King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

by Paul Hoffman

  Pascal wished me success.

  “It will be sexy playing a beautiful woman,” I told him.

  “It will be even sexier beating a beautiful woman,” he said.

  “You have experience?”

  “Not exactly. Just follow my advice.”

  One of the male students approached me. “We count you,” he said in broken English, “defend our manhood. We not good. You beat.”

  I laughed and told him I’d try. One of the information officers came over and sat on a sofa behind me. The simul was late getting started, and so to pass the time I thumbed through a copy of Muammar Gadhafi’s slim Green Book—his manifesto for achieving a utopian society, the Jamahiriyat (“state of the masses”)—that I had purchased in the lobby gift shop. The jacket copy set the tone for the quirky booklet, which was Leader’s answer to Mao’s Little Red Book:

  The thinker Muammar Al Qathafi does not present his thought for simple amusement or pleasure. Nor is it for those who regard ideas as puzzles for the entertainment of empty-minded people standing on the margin of life. Qathafi’s ideas interpret life as it erupts from the heart of the tormented, the oppressed, the deprived and the grief-stricken. It flows from the ever-developing and conflicting reality in search of whatever is best and most beautiful.

  I turned to a fourteen-page section called “Woman” on the off chance that it would have insights I could use to beat Stefanova—or at least an explanation of why Libyan men might find it unsettling to lose to her. “Woman is a female and man is a male,” Gadhafi helpfully stated:

  According to a gynaecologist, woman menstruates or suffers feebleness every month, while man, being a male, does not menstruate or he is not subject to the monthly period which is a bleeding…. When a woman does not menstruate, she is pregnant. If she is pregnant she becomes, due to pregnancy, feeble for about a year, which means that all her natural activities are reduced until she delivers her baby…. As the man does not get pregnant, he is not liable to the feebleness which woman, being a female, suffers.

  I wondered how ignorant the average Libyan was of human biology that Leader felt compelled to give this simple lecture. His statement was a prelude to his conclusion that men and women, although “equal as human beings,” do not have “absolute identity between them as regards their duties.”

  Before I could read further and learn the respective responsibilities of each sex, Stefanova made a grand entrance into the playing area. She wore a sheer embroidered black tunic over a dark pants suit. As a Libyan official somberly read her long bio—“winner of Youth Chess Championship of under 10 years old in Puerto Rico in 1989”—she surveyed her competitors one by one. When her eyes reached me, she arched her brows, smiled winsomely, and winked. The official announced the beginning of play.

  Stefanova elected to go clockwise around the tables, which meant that I was her second opponent. She shook the first player’s hand and advanced her queen pawn. She shook my hand, told me she was pleased I could play, and made the same first move. So far so good: she was following my preparation. With only fourteen opponents, she was soon back at our table. The Libyan on Board One mimicked her first move, and she responded by whipping out her bishop—voilà, the Pseudo Trompowsky. I also copied her first move, and for a moment she looked at me instead of at the position. “Now what should I play?” she whispered, as she pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I could move my bishop,” I thought I heard her say. She was speaking so softly—and I was so groggy—I couldn’t be sure. I tried to remain calm while thinking yes, yes, move the bishop. I wanted a Pseudo Trompowsky on my board, too.

  No luck. She picked up her king knight, flamboyantly lifted it high over her pawns, and gently lowered it onto a square on the third row. Drat—it was only her second move, and she had already taken me out of my preparation. I had seen this position before; I just didn’t know how she handled it. She was back in a couple minutes and I copied her knight move. She responded by caressing her dark-squared bishop and slowly sliding it until it was adjacent to my knight, which it was now attacking. I was on my own. I had reached the position several times at blitz on the Internet Chess Club but didn’t know the recommended response. What to do? One disadvantage of developing her dark-squared bishop so early on the kingside, I thought, was that it left the dark squares on her queenside weak. Indeed, a flank pawn was no longer defended, and I decided, by pushing a pawn of my own one square, to open a diagonal path for my queen to go after her pawn. Afterward Pascal told me that my plan was good, but I should have been more aggressive and pushed my pawn two squares, thereby also challenging her domination of the center as well as creating the desired path for my queen. Still, I had a decent game until the fifteenth move, when I should have prevented her from trading a knight for my bishop. A knight and a bishop are generally regarded as equal in strength, but in the kind of unobstructed position we reached, the bishop was stronger because it can zip from one side of the board to the other in a single stroke.

