Twenty years after I first saw him, tall and gangling and infinitely appealing, I finally sat down, alone, with Bobby Fischer. I wanted to talk about him. He wanted to talk about Lebanon, and me. The world chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 was my first big reporting assignment, for The Associated Press. I went for three days and stayed for three months, sent not because of any journalist skills but because I knew which square the queen sat on (and, false modesty aside, what the Najdorf variation was). My "opposition," at UPI, was an experienced journalist who was a club player, and week after week he creamed me in the daily logs of published reports.

Being in Reykjavik in 1972 was like being a chocoholic locked into Godiva. It didn't matter too much that Bobby himself refused all interviews until the championship was won. Reykjavik was packed with people who were the rock stars of the chess world and knew him intimately: his first chess teacher, John Collins; his gentle sister, Joan; grandmasters like Svetozar Gligoric and Miguel Najdorf himself; and Miguel Quinteros, a same-age international master brought to Iceland midway through the tournament to hang out with Bobby and help him keep his cool. Some arrived after the championship began, fearing Bobby would not get off the starting blocks; others, like Najdorf, left before it ended, fearing he would blow it before he clinched it. They were united by affection for Bobby - and terribly concerned about what he would do, or say, next.

Reading about Reykjavik in Fischer's obituaries two weeks ago, I do not recognize the event. Yes, Bobby was difficult, but so was Reykjavik. Chess in Iceland is a family outing. Men, women and children streamed in and out of the tournament hall, a hastily converted basketball stadium with corrugated iron walls, crumpling sweet papers, banging wooden benches, whispering. I found it difficult to concentrate. Imagine Bobby, unused to such public events and computing a thousand variables.

But that was not all. He had agreed to television cameras, for the first time in his life, after the Icelandic Chess Federation assured him that they would be out of sight and soundless, "just like candid camera." But they weren't. For the first game, they were mounted on metal towers right behind the players' chairs. The match arbiter, Lothar Schmid, told me that Bobby turned "white as death" when he saw them. Bobby complained, but Schmidt ordered that play continue. Bobby continued - and lost the game after an elementary blunder.

Weeks later, a member of an Icelandic film crew said the camera behind the American's chair had technical problems that had to be repaired in situ, in the middle of the game. "I knew I disturbed him because he kept turning around," he said. "But it was inevitable."

Inevitable, too, was Fischer's victory. The journalists Bobby so disliked may have put it down to his "psychological warfare," but Spassky, who was fond of him, did not. "I held him in my hand so many times," he said, "but I let him slip away. I did not have enough nervous strength." Even grandmasters who were disappointed by Bobby's tantrums defended him against this accusation. "He plays to win, to produce games that will last," said Najdorf, the most urbane and gentlemanly of players. "He would not stoop to win by psyching his opponent out of the game. Nor does he need to."

In the year following the championship, I visited John Collins (known to everyone as Jack) and his sister Ethel in the little apartment in New York's Stuyvesant Town that had been a home away from home for Bobby and many other young chess prodigies. The one thing Jack didn't want to talk about was Bobby. He had forgiven him a lot, he said, but his derogatory comments about blacks and Jews were something he couldn't forgive. Bobby was becoming a recluse. The relationship was over.

Fischer surfaced in 1992, in Belgrade, and I went to see him. Gligoric, a mutual friend, promised to try to arrange a meeting and, true to his word, he did. I arrived back at our hotel one night at 2:00 a.m. to find a note saying: "Bobby will see you whenever you get in." I rushed up. "I remember you," said Bobby (rather grimly, I thought). And yes, he would talk. But first he wanted to see what I had written in 1972. I was, in chess parlance, "zugzwanged": forced to move, but with no good move to make. No matter what I had written - and I had written rather sympathetically - he wouldn't have liked it. So I said I had no cuttings with me (this much was true) and really couldn't get my hands on anything in the few days I had in Belgrade. Bobby smiled, not unkindly. "Of course you can," he said.

And that, I thought, was that. Except it wasn't. The next 30 minutes or so were extraordinary. In the 1980s and early 1990s, I had been reporting from Beirut for ABC radio - and Bobby had been listening. (I learned later that these had been very bad years for him. He spent much of his time locked away, playing chess and listening to the radio.) He quoted myself to me. Why had I said this? What did I mean by that? Why was I out of breath when I said such-and-such (because I was recording, live, as I ran down a street in Mar Mikhael under Lebanese Army tank-fire in February 1984). Why did I not stay in Central America when ABC rather publicly moved me there? (Because Lebanon was home by then). Why were the Israelis so "bloodthirsty"? "Israelis" was not the word he used.

Now, at only 64, he's dead, having reportedly refused medical treatment for fear of being poisoned. Jack made it to 89; Najdorf to 87; Joan, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1998, only to 60. There were (at least) two Bobbies: the deeply disturbed man who cheered 9/11, pursued by his own government for breaking US sanctions against Milosevic's Serbia, and who indulged in vile rhetoric; the other who loved children, old movies and women - and who swore his friends to silence about everything that concerned him, big and small. It is interesting that so many who could say so much have said so little since his death. I hope it stays that way.

Julie Flint writes frequently for THE DAILY STAR opinion page.