Letters from London (39 page)

B
ETWEEN 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 serious 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.”

W
ITH 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.

A
RRIVING 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 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.”

In the commentators’ box a bored, end-of-term facetiousness reigned. Cathy Forbes began speculating on Short’s awkward body position, wondering if it was because no one had told him to pee before the game. We were all waiting for queens to come off and glutinous drawdom to arrive. Short later gave two slightly different explanations of why this didn’t happen. At his press conference, he said, “I was a little bit too ashamed to offer a draw and I think he was too ashamed, too.” Later, he suggested, “I was too lazy to offer a draw and so was he.” Given that the match had virtually been decided, and the two players were now business partners popularizing a sport, shame was the likelier motive. And there was also perhaps a familiar unspoken subtext as the rival queens stared at each other in a proposed suicide pact. Go on,
you
offer the draw. No,
you
offer it. After you, Claude. No, after you, Cecil.
I’m
not taking the blame. Well, you’re six points down, it’s up to you to do something. Kasparov appeared to be playing simply to stay equal, at one point rather futilely retreating his bishop to a8 rather than proffer a whisper of an attack. The commentary team interpreted Ba8 like this: “‘I’m not going to offer a draw, English swine’—that’s what that move says.”