Playing With His Fingertips

By Barry Hillenbrand/London

It is tempting to think of Nigel Short as an English Bobby Fischer. Transform Short's Lancastrian accent into Brooklynese, remove the wire-rimmed glasses, and Nigel becomes Bobby. After all, Short and Fischer are the only non- Russians to play in the finals of the World Chess Championship since 1948, and both were child prodigies who grew up to challenge the established order of the chess world.

The similarities end there. Fischer is a reclusive eccentric who has spent most of his life alone in hotel rooms with the curtains drawn. Short is happily married to a Greek psychologist, Rae Karageorgiou, and finds time, even during tournaments, to play with toy trains with his two-year-old daughter, Kiveli. He lives in a cozy apartment in the leafy London suburb of West Hampstead and relishes beach time in Greece and good laughs over beer almost anywhere. He is, in other words, a rather normal guy with a sly smile and a quiet manner.

Taught the game at the age of 5 by his father, Short quickly worked his way into the record books. At 12 he was the youngest player ever to qualify for the British championship, at 14 the world's youngest current international master, and at 19 the world's youngest grandmaster. All the while he struggled through school as the genius underachiever striving unsuccessfully to blend in with the guys. He went easy on the studies, grew his hair long and played bass guitar in a punk band called the Urge.

Short's early chess successes came almost too easily. By the time he was 23, he was ranked No. 3 in the world, behind world champion Gary Kasparov and ex- champ Anatoly Karpov. By his own admission, he had never worked very hard at the game. He relied heavily on a natural chess sense that allowed him to play brilliant moves almost intuitively, as if they came out of his fingertips, not his brain.

In 1988, after Short was defeated by fellow Briton Jonathan Speelman in a preliminary round of the world championship, his ranking plunged to 18th, but he picked himself up, hired Czech grandmaster Lubomir Kavalek as his coach and rebuilt his career. Patiently he battled his way through the grueling qualifying rounds of the current championship, polishing off Speelman, Karpov and Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman.

Over the board, Short does not display the sort of crass aggressiveness with which Kasparov intimidates his opponents. He is cool and controlled, though under pressure he may fidget like an Oxford don struggling for the right translation of an Ovid couplet. But behind this outer tranquillity, he plots his opponent's destruction. After all, this is a man who once described chess as mental boxing.

In search of his knockout punches, Short plays a studied game tending toward geometric patterns that win by stealth and surprise rather than brute force. He has frequently snatched games and matches from defeat when others might have abandoned them. This is a skill that Short, down two games as of Saturday, will need if he is to emulate Bobby Fischer in one more way: by winning the world championship.