James Coleman wrote:Is being "sellable" enough these days ? Maurice Ashley and Susan Polgar have both achieved unique things. Ashley was the first African-American GM (I think) and Polgar's credentials speak for themselves.
I've met Ashley and he's a personable fellow but there's a rumour that FIDE encouraged a bunch of players to drop games to him so as to produce an African (-American) GM. He was instrumental in setting up the 'HB Global Chess Challenge' in Minneapolis -- my adopted hometown -- in 2005; it was a commercial disaster because of Ashley's over-optimism on how many players the $500,000 prize money would draw.
Nigel Short's match against Kasparov in 1993 comes to mind as something that captured the attention of the average guy in the street. He's still by far the best known British GM. We need something like that again. Simply having GM's that are snappy dressers or take more than two showers a week isn't enough to get noticed
Look at how poorly and gracelessly Short came across in interviews at the time. Kasparov came across as a true ambassador of chess.
Among British GMs, I think Danny King comes across well.
It's increasingly difficult to make chess media-worthy: there's now a plethora of TV channels and the public's attention span has correspondingly gone down. Not easy to cover chess under such circumstances.
