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

by Paul Hoffman

  His strengths as a player were also conspicuous. Writing in 1981, George Botterill, former British champion, identified three of them: “One is the highly concrete character of his thinking at the chessboard. Generalities do not feature in his approach unless they can be converted into variations. A second is that he always knows what he is doing. Planless play has always been most uncongenial and alien to Nigel. Thirdly and most important of all, he has a very cool head and never seems to get flustered.” Temperament, Botterill argued, was the key to competitive chess. Downplaying the role of genius, Botterill suggested that chess is 30 percent talent, 50 percent temperament, and 20 percent preparation.

  As for Short’s temperament, the teenager displayed a blustery self-confidence, an obnoxious trait in everyday life but a useful prerequisite, it seems, to becoming a chess champion. “My friends think I’m boastful,” Short told the Daily Express, “but what else can I say when I sincerely believe it? No one in the world has been able to match me at my age since I was eight.” He was right: at fourteen, he became the youngest international master in the world, and at seventeen, the youngest grandmaster.

  As a young teenager, he had a working-class patois, shoulder-length hair, and delicate features. “Nigel sported long hair and looked disconcertingly effeminate. He knew this and it didn’t bother him in the least,” recalled Frederic Friedel, founder of ChessBase software, in whose Hamburg home the fourteen-year-old Short stayed while playing in a German tournament. He used his looks as an improbable weapon at the chessboard. “He would sometimes go to the round wearing a silk blouse he borrowed from my wife,” Friedel said. “It was priceless to see middle-aged GMs from Eastern Europe wondering whether they should be trying to look down his shirt or not.”

  The British press portrayed the young Short alternately as genius and brat. In Nigel Short: Quest for the Crown, his biographer Cathy Forbes quoted from a piece in the Manchester Evening News: “Nigel Short has been moaning about what a tough life he leads. He says: ‘There have been television speeches, simultaneous challenges, matches, things to write…it’s very deeply tiring. You probably need an absolute minimum of ten days to recuperate….’ Try factory work for a break, Nigel.”

  While Short was not reserved about describing his chess ability, he was also not sentimental or mystical. When his friend, journalist Dominic Lawson, called him a genius, Short demurred: “I was simply lucky that I came to chess at an early age and was totally absorbed in it. At the age of seven I would spend fifteen hours a day and do nothing but read about chess. That is not normal…. But as for genius: Chess at this level requires nothing more than a combination of above average intelligence, an early response to the game, and lots of practice.”

  Lawson did not accept Short’s humdrum explanation and suggested, in the pages of The Daily Telegraph, that the teenager was effectively channeling the chess goddess Caissa:

  One could subject any number of…intelligent children, and from far more promising backgrounds, to an early diet of intense chess, without ever producing another Nigel Short.

  Lawson approvingly quoted the British grandmaster Raymond Keene, who once argued that chess prodigies share something with mathematical and musical prodigies:

  “Chess, music and mathematics all have a kind of cosmic harmony: they just balance, because God, or whoever, built the universe in that way. I think that certain children are born with the ability to act as a conduit for this cosmic harmony, and if they are lucky, they retain it into adulthood. Nigel Short is one of those lucky people.”

  When Lawson told Short about Keene’s theory, the British chess superstar dismissed it as “a load of bollocks,” but Lawson found it persuasive, pointing out that whereas most people become more combative and anxious before a big competitive event, “Nigel’s metabolism takes him in an opposite and less explored direction.” In Lawson’s eyes, Short was a yogi, who

  becomes glacially calm, his pulse rate seems to slow, his movements become sluggish and faint—in fact he appears to enter the trance to which Indian mystics might aspire. Most chess players of international standard make a great play of eyeballing each other and strutting about, like heavyweight boxers or sumo wrestlers. Nigel, however, scarcely seems to notice his opponent.”

