**These are not local but they are two very BIG losses when it comes to names that changed the face of sports and sports entertainment.**(from foxsports.com)
REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Bobby Fischer, the reclusive American chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died. He was 64.
Fischer died Thursday in a Reykjavik hospital, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said. There was no immediate word on the cause of death.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, Robert James Fischer was a U.S. chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15. He beat Spassky in a series of games in Reykjavik to claim America’s first world chess championship in more than a century.
LUMBERTON, Texas (AP) – Ernie Holmes, who won two Super Bowls as an anchor of Pittsburgh’s famed “Steel Curtain” defense in the 1970s, died in a car crash. He was 59.
Holmes was driving alone Thursday night when his car left the road and rolled several times near Lumberton, about 80 miles from Houston, a Texas Department of Public Safety dispatcher said Friday.
Holmes was a two-time All-Pro performer and won two Super Bowls with the Steelers.
He was not wearing a seat belt and was ejected from the car, and pronounced dead at the scene, the department said.