My first thought is that it’s a long way from Leigh in Lancashire, where Nigel Short was born. I am interviewing him on the terrace overlooking the garden of his rambling house in southern Greece. The early evening sun beats down and the Mediterranean shimmers in the distance. The life of a professional chess player is an arduous one.
Short is now forty and, as in all sports, anno Domini takes its toll. He is down to thirtieth in the world — grandmasters are precisely, mercilessly even, graded according to their performance, and Short has slipped below all those hungry young Russians, Ukrainians and Armenians looking for their own place in the sun. He still loves — lives for — the game, the adrenaline rush of competition, but realises he will never again make the top ten.
Not that everyone, hitherto, has quite appreciated the appeal. Chess as an international sport gets tucked away in tiny paragraphs in the press; the world’s leading players remain nothing more than exotic names. Until the all-too- mortal nature of the struggle over the chessboard is communicated, chess will continue to be jammed, in tiny print, between bowls and darts. That will be Short’s demanding job — to make chess come alive.
My chess credentials are ropey: learned the game at eleven; played for my school but always on lower boards to avoid strong opponents; came third in Newport under-eighteen championship (my sole chess prize). Now I play endless low-grade chess on the internet, against unnamed amnesiacs all around the world. I am not promising material.
Short has lived and breathed chess since the age of six, when his father showed him the moves. He beat the great Viktor Korchnoi in a simultaneous exhibition at the age of ten, played in the British championship at twelve (defeating the ten times British champion Jonathan Penrose), beat grandmaster Tony Miles at fourteen and became a grandmaster himself at nineteen.
We had been looking at a chess website detailing all the elite games that had been played worldwide in the past week — 2,500 of them, any one of which might contain some important opening innovation. ‘Even if you just cast your eye over these things, spend three minutes on each … ’. He laughs and leaves the implication hanging, but I calculate later that spending three minutes studying each of those games would take 125 hours a week.
The 1993 match against Kasparov was a watershed for Short, and he never quite climbed those heights again. ‘Getting to the world championship final was probably about as good as I could manage,’ he says. ‘It’s difficult to motivate yourself and it becomes self-fulfilling. You think, “Well, maybe if I work very, very hard again, I can do exactly the same again and then lose to Kasparov.” It’s a depressing feeling.’
Meanwhile, he is optimistic about the future of the sport. ‘If, and when, some new people come in who are more business-minded, I think chess will take off again,’ he says. ‘Chess has huge advantages over many other sports in that it is played all over the world. It’s a game for the internet age, a game where I can be sitting here in a village with goats and chickens and donkeys, and I can go on the internet and be playing some leading grandmaster in Russia or the Philippines.’ The whole world in sixty-four squares.