  AWAY FROM THE BOARD, SHORT HAS A DRY WIT, AN UNRESTRAINED, OFF-COLOR sense of humor, and a remarkable ability to turn most any conversation to the subject of sex. He is a tall, gangly man with pronounced lips, a slow, deliberate speaking style, a cultivated upper-crust British accent, and a tendency to use unusual words (crapulent, dipsomania, pulchritude, frugiferous).1

  Before I visited Short in Athens, we had met only once, at the 2004 World Championship in Tripoli. Pascal introduced us in the tournament lunchroom, and within five minutes the veteran British grandmaster, who can be so erudite and introspective in his writings about the sub-rosa dynamics of a chess match, had steered the conversation to a frat-boy discussion of girls and told us much more than we cared to know about what he wanted to do with them. At the championship in Libya there were few young women for him to ogle, and he said, in mock frustration, that a certain underage male chess prodigy was starting to look pretty good. I regarded his quip as harmless and tasteless, but was surprised that he’d joke about this with a journalist he had only just met.

  It was easy to understand how his humor could get him in trouble. “Short learned the dangers of uninhibited flippancy,” according to Cathy Forbes, at the World Under 20 Championship in Belfort, France, in 1983:

  He gave a mischievous interview, published in the tournament bulletin, in which his idea of a joke was to insult the host nation: “France represents everything I detest most in life. Your country’s only useful products are porn films.” The French were not amused; Nigel’s comments resulted in innumerable rescinded invitations.

  Short begged forgiveness two years later:

  “When you are 18, surrounded by your friends, you’ll say almost anything. It was just kid’s talk, and I regret that it was taken seriously,” he groveled at Catherine Jaeg of [the chess magazine] Europe Echecs. Would you believe me if I told you I love France and that I dream of being able to play there again?”

  In truth, however, Short never outgrew his tendency to say whatever popped into his mind. In 2002, nearly two decades after he insulted the French, Short once again notoriously displayed his inability to censor himself in an obituary he wrote for The Sunday Telegraph of Tony Miles, a larger-than-life compatriot and rival who died, at the age of forty-six, from unattended diabetes. Miles was the only British player in history to become world junior champion, at Manila in 1974, and the following year he became the country’s first grandmaster. He was the top British player for a decade, and, according to Short, “he spearheaded the explosion of talent in this country that took us from rank mediocrity to second strongest chess nation, behind the USSR, during the 1980s.”

  Once John Nunn, a grandmaster ten years Short’s senior, Short, and other British players started to surpass Miles in the mid-1980s, however, he suffered episodes of mania and dementia. He would suddenly take off all his clothes in the tournament hall or on a city bus,2 and he imagined that a fellow British GM was out to kill him not just on the chessboard but in real life. He was arrested and hospitalized after loitering outside Margaret Thatcher’s residence at 10 Downing Street. And yet his games were crowd-pleasers; as Black against Anatoly Karpov in Skara 1980, Miles pushed a rook pawn on his very first move, a kind of shove-it-in-your-face response that announces, “I have such little regard for you that I can violate all known chess principles and still trounce you.” The twelfth world champion was so insulted that he became discombobulated, launched a reckless attack, and lost the game.

  Short’s obituary captured Miles’s seminal importance to British chess as well as his annoying behavior at the board:

  Tony was not above a bit of gamesmanship. Players complained of him burping at the board or blowing his nose loudly. He once won a major tournament lyi
ng on his back claiming that his back condition prevented him from sitting erect. Occasionally he would deliberately (and illegally) disturb his opponents by repeatedly offering them draws.

  And Miles, observed Short, was also a disagreeable loser.

  At one Olympiad during an adjournment he sealed the move “Resigns”—which not only wasted a substantial amount of his opponent’s time but insulted him to boot. But to be fair it was his great ability, and not the odd dodgy practice, that accounted for his success.

