"When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Because of its title, many people think the film is about Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who bested the Soviet Union in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky to become the first US-born world chess champion in history."
"Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years older. I didn't simply love the movie. I was obsessed with it. Any kid who's ever felt lost or misunderstood or stuck in the middle of nowhere has dreamed of picking up a lightsaber and discovering the Jedi master within. That was me in the summer of 1995, only with chess."
At nine, a remote Arizona child discovered chess after watching Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, becoming obsessed and inspired. The film evokes Bobby Fischer's 1972 victory yet centers on the search for a successor and the rise of Josh Waitzkin as a child prodigy in the Hollywood retelling. Descriptions include poverty in Tonto Village, barefoot summers, forest play, and a close-knit community of children. The family lived within the Church of Immortal Consciousness, a cult linked to the mother's spiritual wanderings. Childhood creativity and isolation fed a yearning for identity that chess and the movie awakened.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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