Letters from London (37 page)

Still, however “luck” might be defined and however generously interpreted by chess patriots over the first three games, no one was impertinent enough to reach for this explanation after Game 4. This was the noisiest afternoon so far in the Analysis Room, full of grand-masterly bustle and anticipation. Short had the white pieces for the second time, needed to go for a win, and came out with a lengthy prepared opening. Kasparov, who would have been forgiven for playing quietly with the black pieces, sitting on his lead and inviting Short to do his damnedest, instead responded with the aggressive Poisoned Pawn variation. In this, black accepts the gift of a pawn on the white Queen’s Knight file, the disadvantage of which is that his queen gets marginalized and has to spend awhile working its way back to the center of things. White in theory neutralizes the black queen, chivvying it around the board while at the same time developing his own pieces in an attacking formation. Chess games, even at patzer level, are arguments over structure and activity, development and material; in the higher strata, a single interruption to the tempo of your play
can be most damaging. This is what Short was doing: yielding up a pawn to speed his own attack.

Then came something even more unexpected: Short offered Kasparov a second pawn for his hungry queen. The assembled grandmasters were puzzled: surely Kasparov wouldn’t dare take this pawn as well? It may not be as notoriously poisoned as the first one; even so it must be fairly toxic. But the black queen was boasting an iron stomach that afternoon, and gobbled up the second pawn; whereupon Short drove it back again into its lonely hutch on the inactive side of the board. This time, it seemed even more tied down than before. Kasparov was two pawns up, but Short at move 20 could easily have forced a draw by repetition of moves if he was in any doubt about his advantage in the position.

When the monitor flashed out Short’s next move as Raei, declining the tacit draw, there were whoops and claps around the Analysis Room “He’s going for the win—he’s turned down the draw!” Better still, “After Nc4 Kasparov will have to sac.” Indeed he did, sacrificing rook for knight in order to prevent his queen being trussed up and carried off like a spidered bluebottle. Short pressed on with his attack, while Kasparov seemed merely to give his position a loosening shrug, part readjustment of his defenses, part quiet counterthrust. They reached a point where a Kasparov pawn capture would inevitably provoke an exchange. The champion duly played 27… dxc
₄
, whereupon the room clearly expected Short to recapture a black pawn with his bishop. When he didn’t, there was a sweaty, fearful hush. “Look, Nigel’s thinking again. That’s a very bad sign. He does not look like a man who’s going down a route he planned.” Nigel thought on. “The body language is looking bad.” The Englishman, it later turned out, had miscalculated the result of a long forced exchange and was now obliged to play an inferior move.

From then on, the room watched a fierce demonstration of Kasparov proving a win. Short was reduced to doing what inferior players with crumbling positions are all too familiar with: throwing pieces forward in a Western Front attack on the opponent’s king, while acknowledging the probability that you will be machine-gunned to bits
before you get to his trenches. “What do I say about that move?” Eric Schiller, American National Master and editor of that day’s
Official Bulletin
asked. He paused over his laptop at the main grandmasters’ table and waited for advice. “It’s crap,” one expert replied. “Complete crap,” a second added. The mood was gloomy, with that extra tinge of bitterness which comes when the homeboy seems to be letting you down. “Is it crap or complete crap?” Schiller asked, trying to lighten things up. “It’s necessary crap,” came a third opinion. “Is it crap, complete crap, or necessary crap?” But no one had the heart to respond, and on move 39, just before the time control, Short capitulated. This oral exchange, not surprisingly, didn’t make its way into the printed
Bulletin
, although opinion there is not particularly coded. Short’s reply to 27… dxc
₄
is dismissed as “frankly, absurd,” while the American grandmaster Patrick Wolff (who had declared a win for Short on move 14 and a win for Kasparov on move 20) announced laconically of Short’s position after move 34, “This is a dead parrot.”

W
HEN YOU EAVESDROP
on the chatter of chess, you discover that it reproduces and confirms the game’s compelling mixture of violence and intellectuality. As pieces are finger-flipped around demonstration boards in swift refutation of some other grandmaster’s naive proposition, half the language has a street-fighting quality to it. You don’t just attack a piece, you
hit
it. You don’t merely take a piece when you can
chop it off, hack it off,
or
snap it off.
Pawns may advance, but they prefer to
stomp
down the board like storm troopers. Getting your opponent into time trouble, you try to
flag
him; playing a sacrifice, you
sack
a piece, as you might sack a city. And since violent verbs require victims, your opponent’s bits of wood are personified into living matter; “I want to hit
this guy
and
this guy.”