  Short, though, could never forgive Miles for exploiting his position as selector of the British team for the Dubai Olympiad in 1986. Miles put himself on a higher board than Short even though he had a lower rating. “I found myself occupying board three,” Short wrote, “to the incredulity of most, including an astonished Kasparov. An American reporter who unwisely mentioned this irregularity in the tournament bulletin was punched to the ground by the robust Tony.” Short concluded the Olympiad discussion with an unusual aside for a major-newspaper obituary: “I obtained a measure of revenge not only by eclipsing Tony in terms of chess performance but also by sleeping with his girlfriend, which was definitely satisfying but perhaps not entirely gentlemanly.” Short was savaged on Internet messages boards for this malicious revelation.

  Short is so upfront about his feelings that it would not occur to him to refrain from sharing them, even when others might regard them as nasty or disgusting. Personally, given my own family history, I found this forthrightness refreshing—and, as a journalist, I found it invaluable. If Short’s descriptions of himself as a gleeful conqueror during a match were often brutal, his accounts of his defeats were equally raw. After all, losing is a critical aspect of any player’s experience, no matter how great he is. Short’s ability to articulate the complexities of the game, combined with the violence with which he described his encounters on the board, captured something essential about chess that no other player I interviewed was willing to discuss with such candor.

  IN 1975, WHEN FISCHER RENOUNCED HIS WORLD TITLE WITHOUT SO MUCH as pushing a pawn, the Soviet Union again dominated the World Championship and chess fans in the West had none of their own to cheer for until the early 1990s, when Short defeated two top Russians, Boris Gelfand and Anatoly Karpov, to reach the finals of the World Championship Candidates cycle. His opponent was the Dutch champion Jan Timman, and when Short beat him in thirteen games by the score of 7½–5½, he earned the right to challenge world champion Garry Kasparov in 1993.

  If there had been any residual doubts about Short’s killer instinct, they were dispelled by his quarter-finals victory over Gelfand, the world number three from Belarus. In the eighth and final game of their match, Short needed just a draw to win. For a while it looked as if he might actually lose the game to an ingenious attack that Gelfand whipped up, but on the thirty-ninth move the Belarussian grandmaster blundered. Short could now force the draw—and guarantee his advancement to the semifinals—simply by perpetually checking Gelfand’s king. To the surprise and delight of his fans, the Englishman spurned the obvious draw, drove Gelfand’s monarch into the open, and checkmated him.

  After the game, Short himself admitted that his play had changed. “I’m getting much more pleasure out of humiliating a guy,” Short said. “Maybe I’m just a mean bastard.” But he also attributed his new ruthlessness to the kind of opponent he was facing. “You play these people over the years—the Soviets particularly—and they are warped, twisted and mean,” Short said. “They won’t spare you any pain. So when you get a chance to inflict suffering on them, I get a kick out of it. So now I like positions where I can torture the guy slowly. Slowly is important.”

  Short said he had nothing personally against Gelfand, but wanted to humiliate him all the same. Borrowing Fischer’s words, he admitted that he liked “seeing ’em squirm.” Later he came up with the acronym DTF to describe the sadistic thrill of overpowering his opponents. DTF—Dominate, Trap, Fuck.3 “I like to stick it to ’em,” he would say. The flip side of Short’s new mind-set was that when he now lost, he was devastated. He likened the pain of one particular defeat to the feeling of putting his head in a cement mixer. He said that he thought about suicide.

  I WAS FORTUNATE TO VISIT SHORT WHEN HE WAS IN AN UNUSUALLY REFLECTIVE mood, thanks to a confluence of three dramatic events that were surprising and unsettling even by the usual theatrical standards of the chess world. Simon Webb, the subject of Short’s ruminations on patricide in the Telegraph, was an expatriate British international master who had returned home from a chess club at 1:00 A.M.. and been stabbed twenty times by his drug-dealer son. Garry Kasparov, two years older than Short and a few weeks shy of forty-two, had recently stunned his fellow players by announcing his retirement from professional chess. Finally, Bobby Fischer had just been released from a Japanese detention center and, as Short and I conversed, was on a plane to asylum in Iceland. We paused periodically to turn on CNN for a glimpse of the disheveled genius disembarking on the tarmac in Reykjavík.

