Letters from London (36 page)

Gary Kasparov was, or was thought to be, a known quantity. He was the dynamic, aggressive, and moody champion, much photographed lifting weights, thumping a punch bag, playing football, and swimming on his “Croatian island retreat.” He was the new-style Russian, from “war-torn Baku,” the chum of Gorbachev, then of
Yeltsin; easily packageable, and with the zippy if secondhand nickname of Gazza. Nigel Short was the harder case for packaging, since, like many chess players, what he had mostly done in his twenty-eight years was play chess. Only two things seemed generally known about him: that he had once played in a teenage rock band called the Urge (originally titled Pelvic Thrust), and that he was now married to a Greek drama therapist seven years his senior. But then the phrase
chess biography
is—as Truffaut once cattily remarked of the expression
British film
—a contradiction in terms. Chess is, famously, an activity entirely unrelated to the rest of life: from this springs its fragile profundity. Biography theoretically links the private to the public in such a way that the former illuminates the latter. But in chess no such connection, or reductiveness, applies. Does grandmaster X prefer the French defense because his mother forsook his father when he was as yet a small child? Does bed-wetting lead to the Grunfeld? And so on. Freudians may see chess as Oedipal: an activity whose ultimate aim is to kill the king, and in which the sexy queen is dominant. But attempted matchups between on-board and off-board character produce as many counterindicators as corroborations.

Ruthless gutting of Cathy Forbes’s
Nigel Short: Quest for the Crown
therefore added only a few embellishments of dubious pertinence. Nigel had fallen into an Amsterdam canal as a child; Nigel had been mugged in his home city of Manchester at the age of twenty; Nigel’s parents had separated when he was thirteen; Nigel’s frequently stated ambition was to become a Tory MP. As an indicator of how scarily scant the record is, Ms. Forbes is driven at one point to record that, as a teenager, Nigel “alarmed acquaintances by threatening to dye his hair blue.” An unfulfilled threat, as it turned out, though perhaps helpful to the imaginative psychobiographer, given that blue is the emblematic color of the Conservative Party.

These exiguous and banal details were widely reproduced. Since chess players are on the whole neither charismatic nor polymorphous, it was comic to see the varying journalistic templates into which Short was excitedly fitted. For
Hello!
magazine, that tinned rice pudding of the newstand, it was Nigel the family man posing happily
in his Greek retreat with wife Rea and little daughter Kyveli. For Th
e Sun
, it was Nigel as modern British hero, who “loves rock music and a pint with his mates…. He stormed up the ranks but he didn’t ignore his other passions—women and music.” Short dutifully posed for a laddish photo, hoof to plume in black leather, strutting his stuff among knee-high chess pieces while toting an electric guitar. Headline?
IT’S ONLY ROOK AND ROLL BUT I LIKE IT
. Harmless fun and all that, but at the same time, seriously unconvincing. Nigel has a nickname too, by the way. If Gary is Gazza, Nigel is Nosher. Etymology? “Nigel Short” anagrams out schoolboyishly into Nosher L. Git.

Short is twenty-eight, Kasparov thirty, but judging from their prematch press conferences you would guess at a much wider age differential. Short, a boyish figure in a bottle green suit, with boffinish specs and cropped hair, cut a nervous, adolescent, halting figure, and spoke with the slightly strangulated vowels of one who has had speech therapy. He was accompanied on the podium by his manager and accountant, grandmaster Michael Stean (of whom it was once said that he thought about chess all the time except when actually playing it); Stean would occasionally lean over and deflect the trickier questions. There is, of course, no reason at all why a chess player should be good at PR; even so, the difference between Short and Kasparov was remarkable. For a start, the Russian has much better English than Nigel. He handled the conference by himself and with presidential ease; was just as much at home with geopolitics as with chess; attended courteously to questions he was mightily familiar with; and generally came across as a highly intelligent, worldly, rounded human being. In his many interviews and appearances, Short, by contrast, gave the impression of being thoughtful, considered, wise, and precise when talking about chess, and barely adult when talking about anything other than chess. He brought to mind the remark of the great world champion Emanuel Lasker in his
Manual of Chess:
“In life we are all duffers.”

