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

by Paul Hoffman

  When Morphy was abroad in 1858, he tried to arrange a match with Howard Staunton, an irascible Englishman and self-taught scholar of Elizabethan drama who had been the best player in the world in the 1840s. Staunton seemed interested and encouraged the American to extend his stay in Europe while they arranged the details. After keeping Morphy waiting for three months, Staunton finally backed out, claiming that he could not take time away from his important work as a Shakespearean scholar for “a mere game.” The reality was that Staunton was apparently scared off when Morphy demolished the talented Johann Löwenthal for a £100 wager in Manchester. Of the American’s seamless play against Löwenthal, one observer wrote:

  He seldom—in fact, in my presence never—expended more than a minute or two over his best and deepest combinations. I fancy he always discerned the right move at a glance, and only paused before making it partly out of respect for his antagonist and partly to certify himself of its correctness, to make assurance doubly sure; and to accustom himself to sobriety of demeanor in all circumstances.

  Morphy also handily won a match against Adolf Anderssen, a German mathematician who had won London 1851, the world’s first international tournament. Anderssen was the greatest practitioner of the romantic, go-for-mate-from-the-first-move school, and Morphy’s victory was a repudiation of that style of play and a convincing demonstration that he was now the best player in the world.10 Anderssen was undoubtedly stronger than Staunton in 1858, and yet Morphy, who was already conflicted about postponing his career as a lawyer to play chess, was profoundly unsettled by the Englishman’s diminishment of chess as a “mere game.”

  In fact, Morphy never got over Staunton’s refusal to play him. He returned to the United States and withdrew from chess in 1859, at the age of twenty-two, his career at the board ending just eighteen months after it started. He spiraled slowly into paranoid mania. His life had flipped: when he played chess, the only aggression he experienced was safely confined to the chessboard; now he saw violence everywhere. He thought strangers and friends were plotting to kill him, and he made a preemptive attack, with a walking stick, on an innocent brother-in-law. Morphy refused to eat food that was prepared by anyone besides his mother or younger sister for fear it was poisoned. He would live another quarter century, but never managed to practice law. He spent his last days walking the streets of New Orleans, staring at pretty faces. He would also pace on his veranda, muttering in French, “He will plant the banner of Castile on the walls of Madrid, with the cry ‘The city is taken,’ and the little king will go away utterly shamefaced.”11

  Morphy could take some solace, in 1874, when Staunton’s home-court publication, City of London Chess Magazine, ran an obituary—of which Short would certainly approve—that condemned the Englishman for dodging the match:

  And now what was Staunton as a man? An old maxim has it that we must speak nothing but good of the dead. That may be all very well for epigraph writers, whose trade it is to engrave lies on marble, but, for ourselves, we repudiate any such doctrine, considering it to be ethically unsound…. We have, therefore, very little hesitation in saying that, in our opinion, the deceased often acted, not only with a signal lack of generosity, but also with gross unfairness toward those whom he had suffered defeat, or whom he imagined likely to stand between him and the sun.

  On July 10, 1884, a hot and oppressive day in New Orleans, the forty-seven-year-old Morphy returned from his customary midday stroll through the French Quarter and settled into his usual one o’clock bath. When the punctilious Morphy did not emerge at the routine time, his widowed mother, Thelcide, banged on the locked bathroom door and, receiving no response, summoned a neighbor, who forced it open. They found Morphy dead, his hands clutching the rim of the tub. The physician who examined him attributed the death to apoplexy, or congestion of the brain, brought on by the shock of cold water to his overheated body.

  When news of his death reached the Manhattan Chess Club, in New York, a memorial meeting was hastily called and a resolution was unanimously passed that “the portrait of Paul Morphy in the rooms of the club be draped in mourning for a period of three months.” The officers of the Manhattan Chess Club found it sadly ironic that the man known for his virility on the chessboard was so fragile that he died from a cold bath.

