Column: So many lives would be different if we’d had ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ 50 years ago. Including mine

The Netflix chess epic “The Queen’s Gambit” has entered the stage of cultural ascendency in which people choose via Buzzfeed quiz or personal inclination which character “you are.” Sexy Benny, the chess cowboy who thinks for five minutes or so that he is better than prodigy Beth Harmon? It’s impossible to overstate the effect Fischer had on American chess — so large and so lasting that in the universe of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Fischer does not exist. Garbus loved “The Queen’s Gambit” — the performances and the way the series captured the “edge-of-your-seat excitement that chess held at that time,” she says, though it took her a few minutes to adjust to an American chess that did not include Fischer. “It was tough for me to imagine chess during the Cold War without Fischer.” Fischer’s rise gave the United States one more arena in which to compete with the Soviet Union, where, as “The Queen’s Gambit” makes clear, chess was taken as seriously as pro football is in the U.S. “It was a kind of cultural propaganda,” Garbus says. “ we have in American politics right now is a bit like the emotion surrounding the Cold War; you can imagine how amazing it was to see someone from your side kick someone from the other side in the butt.” It’s no wonder then that the relatively handsome and charming Fischer became a fixture on the talk show circuit and why between national pride and the growing influence of celebrity, chess became a craze — the way running did after Frank Shorter won the gold in the marathon at the 1972 Olympics and cycling did after the 1979 hit movie “Breaking Away.” Like Beth, Fischer had demons; but unlike Beth, who continually worries whether she is mentally ill, Fischer actually was.