The talking up and coloring in of the match entailed a certain halfhearted attempt at demonizing Kasparov. It has been a feature of all world championship matches since Fischer vs. Spassky that there
has to be some goody-baddy, them-or-us aspect for the non-aficionado to get a handle on. In that epochal match in Reykjavik, Fischer was held to represent the triumph of Western individualism against a nominal figure thrown up by the Soviet chess “machine.” (Linguistic note: we may occasionally have had a “program,” they always had a “machine”) When Kasparov emerged to play the first of his five wearying bouts against Karpov, he was portrayed in the West as the admirably uppity young pup, the half-Jewish outsider taking on Moscow Center; later, he was the symbol of Gorbachev’s Russia, of openness and renewal, warding off the ex-chum of Brezhnev. Now that Kasparov was taking on a Westerner, he had to be restyled into “the last great beneficiary of the Soviet machine,” while the fact that he had assembled a strong team of ex-Soviet seconds was put down not just to the sinister continuance of “the machine” but also to the money Kasparov had amassed during his reign. Short could therefore be depicted as the cash-bothered Western individualist (though he was paying his coach Lubomir Kavalek $125,000 for twenty weeks of work, with a promised victory bonus of the same amount). The political angle was also rejigged. The fact that Kasparov had moved on from being a Gorbachevian to a Yeltsinite prompted Short, the Tory hopeful, to denounce his opponent’s politics as “a fake;” he also talked knowingly in prematch interviews of “the KGB connection.” By which was meant, first, that Kasparov had enjoyed the friendship and protection of a local KGB boss back in Azerbaijan; and second, that he had received special training from the master manipulators in how to unsettle opponents. “The story may be nonsense,” Short said of the latter claim, while blithely rebroadcasting it to
The Times
, “but it would be absolutely consistent.”

Nor was this all. Short and his camp deliberately promoted their man’s personal dislike of Kasparov as a factor in the encounter. “I find it hard to pinpoint the exact moment when Nigel Short first began to loathe Gary Kasparov,” wrote Dominic Lawson, editor of the
Spectator
and a close friend of Short. He made a pretty good job of it nonetheless, identifying an incident during a tournament in Andalucía in 1991, when Short had played a certain move against Kasparov
and the world champion had responded by laughing. The Russian, Lawson revealed, also “glares” at opponents and, according to Nigel, walks up and down in their line of vision “deliberately … like a baboon.” Not that Short needed his friend as a mouthpiece. He was already on record as calling the champion an “Asiatic despot,” complaining that Kasparov “wasn’t spanked enough as a child,” labeling his seconds “lackeys and slaves” and pugilistically lamenting that when it came to the World Championship final, “I don’t want to sink to the level of the animal to beat the animal.” At the prematch press conference, Short was asked about his characterization of Kasparov as an “ape.” Although the journalist gave him an out by admitting that it was an “old quote,” Short replied with schoolboy jauntiness: “Anyone who has seen Kasparov by the swimming-pool will know that he is very hairy.” When this drew a chuckle, Short backed up his “old quote” by pointing out that “the Norwegian women’s team refer to Kasparov as ‘the Rug.’”

But whether calculated or ingenuous, the Englishman’s remarks were the equivalent of a wild pawn push. The attack was easily refuted. Kasparov and the KGB? “I think,” the champion responded suavely, “I met some KGB officials in my life. I don’t think anyone can take seriously the accusations of the English boy who did not live in the Soviet Union.” Kasparov as ape? Perhaps those girls round the swimming pool had been more taken with the Russian than with Nigel’s “pale English beauty.” Kasparov played the urbane ambassador, the imperturbable champion, which made Short’s comments seem not just prattish but also an offense against hospitality. If a world champion comes to your country to display his skills, you do not greet him by chortling about his body hair.

Kasparov himself had made only a single prematch verbal strike, just before Short played the Dutchman Jan Timman for the right to challenge for the title. Asked whom he expected to meet, and how he expected the final to go, the champion had replied, “It will be Short, and it will be short.” But Kasparov’s serious—and scary—response to Nigel’s taunts came, quite properly, across the chessboard at the Savoy. Watched closely in the early games, he failed to glower, he failed to
smirk at Nigel’s moves, failed to pace up and down like a baboon. He behaved impeccably. And at the same time he played cruel and destructive chess.

