seemingly unbeatable as the USSR's hockey team had been until the 1980 Olympics.

It was, at a time when the two super powers stared each other down at international flashpoints, seen as a good vs. evil, democracy vs. Communism showdown that wouldn't end in nuclear holocaust. And Fischer was only too happy to play his part referring to his opponent as "that commie cheater." Not to be outdone, Soviets charged the U.S. with using electronic and chemical warfare against Spassky.

Where U.S. sports heroes had mostly been Jack Armstrong All-American figures, Fischer was in a vanguard of maverick, often cocky stars. He threw tantrums, pulled walkouts and was generally petulant. In a 1972 Harris poll, 56 percent of Americans surveyed said they found Fischer to be so "selfish and greedy" it was often hard to root for him.

But what passed for iconoclasm and boorishness in the 70s turned into an embittered anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in later years. So much so that in the wake of 9/11 he emerged from his reclusiveness to say he cheered the attacks.

Fittingly, perhaps, his death came at age 64, matching the number of squares on a board, as he once more propelled chess into the mainstream headlines.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.