  For the next fifteen moves she slowly and efficiently choked me, increasing her space advantage with every move, just as I feared she would if she had played the Exchange Slav. My strangled position, though, was far from lost. She was always in a cheery mood when she came to my board, until, on the thirty-first move, she blundered badly, overlooking that I could win her king pawn. I captured it not because of my brilliance but because of her carelessness. Now, I thought, I might really experience the pleasure of beating a beautiful woman.

  I had to suppress my newfound cockiness so that I could continue to focus on the game. She stood there silent, frowning, her body crouched low over the position. How, she must have asked herself, could she, the world champion, have overlooked such a cheap and obvious threat? She must have gazed at the board for five minutes—by far the longest she had taken on any move in any game—but she could not undo the past. Finally she picked up her king from the very corner of the board and banged it down on the adjacent square on the back rank—a move I didn’t understand. But the audible thump of the king against the board—her previous thirty-one moves had all been quiet—signaled that she was mad.

  By this time she had disposed of more than half of her opponents, and now she literally ran around the room, moving instantaneously on all of the other boards, trying to blitz me. She never left me more than half a minute to move. I wasn’t sure how to exploit my pawn advantage, and I desperately needed time to think. When she arrived next, I said, “Pass.”

  “Move!” she commanded.

  Simuls are usually conducted in one of two ways. Players are either required to move instantly when the grandmaster arrives or they are allowed to pass a maximum of three times. Often the rule is announced before the simul begins, but here it wasn’t. I had noticed that she graciously let other players pass, so I had assumed of course that the rule also applied to me.

  “Move now!” she repeated.

  I reluctantly did as I was told, and when she angrily made a move in response, her unsteady hand knocked over a few of the pieces. Part of me wanted to beat her and punish her for her bad behavior. The other part wanted to run because I was unnerved by the sudden aggression of someone who moments before I had found so attractive. She reminded me of an old girlfriend who was sweet one moment and crazy the next. The intensity of my game with Stefanova had allowed me to forget about my problems with the Libyan authorities and the presence of the information officer who was still sitting two feet behind me.

  Ten minutes earlier Pascal had gone to the dining room because the meal service was about to end. Now dinner seemed like a good idea. Because I didn’t know how to win the game, certainly not in the time Stefanova was allowing me, I let the position repeat three times. She claimed a draw, calmed down, and was all smiles again. She shook my hand and signed my score sheet. Two of the men she defeated congratulated me. I had not exactly “defended our manhood,” but I hadn’t capitulated either. I was happy I hadn’t lost, but was miffed at not having the germ of an idea of how t
o convert my pawn advantage. I felt better after dinner when Pascal looked at the game and didn’t see an easy win either. He said I’d played well.

  Stefanova, as I’d expected, never had the chance for a public expression of solidarity with the Bulgarian nurses. Instead she was shown on television visiting local hospitals to comfort children with AIDS. The children deserved comfort, of course, but in the upside-down world of Libya, a planned show of unity with the nurses on death row had morphed into a photo opportunity with the victims of the nurses’ nonexistent crimes.

  Later, when I was back in the States, I told Jennifer about my playing Stefanova. “That’s funny,” she said, “but, Paul, she’s not really my idol. The idea of partying all night between tournament rounds is appealing as fantasy. But I can’t do that. I’m generally wiped out after a game and want to relax and go to bed.”