  “You take these things pretty seriously when you’re about to turn forty and review what your life has amounted to,” Short told me. “I met Simon Webb a few times at tournaments in the seventies—he seemed kind and gentle. I’m a chess player because of Fischer. And I was not world champion because of one man, Garry Kasparov.”

  Short had not expected Kasparov’s retirement. “He was one of the greats if not the greatest player of all time,” he said. “Lasker may have been world champion for twenty-seven years. Fischer’s hottest streak may have been a couple of degrees warmer than Kasparov’s—he once won nineteen games in a row. But in terms of sheer consistency and number of tournaments, Kasparov can’t be matched. He’s done everything in chess. He still plays very well, but it’s a question of motivation. For a player the guy is old. Just old. As a man he’s nothing of the sort. He has a huge amount of life left. If he spends ten or fifteen years faffing around on the fringes of Russian politics, then he can make his move. Good for him, although it saddens me.”

  Kasparov’s retirement brought to a close a long, frustrating chapter in Short’s career. “I played him seventy-two match and tournament games over a period of a quarter century,” Short said. “Most were classical games. That’s a hell of a lot of games. I’ve spent months and months of my life thinking solely about how to beat him, and I didn’t have any real success.” Short won only seven of their encounters, lost thirty-two, and drew thirty-three.

  They first played each other in the World Junior Championship in Dortmund in 1980, and the game was a draw. “Kasparov won the championship by a mile,” Short recalled. “He was already ridiculously strong—there was this tremendous energy. Young players who have seen Kasparov in recent years think that he is just an opening-theory machine. Maybe they’re not aware of this tidal wave of energy that hits you when you sit down opposite him and continues assaulting you for the entire game.4 I barely held a draw with White. The pressure went on and on until he missed something in time trouble. I had no idea what was happening on the board, and when he offered me a draw, I gladly accepted.”

  The two men have had a tumultuous relationship. It has not been easy for Short to put up with Kasparov’s bravado and accept that he could not dethrone the Russian and become the top alpha male in the chess world. In End Game, a brilliantly detailed account of their title match, Lawson recalled Short’s 1987 review for The Spectator of Kasparov’s autobiography: after quoting Kasparov’s self-description—“Many a player who has become World Champion and has scaled the Mount Olympus of chess, realizes that he can go no higher and begins to descend…. I see no danger of this for myself. I see only new peaks before me and no descent”—Nigel wrote,

  Unashamed conceit runs like a connecting thread throughout the book. We have repeated references to Kasparov’s brilliant memory, which he imagines knows no limits. My own experience is different. I witnessed a game between Kasparov and ex-world champion Boris Spassky, where the younger man tried and failed mise
rably to recall his previous analysis…. Another facet of Kasparov’s personality is his ability to manipulate a set of circumstances into a simplistic theory, to suit his emotional needs. Of course, this defense mechanism is present in us all, but in Kasparov it seems to be in permanent overdrive.

  Short’s dislike of Kasparov was reinforced by their encounters at the chessboard. “He’d simply laugh at my moves, literally laugh,” Short told me. “It was disgusting. After I moved, he’d ridicule me with this sneering smile that said, ‘What an idiot. Ha ha ha. Is that the best you can come up with?’ I used to find his behavior extremely distracting. I’m not saying this always happened; over the years he’s calmed down a bit in his body language. But he still can have incredible expressions which are calculated to disturb.”

  I reminded Short of Kasparov’s assessment of him in Child of Change, the autobiography the thirteenth world champion published in 1987, when he was twenty-three and Short was twenty-one. In Child of Change Kasparov wrote, referring to himself imperially in the third person: “Nigel Short, the British player, is destined, in my opinion, soon to be the leading grandmaster in the West…. All that now seems to stand between Nigel and the prospect of the world crown is the unfortunate fact that fate brought him into this world only two years after Kasparov.” Short thought for a moment and then said in a soft, forlorn voice, of the man whom he once disparaged as the Grandmaster of Self-Delusion, “He was right. Unfortunately, he was right.”