Letters from London (38 page)

Speelman is a very strong player indeed, who beat Short in the Candidates’ cycle in 1988 and was currently acting as one of the Englishman’s seconds. Some, indeed, take the view that Speelman’s mazily unfathomable style might have given Kasparov more trouble than Short’s more directly aggressive manner; though when I tentatively put this theory to Grandmaster James Plaskett in the bar of the Analysis Room he looked at me as if I had just played some nutter’s opening (say, 1h4), and replied, “Gazza beats everyone, doesn’t he?” To add my own penn’orth of tribute: I once played Speelman in a charity simultaneous, and he seemed to handle my attacking verve and prepared innovations pretty well, especially given that he was also taking on thirty-nine other opponents at the same time. (To come clean, what happens is this: you sit there trembling at the board, hideously alone, knowing that you are obliged to have your move ready the moment the grandmaster arrives before you. This is fine at the start, when the chance of going humiliatingly wrong is less, and you have some time to ponder as he strolls round the other thirty-nine boards; but as the game goes on, other players drop out, and the position complicates, your tormentor comes whizzing along with ever-increasing frequency. At moments like this you feel the tiniest inkling of what it must be like to be subjected to full-time, high-level pressure from across the board. The other humiliating aspect is the realization that the flurrying figure who gazes briefly at the position, bangs out a move, and flurries on, isn’t really playing
you;
he’s playing the board. You are not just one-fortieth of his thinking time; you are also merely the equivalent of some practice position set up by one of his trainers to get the sleep out of his eyes.)

But Speelman, for all his great savvy on the board, and the affectionate respect in which he is held, is never going to be the Agassi of
the sixty-four squares. His name was once misprinted in
The Times
as Specimen, and the sobriquet is still remembered and apt. Tall, gawky, and shy, with downcast eyes, thick-lensed spectacles, and a circular shrubbery of comb-free hair, Specimen is the ultimate boffin version of the chess player. His other nickname, from the days when he had a wild beard as well, was Speelwolf. There exists rare TV footage of him on the dance floor after a chess Olympiad. Unwinding is what he seems almost literally to be doing: a sort of frenetic, uncoordinated whirling response to all the self-imposed discipline of the previous days. Boadicea with knives on her chariot wheels cleared less space around her than the grandmaster on the dance floor. Despite his regular appearances on television over a period of three months, it would be a fair bet that no clothing chain has subsequently approached him with the suggestion of a sponsoring deal. He is, in brief, a sports marketer’s worst nightmare. This is, of course, all to the greater and more serious glory of the sport he takes part in. But the alarming and true presence of Specimen stands like an emblematic bar to the popularizer’s dreams.

A
S
G
AME
5 B
EGAN
, with Short already three clear points down, the bookmakers William Hill were declining to take any more money on Kasparov. Local cheerleaders ransacked the records for examples of bad starts heroically overcome (hadn’t Steinitz been 1–4 down in a world championship, the great Fischer 0–2, Smyslov the same ½–3½?). By Game 9, however, Short was five clear points down, and his cause was lost. What the brute statistics failed to reveal was that the chess had been vivid and thrilling, as it would continue to be until almost the very end of the match. Both players favored sharp, open positions, which—apart from anything else—meant that the amateur observer could see much more clearly what was going on. Not all professional observers approved. U.S. Grandmaster Larry Evans was in the Savoy Theatre commentary box during Game 6, and through the earphones you could practically hear his neck crack from incredulous head shaking. “Looks like a position out of Hack Attack in
Kingpin
magazine. It doesn’t look like a world championship game. It looks like a
coffee-house game.” Perhaps, but one thing was certain: there were none of those mean-spirited, glued-up positions of the older Soviet school, in which denial of space was the main ambition, with the eventual intention of a pawn exchange on about move 80, followed by a crafty bishop-for-knight swap on move 170, all leading to a mildly unbalanced opponent and a slight technical advantage on about move 235 of a grinding endgame. None of that: here were glamorous pouncing attacks, and escapes of Keatonesque vertiginousness.

Game 8, a street-fighting draw, was further enlivened by the news that Nigel Short had sacked his coach at the end of the first week’s play. Lubomir Kavalek had been paid off after Game 3 and was now back in the States. The surprise was all the greater given the unremitting public praise of “Lubosh” right up to the opening pawn push. He was, we were told, Nigel’s secret weapon; he had an unrivaled database of a million games; he was “the Czech who loved beating Russians” (having left Prague in 1968, he had resurfaced four years later in Reykjavik as Fischer’s unofficial second). He had coached Short since the start of the Englishman’s run at the title and was variously described as his mentor, guru, father figure, and Svengali. The extent of his influence may be judged from this delicate revelation from Cathy Forbes: that Kavalek “also pays attention to the regulation of his charge’s bodily functions. After Short has let off steam by playing his guitar before a game, Kavalek will remind him to empty his bladder.”