  IT WAS OUR LAST NIGHT IN TRIPOLI, AND AT SOME POINT PASCAL AND I WERE awakened in the dark by enthusiastic shouting and gunfire. The disturbance was particularly loud because we had left the balcony door open to cool off the room. I slid the glass door shut and tried to stare out, but without my contacts I couldn’t see what was happening. Both of us thought the hotel might be under attack, with crowds cheering the assailants on. But I was too tired to think of a constructive response, so I pulled the pillow over my head, hoped for the best, and went back to sleep. Pascal apparently did the same thing.

  In the morning we learned that there had been a holiday celebration during the night. As we waited in the lobby for Walid to escort us to the airport, half a dozen information officers told me they had a special surprise. They led me to a couch and backed away smiling. I thought I was finally going to meet Leader or his son. But instead I was greeted by an aide to Mohammed Gadhafi, who ceremoniously presented me with four wrapped gifts from his boss.

  I could tell that Pascal had the same thought: What if there were bombs inside? We made an excuse about wanting to double-check our room to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. We took the presents with us and carefully unwrapped them. Gadhafi had given me a handsome camel rug, an ornate saddle blanket, a colorful woven handbag, and a set of coffee table books on his country. We examined the gifts closely but weren’t really sure what we were looking for; if a wire had been sticking out of a book, or a battery sewn into the rug, we’d have known we had a problem.

  AN HOUR AFTER I RECEIVED MY PRESENTS IN THE EL MAHARY, WALID WAS fast-tracking Pascal and me through airport security. We bypassed long lines of crabby travelers, and our bags were never searched or X-rayed. A nice gesture to make our send-off more pleasant or a diabolical plan to get our explosive packages onto the plane? Maybe it was time to picture Muammar on the toilet.

  Pascal and I relaxed once we reached cruising altitude and heard no rumblings in the cargo hold. I asked a British Airways stewardess if the crew ever stayed at the El Mahary. She laughed. “Are you kidding?” she said. “We never stay in Tripoli. The airline won’t risk leaving the planes overnight. We always turn around and fly back to London.”

  There was one last oddity to our surreal trip. I took out a pen and my notebook—my infamous agent’s notebook—so that I could jot down some reflections. The pen looked cheap; I think it came from one of the information officers. I must have inadvertently kept it when he had me sign one of the forms. When I started to take off the cap, the very top of the cap popped open—it seemed to have been cut—and a small projectile shot out, landed six feet away in the aisle, and rolled under the seats.

  “I give up,” I told Pascal, laughing. “I’m tired of trying to tell whether we’re in danger or not. When we leave Libyan airspace, do you think they’ll serve alcohol?”

  I imagined the conversation we’d have with security when we switched planes in London and later when we drove across the Canadian border to the States.

  “Where have you guys been?” they’d ask.

  “To the World Chess Championship,” we’d say.

  “And where was that?”

  “In Libya.”

  “Did anyone give you any gifts?”

  “Oh yes, Gadhafi.”

  11

  “I STUCK IT TO HIM REAL GOOD, WAY UP HIM”

  “[In chess] the sense of overwhelming mastery on the one side matches that of inescapable helplessness on the other. It is this anal-sadistic feature that makes the game so well adapted to gratify at the same time both the homosexual and antagonistic aspects of the father-son contest.”

  —REUBEN FINE

  “In the two things that comprise manhood, a serious career among men and the love of a woman, his chess past dogged and thwarted him.”

  —ERNEST JONES,

  on Paul Morphy

  “I DON’T KNOW WHETHER THERE’S A GOOD WAY TO DIE, BUT there are certainly bad ways….” I was in Nigel Short’s apartment in Athens, reading aloud from his weekly chess column, which he was about to dispatch to The Sunday Telegraph in London, when his six-year-old son walked into the room. Short had been eager to share the column with me, one writer to another, but the particular topic—a gruesome patricide in the chess world—seemed inappropriate for young ears. So I stopped my recital and promised Short that I’d continue later.

  “That’s OK,” Short said before addressing his son. “Nicholas, what’s a bad way to die?”

