There is no place on earth more (less?) ideal than Jerusalem for pondering the mysteries of existence, and for a not-insignificant number of people mysteries don’t get more engrossing than the self-exile of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. The all-time great retreated into obscurity—and, later, derangement—at the age of 32, shortly after refusing to defend his 1972 world championship, which he captured against Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky. Fischer played tantalizingly little high-level chess after 1972, joined a cult for a time, and then became a full-blown anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. Having died in 2008, he is no longer alive to explain himself, but dwelling on the irrevocable and insoluble past is of course part of the reason to come to Jerusalem in the first place.
The upscale flesich restaurant where veteran ESPN correspondent Jeremy Schaap and I sat was in a shopping mall nestled within a stone mirage of condos peched far beyond eyeshot of the holy city’s ancient centers of mystery-contemplation, thank God. But no amount of garishness can fully hide that you’re in Jerusalem, and there’s probably no other place on earth where Schaap and I would have had any reason to cross paths. The very fact of meeting Schaap was slightly surreal, since I can’t remember a time in my life when he hasn’t been there in some form of another—When I saw Schaap was moderating a panel at the Sixth Global Forum to Combat Anti-Semitism, which I planned on covering, I mentioned in an email to ESPN’s press office that I had listened to the Sunday morning radio show that he’d co-hosted with his late father Dick Schaap on the way to Hebrew school when I was a kid. In the almost two decades since then, Schaap has become the reporter that ESPN entrusts with the hardest stories in sports, a subsection of life that reflects all the ugliness of the broader world: He’s reported on child prizefighting in Thailand, worker abuse at Qatar’s World Cup construction sites, and racism among the fans of Beitar Jerusalem.
