Letters From London

by Julian Barnes

  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.

  BETWEEN THE FOURTEENTH and fifteenth games, I lunched some observations out of the international master William Hartston. He had been at school with me back in the days when chess was a very amateur business in this country, and the notion of a British grandmaster was as speculative as the yeti. At our school, there were two reliable ways of getting out of the playground rain at lunchtime. The uncompetitive joined the stamp club, the competitive the chess club. (I joined the stamp club.) Thereafter I followed Hartston’s progress from a distance: top board for England, chess correspondent of The Independent, resident BBC chess sage. The last time I had seen him he had arranged to have me slaughtered in a charity simultaneous by a fourteen-year-old (much more soul liquefying than being slaughtered by Speelman).

  Hartston has a positive lifetime score against Nigel Short of 2–1, though he admits that both victories came before Nigel started shaving. As an industrial psychologist, he tends to take a broader and more amused view of proceedings, thereby attracting the “traitor” rather than “nutter” label. For instance, he was skeptical of the new official line about Short: that since he was not going to stage a miracle recovery, he was now “learning to play” Kasparov for the next time round. In Hartston’s opinion, there won’t be a next time: “If you put Short back into the ratings, he would be ninth, with five younger players above him.”

  This assumes that the Professional Chess Association will still be there next time round. Hartston was not as dismissive as I had expected about the marketing possibilities of chess…. But tennis and golf? Why not, he replied. He reckons that the players are just as promotable as golfers, and points out that the last game of the 1987 Karpov-Kasparov match in Seville drew an astonishing live television audience of 18 million Spaniards. When I asked him to assess the chances of other grandmasters abandoning FIDE and throwing in their lot with the Professional Chess Association, he replied, with a sort of benign cynicism, “The way to a chess player’s heart is through his wallet.” This doesn’t, of course, make chess players much different from anybody else; indeed, in their case the cardio-economic link is all the more understandable. The very best players have always been able to make a living, but in few other professions (except perhaps poetry) does the earnings graph go so suddenly into free fall when set against the graph of ability. International Master Colin Crouch, who is around number 30 in the country, took nine days off from the Short-Kasparov match to play a tournament in the Isle of Man. The top prize was a mere £600, and despite a bright start Crouch came home with only his expenses. This is the reality of even a strong player’s life: small tournaments, small money, local fame. A couple of years ago, Hartston did the following calculation during a grandmaster tournament in Spain: assuming that all the prize money on offer was divided simply between the grandmasters (and there were some powerful IMs scrapping for the loot as well), their average earnings worked out at between £2 and £3 an hour. The basic rate for the female industrial mushroom pickers in the North of England who demonstrated outside last year’s Booker Prize ceremony was £3.74P an hour.

  Hartston certainly thinks that the pursuit of money and the PCA politicking were ser
ious distractions to Short’s first-time title challenge. Indeed, he goes further, believing (as does Cathy Forbes) that at some level Short recognized he wasn’t going to beat Kasparov and therefore put his energy into getting the best possible payday that he could. In Hartston’s view, this fundamental self-disbelief had also leached into the Englishman’s play: “I get the feeling that Short is trying to prove to himself that he isn’t afraid of Kasparov—but he is.” Hartston admires what he calls Short’s “classical, correct chess style,” and praised his tactics against Karpov, when he varied his openings in such a way as to provoke damagingly long periods of reflection in that Russian. This is a fundamental part of successful match play. “The history of the world chess championship,” Hartston maintains, “shows that the way to beat a great player is to allow him to indulge his strengths in unfavorable circumstances.” This is what Botvinnik famously did against Tal in 1960. I asked Hartston what strength-cum-weakness Short might play on against Kasparov, and he replied, “Impatience.”

  WITH APT TIMING, Game 15 arrived to annotate this theme. Short, with the black pieces for the eighth time, played the queen’s gambit declined—a solid, traditional defense which he knew well and had used in all his candidate’s matches but had not so far offered to Kasparov. Observing the opening moves, the international master Malcolm Pein praised “a sound, sensible Nigel Short not trying to strangle Gary Kasparov from the beginning.” David Norwood, Hartston’s co-commentator in the BBC studio and fellow critic of Short’s Panzerism, enthused over what he saw as “normal chess.” When the anchorman muttered that nothing much seemed to be happening, Norwood patiently explained that “normal chess is about fighting over half-squares.” Hartston agreed: the game would turn, ultimately, on whether white’s two central pawns were weak or strong, but the truth of the position would not be swiftly yielded up. Indeed it wasn’t: Kasparov wheeled and probed, Short adjusted and secured. Kasparov had the choice—the eventual choice—of attacking either kingside or queenside; black’s job was to stay patient, shore up the seawall, and wait to find out from which direction the waves would break. Short seemed to do this admirably: there were none of the wide open spaces and forced piece trading of earlier games. Then, fascinatingly, the game developed as “normal chess” sometimes does: that is to say, a rather closed, quiescent position, with no material gains and only a half-square or so advantage to either side, opens up into a thrilling, charging attack. The answer to Hartston’s question as to whether white’s central pawns were strong or weak was disclosed: they were strong, not least because they belonged to Kasparov. In ten brutal moves, the world champion jimmied his way into Short’s position and ripped the place to bits. Short had not gone on a rash strangling trip, and Kasparov had been obliged to wait a long time for the right moment. Yet he had shown no signs of self-destructive “impatience.” On the contrary, he had displayed exemplary patience, then perfectly calculated aggression.