  “Shoot yourself! Cook yourself!” Nicholas said.

  “How about being stabbed to death by your own son?”

  Nicholas, normally a talkative child, did not respond.

  “Now you promise,” Short continued, “you aren’t going to do that to me. You promise me you love me.”

  Nicholas thought about it and then broke into a wide grin. “I’ll get a woodchopper and chop your head off.” He hacked the air with an imaginary axe and danced around his father’s office.

  “All right, Nicholas, you should leave Paul and me alone now. He came all the way from New York to talk to me.”

  “But I want him to talk to me,” Nicholas said.

  “I have a little guy like you at home,” I told him. “His name is Alexander, and he’s five.”

  “Can I play with him?”

  “He’s across the Atlantic in the United States.”

  “OK, Nicholas,” Short interjected. “Scoot along now.”

  IT WAS LATE MARCH 2005, AND I WAS IN GREECE FOR THREE DAYS TO INTERVIEW Nigel Short about the peaks and valleys of his checkered chess career. In 1993, before I took up tournament chess again, I enthusiastically followed Short’s games in the papers as he became the first Western grandmaster since Fischer to play a match for the world crown. Pascal had introduced me to Short, and he was the last grandmaster I’d interview in depth in my far-flung mission to understand the inner life of chess players.

  Short’s reputation preceded him: I was fascinated by the contradiction between the decorous maturity and control he displayed at the board and the crudeness so prevalent in his language and behavior away from it. To further complicate the picture, unlike many world-class players, Short has an unusually stable family life (with two children and a wife of many years, Rhea, who has her own career as a psychotherapist), and yet he can also regress in an instant into the locker-room swagger of a fourteen-year-old boy intent on letting his friends know that he has just lost his virginity.

  Many middle-aged players, conscious of Capablanca’s example, reinvent their early years, adding victories in the crib to their résumés. It is not in Short’s nature to inflate his past—nor does he have to: he was one of that unusual breed, the true chess prodigy. He learned the rules in 1971, when he was six. In 1972, he contracted chicken pox and spent time in bed replaying Alekhine’s greatest games from a book.

  That same year, the newspapers were full of stories about the Fischer-Spassky match, and Short remembers being extremely put off by the American’s behavior. “I must say I didn’t like Fischer that much at the time,” Short told me. “I thought he was behaving pretty badly. I saw this slightly older guy defaulting
and complaining about money, the height of his chair, and other playing conditions, and giving a big fuss about the television cameras, so what was there to be impressed by? The whole Cold War thing passed me by.”

  Fischer’s strong, crystalline play, however, was a different story—Short found his games intoxicating. “The family was on holiday in Sandown, in the Isle of Wight, during the championship,” his father wrote in Nigel Short. “We traveled home by car and Nigel spent the entire nine-hour journey playing through games and trying out moves on his pocket chess set.” From that point on, chess dominated the boy’s life. “Nigel would pick up a chess book whenever he had a spare moment, and if we allowed it, he would read during meals. A chess book was the last thing he put down at night and the first thing he picked up in the morning.” Short’s mother called the local chess club to arrange for him to attend, but the manager turned her down, saying that a child that young should be in bed in the evenings. Other seven-year-olds in the coal-mining county of Lancashire, England, aspired to be footballers or cricketers, but Short announced that he was going to become a chess professional.

  Five years later, he was the strongest twelve-year-old on the planet and the youngest participant in the World Under 17 Championship. A Russian magazine ran a story with the headline “Beware of Nigel Short,” but some of his countrymen wondered if his approach to chess was too laissez-faire to make it to the top. Short was not as single-mindedly devoted to chess as Russian prodigies; he was known to wander off in the middle of a tournament game to play Space Invaders. He also spent time away from chess mastering the electric guitar; his punk-rock band The Urge even appeared on British television. “He seemed far too happy a child to be a chess player,” international master Bill Hartston said at the time. “He never cried when he lost. I thought this was the one weakness in Nigel.”