Letters From London

by Julian Barnes

  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.

  PROFESSIONALIZE 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.

  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, hideo
usly 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.

  AS GAME 5 BEGAN, 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?

  BY 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 wou
ld 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.”