  Subsequent analysis of Game 15 showed, not surprisingly, that the above description is too neat, too thematic. Kasparov may have jimmied open Short’s front door, but the householder had lifted the latch himself. Moments like this—when subsequent analysis acts like gravy thickener on the game you thought you knew—are part of chess’s fascination. If you watch a video of an old Wimbledon final or Ryder Cup match, you aren’t really reanalyzing; you are merely reminding yourself of what happened and suffusing yourself again with the emotions provoked by the original events. But a chess game, after it has happened, continues in organic life, changing and growing as it is examined. In Game 6, for instance, when Short opted for what he called “the most violent method of smashing Kasparov’s defenses,” sacrificing a bishop on move 26, it was generally thought that he had “missed a win.” Analysis of the game continued, however, and by the time the players were hunched over Game 15 a defense to Qh7 had been found which would have given Kasparov a draw. On the other hand, at the time of playing no one had seen this possible defense, so in a sense it didn’t exist. This is one of the aspects of chess that gives it a sense of high and oscillating peril: the tension between objectivity and subjectivity, between some coldly ascertainable, finally provable “truth of the position” and the clammy-handed actuality of play, with half a dozen different half-truths running through your head while the clock ticks, while the footlights and your opponent glare.

  Eventually, some final truth about a position may emerge, months or years down the track, with the help of outside analysts and subsequent world champions. The immediate postmortems, while appearing to start this process, may in fact work more as a continuation of the struggle on the board, and thus be more psychologically freighted. What normally happens when a game finishes is that the players discuss between themselves the final position and the key moves that led to it. This is not just from sadistic or masochistic interest but also from lucid need. (Kasparov used to do this after games with Karpov, even though he loathed and despised him. “I am talking chess with the number two in the world,” he explained. “I wouldn’t go to a restaurant with him, but who else can I really talk to about these games? Spassky?”) Such analysis continued for television and the press, with Short showing himself at his best: straight, rueful, likable, self-critical, still fretting about the truth of the position. Kasparov, by contrast, the supreme strategist and consummate psychological bruiser, seemed to treat the follow-up discussion as part of the match. Avuncular, dismissive, unfretted, he played the wise don to Nigel’s anxious student. Yes, on the one hand there was this, this, and this; but then I have that, and maybe that, and then that; and if Rb8, then Nc5; and of course that move of Nigel’s was a big blunder, so really I think the position is equal; perhaps I even have the better chances. Kasparov’s analyses often seemed craftily to diminish Short’s (and everybody else’s) assessment of what had happened. “Nigel’s problem was hesitation,” Kasparov announced in a lordly way after the debacle of Game 4. “He has big psychological problems, and I am curious to see how he deals with them.” After Game 15, Kasparov commented that Short’s use of the queen’s gambit declined “wasn’t a very good choice by him” since it led to the sort of positions with which the champion was thoroughly familiar. “It wasn’t that difficult,” he summed up. “Probably the cleanest game of the match.” Clean as in clean kill, that is.

  ARRIVING FOR THE SIXTEENTH game, with Kasparov six points clear and needing only three draws to retain his title, I ran into one of the rumpus room’s senior figures, Professor Nathan Divinsky. Benign and epigrammatic, he is President of the Canadian Chess Federation (and, among other achievements, was once married to Canada’s prime minister Kim Campbell). I observed that the match might be over that week.

  “It’s been over for six weeks,” he responded.

  What about the idea that after the match was settled they might play a few exhibition games for fun?

  “It’s been an exhibition game since the beginning.” As a transatlantic observer sitting day after day at the grandmasters’ table, Divinsky confessed himself disappointed with the narrowly partisan attitude of the local analysts, with their “Nigel-this, Nigel-that” approach to the match. Here, after all, was a rare and privileged opportunity to watch in action the strongest player in the history of the game: “When Nijinsky danced, they didn’t care who the ballerina was.” He cited a knight move in Game 15 (21 Nf4), which Kasparov had identified as the key moment, but which the boys at the round table hadn’t heeded. As general corroboration of this British insularity, Divinsky pointed out a news story in that morning’s Times. An Englishman had just been awarded the Nobel Prize jointly with an American. The paper had printed the Englishman’s photo, described his career, interviewed his gerbil—and not even mentioned the American’s name.

  The charge sticks (though British insularity is perhaps no stronger than, say, French chauvinism or American isolationism—each nation earns its own abstract noun). In defense, I could only plead the extreme rarity of a local challenge reaching this ultimate stage
, and the deleterious effects of hype. Later, another explanation occurs. If you are a top player, one who in all likelihood has played against Short, it’s probably not too difficult to imagine yourself in his position, challenging for the title, trying to assess the correct response to Kasparov’s tormenting strategies. It’s much harder—perhaps impossible—to put yourself into the champion’s mind. The round table and the assembled commentators were frequently baffled by Gazza’s ideas, awed by his chess brain. Two remarks from the Savoy Theatre commentary team that afternoon stressed the difference. The first was a reference to “Nigel’s habit of having big thinks and then playing the natural move” (which on this occasion he duly did). The second was an honest and exasperated complaint about Kasparov: “It’s depressing, he sees instantly more than we see in a quarter of an hour.”

  However, Game 16, to everyone’s great surprise, turned out to be the moment of cheer for the Nigel-this, Nigel-that brigade. For once the ballerina jumped higher than Nijinsky. Even more surprising were the circumstances of the leap. Short had white, and played one of his least attacking games against Kasparov’s habitual Sicilian. (It later emerged that the challenger had a cold and didn’t feel up to more than a piano approach.) After eighteen or twenty moves, the Analysis Room was calling it as dull as it was equal: Speelman wandered past the board I was sitting at with Colin Crouch, whacked a few pieces about and declared the position moribund. For a change of scenery in the most tedious game so far, I went off to the Savoy. As I settled in, Short was offering an exchange of queens, and the headphones were groaning: “Oh, Nigel, that’s such an unambitious move.”