Kavalek was sacked, it later emerged, because he had stopped coming up with new ideas, was enjoying the free hotel life too much, and had become a “depressing influence” according to Short. Though the Short camp tried to make light of the event, with Dominic Lawson talking about Nigel finally getting “the team he wants,” the same journalist’s subsequent account of Short’s anger and dismay is revealing: “Tomorrow I must kill Kasparov. But today I am killing my father. … He was my mentor. In the past year I have seen as much of him as I have of my wife. No, in fact I have spent more time with him than I have with Rea. … Don’t you feel the brutality of this moment? It’s parricide.” Listening to this plaint, Lawson “began to feel like an
extra in
Oedipus Rex.”
It is, no doubt, never quite the right moment for parricide, but the timing of Kavalek’s departure—and that of his much-lauded database—seemed inept: comforting to the enemy, dispiriting to the home supporters. Besides, who was now reminding Nigel to pee before each game?

B
Y THE FIRST SATURDAY
in October, the match had reached its halfway point, Short had yet to win a game and was still trailing by five clear points. In one sense, the match was dead, and the bookmakers rated a Short victory as improbable an event as proof of the Loch Ness Monster’s existence within the next year. Ambitions for Short were readjusted: he was aiming, as a starting point, to register a single victory; he was “learning to play” Kasparov with the longer-term ambition of doing better next time. A far cry from the apprehension that he might have to “sink to the level of the animal to beat the animal.” But in terms of excitement things were far from dead, and Short had just had his best week of the match. In Game 10, he built his most powerful attack so far with white, then missed what the
Official Bulletin
called “four absolutely trivial instant wins” and had to settle for a draw. In Game 11, Kasparov cleverly played on the expected demoralization the missed win would have caused: he switched openings to the Scotch, with which he had crushed Short a couple of years ago, and thumped it out as if he knew exactly what he was after. Short’s pawn structure soon looked a wreck, with doubled pawns on two files, but Short defended astutely and the game drifted away from white into another draw. (One of the match’s revealing subplots concerned Short’s readiness to accept doubling of his pawns. This usually traumatizes the amateur, whereas top players see it as usefully creating an open file.) Game 12 went in a sharp blast from opening to endgame, leaving a position that to the chess duffer looked awful for Short: he had a bishop for three pawns, but whereas his own three pawns on the queenside were blockaded by two of Kasparov’s, the champion had four passed and interconnected pawns on the king-side, which looked all set to pile down the board like space invaders. Still, International Master Crouch at my elbow called a draw; duffers
shouldn’t underestimate the power of a sole bishop or the defensive usefulness of a mobile king. Short got his third half point of the week.

That afternoon the Analysis Room was bustling: grandmasters, hangers-on, journalists, drinkers, wives and children, traitors and nutters. Rea Short and Kyveli were in evidence; while Stephen Fry, the chessoholic actor, wandered in to unleash his own bit of literary home preparation about Short’s plight
(Antony and Cleopatra
II.iii, Soothsayer to Antony: “If thou dost play with him at any game/Thou art sure to lose, and, of that natural luck/He beats thee ‘gainst the odds.”) The atmosphere should have been genial, but there was a distinct edge of rattiness. The grandmasters’ table was, as always, voluble, opinionated, and largely pro-Short. But those around it were also watching something which they themselves would certainly never achieve: a challenge for the world title. And, given that chess is a game of extreme competitiveness, a further edge may develop toward the person who is there instead of you—namely Nigel Short. Patriotism (or support for the underdog, or politeness to one’s hosts) can therefore give way to “Christ, what did he do
that
for?” When Short blocked a long diagonal bishop attack with a knight, a roar of disbelief went up from the table; but in fact it proved the start of a solid defense. Throughout the match, experts, whether on television, over headphones at the Savoy, or in the Analysis Room, constantly mispredicted the two players’ next moves. Only a few were prepared to say, “I don’t understand what’s going on,” or, “We’ll only know when we get the players’ analysis of the position.” But to those in the grandmasters’ circle, tapping into their databases, flicking out possible continuations and then taking them back, freed from the stress of actual play, shuttling to the bar for drinks, fizzing with rivalry yet safe from the highest rivalry two doors away, there was often an exaggerated certainty about what was going on. “Well, there’s
this,”
snapped Tony Miles (the first-ever British grandmaster), bossing a couple of pawns around, “but it’s a bailout.” Not a bailout that was followed by Nigel Short, as it happened. At times I was reminded of a remark by the writer Clive James, who had once provided captions to a set of photographs in the
Observer
magazine. A helpful subeditor generously
restyled them for him, accentuating the wit and taking out the longueurs. “Listen,” James cruelly explained to the sub while making him restore the original text, “if I wrote like that, I’d
be you.”

