Loading ...my better halves
My very first North American Bridge Championship (NABC) was Chicago, 1998. I played two side games with my dear friend Stan and was completely overwhelmed by the whole crazy scene. In the fall of that year, I went to Orlando for a couple of days that changed my life.
See, I came to bridge online. We played a bit in college, me and a house full of Indian and Pakistani students, but it wasn’t until I found OKBridge in the early 90s that my interest in bridge really took root. I was online for years before I even considered seeing what this whole duplicate bridge thing was all about, and it wasn’t until a couple of years after that I saw my first NABC. The endless rooms of bridge players (none of whom remotely resembled the people I imagined) were overwhelming. Orlando, my second NABC, wasn’t much better.
The night before I was leaving, I ended up in the bar where I saw a gorgeous young redhead who seemed to know absolutely everybody. When I was leaving a short while later, a guy named George asked if he could walk me back across the street. And the rest … well, you know the rest. I’m constantly struck by the similarities between partnerships in bridge and partnerships in life. All partnerships are not created equal. No two are exactly alike. And you never really know what happens inside somebody else’s.
Crazy karmic coincidence: George and Shannon both won their first NABCs in Vancouver (Spring, 1999). For George it was the Vanderbilt (with Ralph Katz, Peter Weichsel, Alan Sontag, Alfredo Versace and Lorenzo Lauria), Shannon won the Mixed Pairs with her then-husband, Mike Cappelletti, Jr. It’s a magic city — Grace, Anducci’s Coquitlam (oh, the bathroom!), Stanley Park. And big wins.
To establish a partnership in bridge requires nothing so much as an openness to (intellectual) intimacy. Karen McCallum is reported to have said “We are who we are at the bridge table, only moreso.” That sounds about right to me. The success or failure of a partnership, I think, probably takes root in the earliest (dating) phases: the first time we play bridge with someone, we’re on our best behavior. We’re more careful and considerate than we might otherwise be. It’s as if we’ve sent the best representation of ourselves to the table; our agent, if you will. Over time, we grow comfortable enough to disagree. To frown. To take a losing finesse. The agent recedes and we are fully revealed. Sometimes (perhaps often) it’s the beginning of the end. The wider the gap between our best behavior and our real behavior, the greater the chances for failure.
When I look at the best pairs in the world, I’m persuaded that the ideal is to find a partner and stick with her as long as you possibly can. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Shannon and I, for example, have been through quite a bit — our best behavior beat a hasty retreat when our lives and marriages got complicated. Some time I’ll tell you about New York, our first NABC together. And the time we finished dead last in the Women’s Pairs. None of that matters one bit compared with the simple fact that Shannon is, like George, someone I like and respect more as time goes by. I believe we’ll be old ladies together. For better or worse.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:41 am
[...] together to write about Houston, I thought I remembered a long-ago post about George and Shannon (this one, full of coincidences and ironies). I loved congratulating Shannon for winning the Women’s Swiss on Sunday night — [...]