NIGELS CZECH MATE
Dominic Lawson reveals the inside
story of Nigel Short's progress to the verge of chess immortality
GRANDMASTER Josef Dorfman, ex- captain of the Red Army chess team, for- mer coach and second to the world chess champion Gary Kasparov, is not easily amused.
But ten years ago, when he visited Lon- don with Kasparov, I reduced the normally po-faced Dorfman to hysterics. I had asked him, over lunch at one of London's gloomier restaurants, 'Do you think that Nigel Short could become world chess champion?' Dorfman's forkful of steak stopped on its otherwise mechanical progress to his mouth. From that mouth came a low gurgle. The gurgle got louder. After a minute of gurgles I finally realised that the man was laughing uncontrollably. I pointed out, patriotically, that Nigel had recently become the world's youngest grandmaster, and that in the previous year he had come second to Kasparov in the world junior championship. Dorfman final- ly summoned sufficient composure to reply. 'No Westerner will become world champion. All your players are on their own. They have no support from the state. Who do you think pays me — and two other grandmasters — full-time to help Kasparov? Who do you think paid for Kas- parov's chess eduction from childhood? Nigel Short is very talented, but one man cannot beat a system. Forget it.' I did.
Six years later, in 1989, however, I was sitting next to Nigel Short's wife, Rea, on a flight from Barcelona. Nigel had just been competing there in the Chess World Cup. As was usual for him at that time he had scored some dazzling victories, but suf- fered some pathetic defeats, including his customary drubbing at the hands of world champion Kasparov.
What, I asked Rea, could be done to help Nigel — and the hopes of British chess — reach full potential? She echoed Dorfman's remarks of six years earlier. What her husband needed, she insisted, was back-up, preferably from a grandmas- ter of vast experience, who could acceler- ate Nigel's development by passing on that wisdom in concentrated form. The prob- lem was that such wisdom was not so much priceless as very pricey, and Nigel's earn- ings as a chess player could not cover it. A
week later I recounted this tale to Sir Patrick Sheehy, who, apart from being on the board of The Spectator, spends most of his remaining working hours as chairman of British American Tobacco. Pat is a man of action. Within a month Eagle Star, BAT's insurance arm, had agreed to fund the acquisition for Nigel of the grandmas- ter coach of his choice.
Nigel's initial choice was Boris Spassky. Who better for a putative world champion to have as a coach than one who himself has held the highest title? And besides, the two men were — and remain — very good friends. But it didn't work out. These days Boris's talent is matched only by his laziness, and Nigel needed someone who would be as motivated as he to wrest the world championship from Russian hands, for the first time since Bobby Fischer did so — against Spassky — in 1972.
The answer was, in retrospect, obvious: hire the man who had himself acted as Fis- cher's second in that match. His name is Ljubomir Kavalek, known as Lubosh. He has a particular hunger to bury the rem- nants of Soviet success — and he sees Kasparov as very much part of that system. Lubosh fled his homeland, Czechoslo- vakia, shortly after the Russian invasion of 1968 (but not before putting on a black armband in the 1968 Chess Olympiad, when he represented Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union). After Fischer's retirement, Kavalek became the dominant chess player in the United States, winning the US championship on three occasions. According to Kavalek, in an article he wrote for the Washington Post, Nigel turned up on his doorstep and said,
`Lubosh, I want you to make me world champion like you made Bobby Fischer world champion.' Nigel denies he said exactly that, but it certainly made good copy.
And it is true that Kavalek has helped to turn the British grandmaster into a lethal match player, most notably when he astounded chess players and bookmakers by knocking out the former world champi- on Anatoly Karpov in Spain last April. It is not just that the bald, bearded, and slightly sinister-looking Kavalek is fantastically hard-working. It is not just that he has an unequalled database of almost a million chess games, logged into a 120 megabyte computer. It is more, as he put it to me recently, that he knows 'the way these spec- imens of the Soviet school of chess think, how they have been taught to think. Once you understand that, they become very pre- dictable.'
But none of this should detract from Nigel Short's great achievement, which is to become only the third non-Russian since 1927 to qualify to contest a match for the official world chess championship. Once the theatre lights dim, and the clock starts ticking, it is Nigel alone who engages in brain-to-brain conflict with the most advanced products of the greatest chess factory the world is ever likely to see. And Kavalek, himself a modest man, knows this. I recall a moment after one of the games in Nigel's triumphant final eliminator match against the Dutch champion Jan Timman last week in Spain. Nigel, Lubosh and I were in Short's hotel suite, analysing that day's win over Timman. Lubosh thought he had found a move for Timman which would have turned the game around. It cer- tainly looked terrifying. 'I saw that,' said Nigel, quietly. 'But look.' And then in a blur of hand movements he played four further moves for each side: 'Now black must resign.' Kavalek turned to me with a strange grin, half sheepish, half tri- umphant: 'Did you see that? That is why Nigel is special, why other grandmasters are afraid of him.'
Gary Kasparov is nor afraid of Nigel Short. He has already, punning fluently in English, declared that their match 'will be short'. And in his autobiography Child of Change, Kasparov stated, with his custom- ary lack of false or genuine modesty, that, `it is Nigel Short's misfortune to have been born only two years after me'. We shall see how unfortunate, when the two lock cere- bella in seven months time. Meanwhile I prefer to carry with me the memory of Nigel in his hotel room half an hour after he had won his match against Timman. He had just told some reporters, to their disap- pointment, that he 'felt nothing'. But here he was in front of a few close friends and family, hurling himself through the air, then lying on his back and kicking his legs in a paroxysm of delight. I wondered what Josef Dorfman would have said. Probably, he would have laughed.
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