MARILYN YOUNG AND MIYOKO WATEI and MISTER BOBBY FISCHER, CHESS CHAMPION AND BROKEN GENIUS

The story of American Chess Champion Bobby Fischer (Robert James Fischer) is one of the strangest stories ever,  not just because his body got dug up for DNA tests in an ugly inheritance battle between one woman who said she was his secret wife, Miyoko Watei, who is President of the Japanese Chess Association, and his Filipina mistress , Marilyn Young, with whom he fathered a child*, and I'm reminded of it because of what's been happening over the last couple months with Edward Snowden, the leaker of NSA secrets.

Snowden, who has not had a mistress to my knowledge but did leave a girlfriend, who is now pictured all over the net for her pole-dancing hobby, in the lurch,  holed up in a Moscow airport transit terminal for weeks. His American Passport and travel papers were revoked by the authorities and his bid to find asylum and citizenship in Iceland went nowhere. On August 1, 2013 he was given one year temporary Russian refuge and is reported to be living with American expats somewhere that is not Moscow.

American Chess Champ Fischer also had his American passport revoked, after not giving in to threats of prison and huge fines by the United States, when he decided to go ahead and play his main opponent in Yugoslavia, which was forbidden at the time.  He took his win of over 3 million dollars and started to travel. 

Fischer grew to the age of five in Russia, the son of a single mother, a brilliant Jewish woman who he remained close to.  She brought her son to New York City where they became American citizens and she remained, but at the end of her life, though he called her everyday, he couldn't even attend her funeral.  The life-long loner and increasingly reclusive man ended his travels when he moved to Iceland and became a citizen there. But during his years of exhile he got involved with the women.

There are those who say if it were not for Bobby Fischer, the United States would have remained unaware of chess as a competitive sport.  Before Iceland, he disappeared in travel for about 20 years, and then emerged as a ranting anti-American DJ on Phillipine radio, a man who also was terribly anti-semetic.

Fischer's father was likely a Hungarian Jew, so it's bizarre that he would be so convinced that he would become a holocaust denier and worse, but these days it goes almost without saying that he was a broken genius - mentally ill. 

In 2010 the two women in his life had his body exhumed to be tested for a DNA match  Marilyn lost and Miyoko became his sole heir. * Though he believed himself to be the father of Marilyn's daughter, who looks nothing like him, the DNA showed no match.