  Newspaper obituaries, however, disputed the cause of death. They attributed his demise to mental overexertion from blindfold chess years earlier. In his prime, Morphy liked to demonstrate his chess skill by playing as many as a dozen blindfold games simultaneously against “sighted” opponents. Such a feat demanded extraordinary concentration, and, according to The New York Sun, “The strain in his brain produced a brain fever from which he never recovered.”12

  FROM THE TIME I FIRST ENTERED TOURNAMENTS, I WONDERED WHETHER MY own interest in chess was too obsessive and stressful. My father, however, never seemed particularly worried about me in this regard. He no longer played chess with me, because the games were too one-sided. Instead, he encouraged casual games with Mike, his closest friend, a dyspeptic and dominating widower whom—let me be blunt—I found completely repulsive.

  Mike had the strange, distinctive physique of a pregnant Indian squaw with big biceps. I remember him spending his days hobbling around the Village on a clubfoot while pumping hand-held weights. He had a lot of free time: his wife was a Maytag, so he inherited a fortune from the washing machine manufacturer and didn’t have to work. My father told me that he had no children and I stood to inherit millions if I was nice to him and “played my cards right.” I knew that, for my father, this would ideally include throwing some of our chess games, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even so, I experienced them as a terrible ordeal. Mike rarely showered—which was unnoticed by my father, who had no sense of smell (owing, he claimed, to a boxing injury)—and I had to keep from gagging whenever Mike leaned in toward me across the chessboard.

  No doubt I disliked Mike even more than I would have otherwise because, when my parents separated, my father moved into an apartment with him. I never understood the nature of their relationship. Was he in love with Mike? Was it an unconsummated and unrequited love? Were they simply good friends? Or was my dad just cravenly looking after my financial well-being? All of these possibilities seemed distressing.

  (Much later, after my father’s death, I opened the envelope on which he had provocatively written “IF YOU DARE OPEN THIS ENVELOPE, MY HAND WILL GROW OUT OF THE GRAVE AND CHOKE YOU!” and found copies of a dozen letters he had sent to Mike. I pored over them for clues to their relationship, but the letters were bland and uninformative and certainly didn’t need to be destroyed. I couldn’t help feeling that the envelope was an elaborate practical joke: after all, my dad knew that I was curious about him and Mike. He also knew, of course, that I would open the envelope and study the letters as if they were cryptic texts. By leaving behind only innocent letters and calling attention to them—perhaps they were never even dispatched and were created specifically for me—he had indeed succeeded in needling me from beyond the grave.)

  One thing was clear: my father was inordinately dependent on Mike. Perhaps it was simply because Mike lent him significant sums of money, bankrolling him for the year he was supposed to be writing his novel. Whatever the reason, my dad was very nervous about how I behaved around his friend. He’d discourage me from talking about things I liked that he thought might irritate Mike. For example, he didn’t want me to mention that I played tournament bridge, because he feared Mike would dismiss the game as an activity for idle country club ladies. (There was no real money in chess for me. But bridge was a partnership game, and when I was a senior in high school, geriatric women who needed “master points”—the bridge world’s equivalent of chess ratings—occasionally paid me to join them in a club tournament.) I don’t know whether Mike actually disliked bridge—or whether my dad was communicating his own disapproval—but I hated being censored.

  As for chess, I was allowed to talk about the game—Mike see
med to enjoy these discussions—until I started consistently beating him. He was a worse loser than Karpov and grumpily dismissed chess as the domain of idiot savants. After one game, Mike announced that he didn’t want to play me again and insisted that I give up chess because a kid my age should not be sitting on his butt for hours but doing active things like weightlifting. When my father did not come to my defense, I felt betrayed. It was clear that he fervently hoped I would never mention the game again in Mike’s presence.

  It wasn’t until later that I realized my father, too, wanted me to give up chess altogether. Yes, I sensed that he was jealous of my accomplishments in the game and envious of my ability to buckle down and focus on improving my play, but historically chess had been a big part of our bond. Besides, he knew how angry and contrarian I’d be if he asked me to abandon the one thing in life that I found so mesmerizing. Instead, he resorted to his signature indirect strategy—the artful positioning of a disturbing manuscript in a place where I’d “stumble” on it—to make me reconsider the wisdom of playing chess.