Aggression involves contempt. So an opponent’s strategy which seems passive or unadventurous is dismissed as
vegetarian
. (Hitler was a vegetarian, of course, but no matter.) Here is Nigel Short reflecting before the title match on whether to recycle some of the offbeat lines he had played against Karpov: “Kasparov could destroy such openings at the board, and then I’d be fucked. I must play a real man’s
opening. No quiche.’” Real men don’t let themselves be fucked; they fuck. Here are some other Shortian prematch reflections, taken from Dominic Lawson’s
The Inner Game
. “I’m going to give it to him good and hard.” “I’m going to give the guy a good rogering.” “I’m going to give it to him good and hard, right up him.” “I want to rape and mate him.” Lawson recalls the moment in Barcelona in 1987 when he first heard Short use the acronym
TDF
, which he assumed to be shorthand for some complex tactical ploy. At first he didn’t want to confess his chessic ignorance, but after Short and the American grandmaster Yasser Seirawan had used the expression several times, he finally cracked and inquired. “Trap. Dominate. Fuck,” the two grandmasters chanted back at him.

Interwoven with all this is a more polysyllabic language of theory and aspiration. A move may be
natural
or
artificial positional
or
antipositional, intuitive
or
anti-intuitive, thematic
or
dysfunctional
. If its aim is to inhibit the opponent rather than strike menace on its own behalf, it is said to be
prophylactic
. And what are the two players seeking? The
truth of the position;
or sometimes, the
absolute truth of the position
. They are struggling to
prove
something; though an outside observer might not
believe in
it. This makes each game a courtroom scene, and a world championship match a Day of Judgment. Another analogy is with the philosophical symposium: as in The players are
continuing their discussion
of the Bc4 variation of the Najdorf.” Thus high ambition combines with low brutality; there seems to be no middle vocabulary developed by the players.

Strategic verbal violence features in life off the board as well. The two terms of abuse I heard most often down among the chessists were
traitor
and
nutter
. Such epithets were widely deployed during the global institutional wrangling that preceded the London match. For decades the world championships had been run by FIDE, the International Chess Federation, but increasingly there were collisions between this entrenched bureaucracy and volatile egos with high financial expectations. Relations between FIDE and the top players had deteriorated sharply under the Presidency of Florencio Campomanes. When I asked one English grandmaster his opinion of Campomanes,
he replied that he found him charming, intelligent, and very likable; the only problem was that he should have been running a small Marxist state with a large military budget rather than a sports federation.

The qualifying cycle which produced Nigel Short as Kasparov’s challenger was organized as usual by FIDE. They had got as far as awarding the final to Short’s home city of Manchester when the two contenders hijacked the match for themselves, setting up their own rival organization, the Professional Chess Association. The PCA showed (partly of necessity) that you can successfully run a major championship with fewer officials and levels of bureaucracy; they introduced some spectator-friendly rules changes (thus, every single game was finished without adjournment); they earned more money for themselves; and they were naturally accused of being traitors. Kasparov had been fighting FIDE for years, while Short didn’t like being taken for granted. “FIDE thought I was a little bunny rabbit because I smile a lot and look fairly inoffensive,” the Englishman later recalled. “But I’m a bunny rabbit with sharp teeth, and they got bitten.”

Long-term audacity plus a principled assertion of the individual’s right to sell his services to the highest bidder, or short-term self-interest? No doubt a bit of both. The setting up of the PCA made for good prepublicity; but it also distracted the players in their final preparations. Short, as debutant at this level, was the more likely to suffer from this distraction; he also received the greater abuse of the two. A Manchester dignitary, seeing the match slip away from his city, called Nigel a “breadhead,” while the British Chess Federation passed a motion declaring that Short had brought the game into disrepute and berated their most famous player in an oddly lachrymose press release: “You could have been a chess hero, a legend in your lifetime, but not like this.” Campomanes meanwhile retaliated by relieving Kasparov of his title, stripping both players of their ELO ratings (the officially computed measure of strength), and setting up a parallel and contemporaneous FIDE world championship. The world of chess had become as fissured as that of boxing, and by the end of the year there would be three world champiqns: the PCA titleholder,
the FIDE titleholder, plus Bobby Fischer, who down the years had continued to argue that since no one had ever beaten him and his title had been illegally removed by FIDE, he was still numero uno.