The first four games of the twenty-four-game match were catastrophic for Short. Setting off for the Strand in a state of rather wan patriotism that first Tuesday in September, I thought, 2–2 after the first four, we’ll settle for that. No, we’d be
thrilled
with that. Short is a notoriously bad starter in big matches. So (this was my modest plan) Short should attempt to slow the champion down, blanket him, frustrate him, not let him play the way he wants to. Eight days later, Short had made almost the worst possible beginning, with three losses and a draw. It was bad not just because of the brute score but for various and cumulative reasons. Short lost the first game after running out of time in a frenetic scramble and ignoring the offer of a draw. He drew the second after missing a chance to create a passed pawn, which some said might have given him winning chances. He lost the third despite a furious, flamboyant attack on Kasparov’s king. And he lost the fourth despite laying out a lengthy and impressive opening preparation. The preliminary conclusion seemed to be this: that Short was showing he could set Kasparov problems, but the champion was showing he could answer them in style.

The Grandmasters’ Analysis Room is located a couple of doors away from the Savoy at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. This is one of those venerable British restaurants where the roast beef arrives in a silver-gilt armored personnel carrier, and a guinea to the carver helps you dodge the gristle. But it is also a place with historic chess associations. During the last century, patzers and pros met upstairs at Simpson’s Divan to drink coffee, play chess, and gamble for shillings; here in 1851 Anderssen played his so called immortal game, a classic of sacrificial attack, against Kieseritzky. This location no longer exists, but a curved brass plaque reading
SIMPSON’S DIVAN TAVERN
hangs like an armorial shield on the wall of the downstairs smoking bar, now commandeered for grandmasters and their hangers-on. The atmosphere is part senior common room, part sweaty-socks rumpus area. Here,
away from the formality and actuality of play, are the basic necessities for following the game: two large display boards flashing out the moves as they happen, a television link with a fixed long shot of the players at work, another set disgorging live commentary on the first hour’s play, an array of chessboards on which to thump out possible continuations, power points for databases and the
Official Bulletin
laptop, ashtrays, and a half-price bar. Here also are the luxuries: space to roar and burble, chunter and chatter, rage and wail. A roomful of grandmasters in a state of busy analysis recalls some wildlife clip of lion cubs furiously scuffling. There are snarls and spats and ear-chewing expressions of territoriality; only when the camera pulls back do we realize that the lion and lioness themselves are lolling higher up the hill.

By the end of the third game there were sympathetic murmurings around the Analysis Room about “luck.” Short had been “unlucky” to lose on time in Game 1 when a pawn up; “unlucky” to miss that passed-pawn opportunity in Game 2. “unlucky” when Kasparov found himself with a crucial defensive rook in the right place to thwart black’s powerful attack in Game 3. Kasparov, not surprisingly, didn’t think he’d won the third game for this reason: “I always felt that truth was on my side.” Short snorted at this: “It’s total nonsense. Chess is not a science.” On the other hand, he wasn’t going to fall back on “luck” to explain things. “Luck does exist in chess, but that is not the reason for my failure to take my chances. I haven’t played well enough, that’s all. You make your own luck.” My own experience of the vertiginous joys and sorrows of the sixty-four squares has always led me to the conclusion that chess is a luck-free zone, even more luck-free than, say, tennis (where you might get a somnolent line judge, or a bad bounce on a worn court) or pool (where you might get a nasty contact if the cue ball has dirt on it). Surely in chess there is just you, your opponent, the pieces, and—in Kasparovian terms—an examination of the truth of the position. I put the matter to Colin Crouch, a bearded and amiable international master who holds one of the strangest records in the book: playing black in a tournament in London nine years ago, he made the highest-ever number of
consecutive checks in a documented game—forty-three in all—as he methodically chugged to victory. Crouch maintains that luck does exist, and of two kinds: the first is when your opponent misses something, or messes up his position to your benefit (though this might seem an imbalance of skill rather than the operation of hazard); and the second is when a position develops of enormous complication, which neither player properly understands or can see the advantage in but which they are nevertheless both obliged to play. Kasparov rather confirms this when he says, in Fred Waitzkin’s
Mortal Games
, “People think of chess as a logical game, and yes, there is logic, but at the highest level the logic is often hidden. In some positions where calculation is almost impossible, you are navigating by your imagination and your feelings, playing with your fingers.” Even so, when you are in the Land Beyond Analysis, are you not discovering the superiority of one player’s imagination, feelings, and fingers, rather than submitting to the mute operation of fortune? Perhaps, at some final level, chess players wish to decline absolute responsibility for all that happens.