  I returned to my father’s apartment one afternoon in high school and found on the dining table a copy of a 1931 scientific paper called “The Problem of Paul Morphy: A Contribution to the Psycho-Analysis of Chess,” by Ernest Jones, a heavy hitter in the world of psychology who was a colleague of Freud’s. The paper was casually open to a page in which Jones wrote that in chess “the unconscious motives actuating the players is not the mere love of pugnacity characteristic of all competitive games, but the grimmer one of father-murder.” My father had highlighted father-murder. Chess, Jones noted, was the sublimation of the Oedipal struggle. The goal was to render the king, the father figure, helpless through checkmate—that is, “to sterilize him in immobility” or, in other words, to castrate him. Naturally, Jones said, the most potent assistance was provided by the queen, the mother figure.13 In Morphy’s case, Jones observed, the Oedipal drive was clearly reflected in the skill he showed “in separating the opposing King and Queen,” evident in the twelve-year-old’s first recorded game, against his uncle.

  But Morphy’s unconscious motives were even more scurrilous. The object of chess, Jones continued, was to mate the king in two senses of the word mate: the sense of checkmate (from the Persian mat, meaning “death”), on the one hand, and the sexual sense, on the other. Jones concluded that Morphy suffered from “latent homosexual14 and anal-sadistic aggression directed at his own father.”15The evidence was the skill Morphy reportedly exhibited in “attacking the king from behind”—a phrase my father also underscored.

  In case my adolescent mind was too naive, or shocked, to understand the full import of Jones’s words, my dad left out and marked up another essay on the psychopathology of chess that decoded why Morphy exhibited this particular skill. This quiet young man, who could sit longer at the chessboard than any other top player of his day, secretly desired to penetrate his father until he rectally bled to death. Morphy’s own father died just before he ascended to the world stage. Staunton became the substitute father figure, Jones concluded, and when Morphy didn’t get a chance to sublimate his homo-patricidal impulses by buggering Staunton on the chessboard, his psyche collapsed.

  Dominate, trap, fuck—it didn’t get any more squalid than that. And to think that I, in the bloom of grade school innocence, had thought that chess was a battle royal of wits and stamina and that the refined and dapper Morphy, known as “the pride and sorrow of American chess,” had been the game’s most noble and tragic practitioner! Never mind that the king doesn’t have a behind and that, try as I did, I couldn’t find a single game of Morphy’s in which one of his pieces sneaked around and attacked the king from the opposing side of the board—I was horrified that my dad left out this crap for me to read.

  Of course, my father, like Staunton, never confronted me directly, and never acknowledged the hostility of bullying me into playing with Mike, or the aggression inherent in diminishing the importance of the game I loved. He was fucking with me. He intended to gross me out by suggesting that I wanted to fuck and kill him. And, given the master of misdirection he was, he may also have wanted me to be sickeningly alarmed by the reverse possibility—that he wanted to fuck and kill me. Or perhaps, in his darkest moments, he even felt that way. He did succeed in getting me to withdraw further from the game. Whatever faint hopes I still had that I could play chess unencumbered by psychological stress were now completely scuttled. The game had become a fairly joyless pastime.

  SHORT IS ONE OF THE TOP PLAYERS WHOSE BEHAVIOR AT THE BOARD IS ALWAYS entirely respectful. He doesn’t glare at his adversary, slam down the rooks, twist the knights into the board, rock back and forth, tap his feet, or pace the tournament hall snorting like a feral animal. He doesn’t laugh out loud at his opponent’s moves or stab himself with a bishop if he loses. And the psychological warfare he wages on his opponents is largely confined to the board, like his choice of the Budapest against Karpov.