The PCA, a body so ad hoc that it consisted—and still consists, at the time of writing—only of Short, Kasparov, and Kasparov’s lawyer, was formed, in Raymond Keene’s oft-repeated words, “to bring chess into the modern world.” This meant “giving fans maximum enjoyment and sponsors full value for money,” according to one of the Association’s rare public statements; it also meant “better-focused marketing.” Nigel Short at his opening press conference spoke of the need “to professionalize and commercialize the sport, as has been done in the past with tennis and golf.” This sounds fair enough, but there is also a certain amount of humbug in the Association’s proclamations. Creeping bureaucratese, too. Try this for size: “The PCA is the first governing body to be cofounded by a world champion and to be vested by him with the ability to further confer the title through competitions organized by it. As a result, the PCA has an organic right to do so not enjoyed by any previous sanctioning body.” In playground terms this means: I’ve got the biggest conker, come and get it, ya ya ya.

P
ROFESSIONALIZE AND COMMERCIALIZE
… tennis and golf. This meant, in part, television, and the medium responded with enthusiasm. Channel 4 (as co-backer) put out three transmissions on every match day, and the BBC one. Television close-ups roundly emphasized the physiognomic and gestural differences between the two players: Kasparov fizzingly coiled, scowling, frowning, grimacing, lip scrunching, head scratching, nose pulling, chin rubbing, occasionally slumping down over his crossed paws like a melodramatically puzzled dog; Short more impassive, bland-faced, sharp-elbowed, and stiff-postured, as if he’d forgotten to take the coat hanger out of his jacket. But this repertoire of tics, plus the undifferentiated way of playing the moves (not much room for commentary on the back lift, pickup, or follow-through of the arm) generates few additions to the pantheon of sports images. Experts did their best with junior anthropology
interpretations of body language (“Nigel’s got his knuckles pressed up to his chin—he’s really concentrating”) but were too often reduced to valorous attempts to talk up the action. “We’re actually seeing two people thinking in public!” enthused the aptly named Mr. Keene at one point. “Thinking incarnate on the TV screen!” The camera did provide one shot that gave a powerful idea of the force field of a chess game: an overhead view of both players straining forward across the board, with only two ranks separating them from a Maori nose rub or, more likely, a head butt. Still, when all is said and done, the basic and constant visuals in television chess are of two seated players pushing wood.

Or, too often for comfort, not pushing it. Channel 4 carried the first hour of each game live, and wandered into quasi-philosophical problems of being and nothingness. What invariably happened was that the players would in the first few minutes rattle out a familiar opening, until one produced a prepared variation from the known line. The player who had been varied against would then settle down for a long and slumberous ponder while the innovator went off and made himself a cup of tea. The high point of such on-air “thinking incarnate” came during Game 9, itself a facsimile of Game 5 in its opening moves. After the first eleven moves had been flicked out in a couple of minutes, Kasparov varied. Short thought. And thought. Commercial break. And thought. And thought. Second commercial break. And thought. Finally, after using up forty-five minutes of live television time, he castled. Tennis and golf? Forget it.

Another reason chess is unlikely to take off (and the support of the ignorant couch potato plus know-nothing stadium clogger are an important financial factor) is the variable charisma of those who play the game. If all players were as intelligent, voluble, and linguistically assured as Gary Kasparov, the game could print its own checkbooks. But the truth is that too many pawn pushers belong to the train-spotter tendency. Anoraks, plastic bags, old sandwiches, and an introverted excitement are some of their characteristics. Television did its chivvying best with the species: two of Channel 4‘s resident grandmasters were Daniel King, whose shoulder-length hair and colorful
shirts looked positively
vie de Boheme
in the context, and the fluent, bankerish figure of Raymond Keene (nicknamed the Penguin for his well-lunched stomach and the rather Antarctic set of his head on his shoulders). The third, however, was the far more compelling—or, if you were a ratings-troubled television channel controller, uncompelling-figure of Jon Speelman.