Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky were the kings of the chessboard in 1972, but they were also political pawns.

The world chess championship played at Reykjavik in that year, which pitted the young American genius against the Soviet champion, was the most bizarre and theatrical confrontation of the Cold War.

Few sporting events in history – and certainly no chess match – have been so heavily loaded with political and ideological symbolism: here was Capitalist America against Communist Russia, brash youth facing off against sophisticated experience, democracy versus totalitarianism, emotion against reason.

The contest in 1972 is also the story of two very different men dragged into a geopolitical conflict in a way that changed the world, and the game, for ever. In Soviet Russia, chess was politics, and had been since the Revolution. Lenin was a keen amateur player. Chess supposedly reflected all the virtues of Bolshevism: intellectual strength, self-discipline and iron will. Successful players were rewarded with higher salaries, larger homes, and freedoms that others could only dream of. Chess, declared Vasilyevich Krylenko, the brutal creator of the Red Army, is “a political weapon in the proletarian revolution”.

The Soviet Union dominated the game, winning every world championship between 1937 and 1972. When the Soviet team crushed their American opponents after the Second World War, Stalin sent a laconic but meaningful note: “Well done lads.” The West could not compete.

Then came Bobby Fischer, a chess prodigy as weird as he was brilliant, an American champion at 14 and grandmaster the next year. His obsession with the game was such that his mother took him to see a psychiatrist. “All I want to do, ever, is play chess,” he said. And he did, with fluid and unpredictable inspiration that stunned the chess world. In the two years before 1972, Fischer crushed the other leading grandmasters in 20 consecutive matches. Suddenly, America was in the game.

Fischer, a virulent anticommunist, seemed to slot easily into the role of Cold Warrior. “It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians,” he said. “This little thing between Spassky and me. It’s a microcosm of the whole world political situation. They always suggest that world leaders should battle it out hand to hand. And this is the kind of thing we are doing – not with bombs, but battling it out over the board.”

The match became part of a wider ideological game. When the intemperate 29-year-old Fischer threatened to withdraw, Henry Kissinger, then the US National Security Adviser, broke off from conducting the war in Cambodia to plead with him: “This is the worst player in the world calling the best player in the world. America wants you to go over there and beat the Russians.” President Nixon sent a message: “I will be rooting for you.” Spassky was similarly left in no doubt that Soviet honour was at stake. Yet, in many ways, both men were unlikely standard-bearers for Cold War antagonism. Spassky, handsome and urbane, had dominated the sport since the war and enjoyed the perks that went with it. But this was no obedient Communist tool: he had refused to denounce defecting colleagues, and never joined the Communist Party.

Fischer’s anticommunism was based not on ideological belief, but on hate. Fischer was almost as good a hater as a chess player. He would later transfer his loathing from Communism to America, his mother, the Jews, and then everyone else. Quirky and obnoxious, Fischer was also supremely selfish and, when away from the chessboard, exceedingly shallow.

Fischer threatened to withdraw from the showdown in Reykjavik, claiming that the prize money of $125,000 was inadequate. The British financier Jim Slater stepped in to double the fund, to an unprecedented $250,000, and the contest went ahead.

Fischer was all but unbeatable at this time – “an Achilles without an Achilles heel”, as one Russian grandmaster described him – but he had never beaten Spassky. The two men had played five times, with Spassky winning three and drawing two.

In July 1972 the two met in the “Match of the Century”, bringing chess to the front pages of newspapers across the world. Fischer lost the first game, and then forfeited the second after refusing to play in an angry dispute over playing conditions. He insisted on changing the board, the chairs and the lighting. He also complained about the cameras.

Spassky agreed to move the game into a backroom, and then began to lose. Sensing foul play, Soviet officials sent Spassky’s orange juice to Moscow for testing, suspecting that his loss of form might be due to poisoning by American spies. As Spassky faltered, Moscow tried to summon him back to Moscow. He refused. The American won seven of the subsequent 19 games, lost only one, and emerged as the 11th world champion.

Fischer’s ferocity, eccentric virtuosity (and, perhaps, his gamesmanship) had broken the Soviet monopoly. Moreover, it had given a cerebral game international prominence and political glamour. Tournament prize money increased dramatically, and a generation of British players emerged from the limelight of that one match.

Fischer, however, became increasingly reclusive, joining a Californian evangelical sect, the Worldwide Church of God, which he later claimed had defrauded him. He failed to defend his title in 1975. In 1981 he was held for 48 hours on suspicion of bank robbery, and wrote an enraged pamphlet afterwards entitled I Was Tortured in Pasadena Jailhouse.

Fischer emerged from isolation to play Spassky again in a rematch in 1992 in the former Yugoslavia, breaking UN sanctions. As usual, long and bizarre negotiations were necessary, including an entire day of legal discussion over the shape of the knight. “Fischer said the horse’s nose was too long,” one official said. Fischer won easily, but most observers agreed that he was not the player he had been. He never played competitively again.

Fischer never recovered from winning the world title. He was even reported to have had his fillings removed because he feared the Russians were sending radio signals through them into his brain.

Spassky generously wrote a letter to President Bush, urging the US to show leniency over Fischer’s sanctions-busting game in 1992. “Arrest me,” wrote Spassky. “Put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer. And give us a chess set.” “He was trying to make me sound like a weirdie,” Fischer responded. “I don’t want Spassky in my cell. I want a chick.”