  Like boxers who disparage prospective opponents in the press, the quick-witted Short can hold his own when provoked in prematch verbal fisticuffs. During Short’s match with Timman, Kasparov was asked whom he expected to be his challenger and whether that person would put up a long fight. “It will be Short, and it will be short,” Kasparov responded. Short got back at Kasparov at an awkward meal the two shared at a Chinese restaurant in London after they had hammered out the details of their upcoming world title bout. “At the end of the dinner,” Lawson wrote,

  when the Russian was paying the bill, the waiter suddenly seemed to recognize Nigel. “Excuse me,” the Chinese asked Short, “but aren’t you the world chess champion?” “Kasparov looked amazed,” Nigel told me, giggling with the memory of it. “So I said to the waiter, ‘No, I am not the world chess champion. I am the next one.’”16

  But Short has faced psychological pressure well beyond, and much creepier than, any he has ever exerted on his opponents. His worst experience was his 1994 Candidates Match against Gata Kamsky, the American star who was born in Siberia and trumpeted in the press as the new Bobby Fischer. Short had played Kamsky four times before, in Tilburg in 1990 and 1991, and emerged with the enviable record of three wins and one draw. Kamsky’s father, Rustam, was notorious in the chess world for invoking vast conspiracy theories about how the chess establishment was holding back his immigrant son. At the Super Tournament in Linares in 1991, Rustam accused Kasparov of trying to poison seventeen-year-old Gata’s orange juice. The press loved the story, and the other participants in the tournament reacted by ridiculing the Kamskys. Before playing Gata at Tilburg 1991, Short wrote “BEWARE POISON!” on a napkin and left it on the refreshment table. A humorless arbiter removed the sign before Gata saw it. Later, when Gata was set to face Kasparov, Short delivered a glass of orange juice to the youngster’s side of the board.

  “Gata’s behavior at the board was always fine,” Short said, “but away from the board it was completely disgusting. In 1994, he and Rustam waged total war on me even before the match began.” Another Candidates Match, between Englishman Michael Adams and the Indian prodigy Vishy Anand, was scheduled for the same time in the same playing hall, enabling chess fans to enjoy both encounters. (The winners would later play a match among themselves for the right to challenge Kasparov.) “Gata demanded that a wall be erected on the stage to separate the two matches. Why? Because there was another Englishman there, and they said he might signal me. I don’t know of any time in chess history when a wall was built to separate games, and of course it wasn’t done here.”

  Short lost the first game, but the charges of unfair play continued. “Gata filed written accusations that I was cheating,” Short said. “At no other point in my long career have I been accused of cheating, and he was claiming that I was looking at Anand a lot, which obviously meant we were communicating by telepathy, and that I was going to the toilet too much, where God knows what he thought I was doing. It was constant bombardment, all these spurious charges. So I lost the first t
hree games. I must be the most incompetent cheater the world has ever seen. I’m losing game after game and being accused day after day of cheating.”

  In the fourth game, Short was playing the White side of the Ruy Lopez and Gata was coughing uncontrollably. “It was my move and I remember counting the number of times he coughed. I don’t think he was doing it deliberately—it was a nervous reaction. And I asked him, while my clock was running, if he would mind stopping coughing or maybe getting some water. That was it—he stopped coughing—and I went on to win the game. The match arbiter told me that after the game, Rustam rushed up to Gata and said, ‘You must protest. You must protest. He disturbed your concentration by speaking to you during the game.’ Gata said there was nothing to protest, that I didn’t disturb him. Well, an hour later Gata submitted another written protest.” Even as Gata Kamsky and his father were pretending to be victimized, they seemed to be doing everything they could think of to intimidate and destabilize Short.

  “And it got worse,” Short told me. “Much worse. Rustam threatened to kill me. I will never forget. He came up to me in the restaurant and said I had disturbed his son. He was all but foaming at the mouth. He started out being angry and got progressively angrier and stuck his face in mine. He was a former pugilist. Now, did I think he was going to kill me or just punch me and leave me with a broken nose? I think the latter was more likely. But either way it didn’t sound particularly good. I was very shaken and lodged a complaint with the police. He was taken in and warned. With such a guy, you never know what he’s going to do. Maybe you’re out walking that evening on the paseo and the guy comes and whacks you.”