Miles was one of those who were consistently severe on Short’s play: “He’s out of his depth. Having said that, most people would be against Kasparov.” This is true: Kasparov was slaughtering Short. On the other hand, Short used to slaughter Miles. And Miles (a “traitor” for having apparently offered his services to Kasparov) would slaughter Dominic Lawson. And Lawson (a “nutter” according to one whispering international master) would doubtless slaughter me. Late in the twelfth game, I was pondering Short’s position with another frowning patzer when Raymond Keene wandered past. “What do you think of this?” I asked, indicating a rook advance which seemed to me to lock up white’s defenses and also offer sharp counterattacking chances: a move, I lightly fancied to myself, almost Shortesque in conception. “Disastrous,” commented the Penguin, and waddled away. This remark stung for, oh, roughly a month or so, and the pain was only transformed into a guffaw during Game 18. Keene was commenting alongside Speelman on Channel Four and proposed a certain rook move. Speelman, who as Short’s second was understandably inclined to diplomatic circumspection, replied, “Well, I think if Nigel plays it, I’ll fall off my chair instantaneously.”

In Game 13 violence was expected. Kasparov considers thirteen to be his lucky number—he was born on the thirteenth, achieved his grandmaster rating on the thirteenth, and is the thirteenth world champion. Gary, the whisper went, would really be going for it today with the white pieces: he’d want to put behind him the three-draw week and start the second half of the match with an explosion. Nigel had zilch chance of winning: he’d lost four games out of six with black, and you had to go back two years to find the last occasion Kasparov was beaten playing white. But there was no explosion. Kasparov looked weary, Short fresh, and they ground out a solid, dull, professional draw. This disappointed some but pleased others. “They’re playing world championship chess now,” said one international master.

There were good extraneous reasons for both players to be comparatively
docile. Between the twelfth and thirteenth games, the attempted coup against Yeltsin had taken place; Kasparov had to sit and watch tanks blast his parliament building. “Frankly speaking,” he admitted, “I spent more time looking at CNN than at the chess books.” Short’s worries were more parochial. While Kasparov contemplated the future of democracy in Russia, the Englishman consulted libel lawyers over a
Sunday Times
article alleging that he was “near to collapse,” that there were “deep divisions” in his camp, and that after the departure of Kavalek, Dominic Lawson was exercising “too much influence.” Most insultingly, if not most libelously, Short, hitherto compared to David taking on Goliath, was now held to resemble Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards, a British ski jumper who became a comic national mascot by cheerily finishing last—and usually a very long way last—in various major competitions up to and including the Winter Olympics.

Short’s reaction had its ironic side. Here was someone who had breezily trashed the moral character, political integrity, and physical appearance of the world champion coming on all sensitive and writ-happy when offered a forkful of rough abuse himself More to the point, he was finding out a little of the cost of “professionalizing and commercializing” the game, of putting it up there with tennis and golf Marketing a sport involves changing it to suit the people who pay the bills. Marketing means making your sport more accessible to people who are only half-interested in it, and thus coarsening either it or the process by which it is described, or both. Marketing means getting written about by people who understand your sport even less than those who normally write about it do. Marketing means playing up inherent nationalism and chauvinism: witness Corey Pavin wearing a Desert Storm cap during the Ryder Cup. Marketing means betraying the subtlety of your sport, and the subtlety of human character; it means Heroes and Villains, and pratting around in black leather for the cameras. It means extravagant praise leading to extravagant blame: the tall-poppy syndrome, as it’s known in Australia. Marketing can mean earning a lot more money, and marketing surely and finally means, unless you are very lucky, getting dumped on. The
comparison between Nigel Short and Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards is, apart from anything else, severely inaccurate: Short—to take the Olympic analogy—was already assured of the silver medal when he met Kasparov. But you can’t expect to be written about with fastidious accuracy once you “professionalize and commercialize” your sport. There had been an early warning of what might come when Short and Kasparov opened the bids for their match at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. The Englishman sat his daughter, Kyveli, on his lap. A harmless and unprovoking gesture, you might think, but one publicly derided by Dutch grandmaster Hans Ree as “Saddam Hussein-like.” Short for once had the lightness of touch to respond: “It’s a long time since I invaded Kuwait.” Some might think being compared to Saddam
and
Eddie the Eagle is a bit tough. But that’s marketing.