The column that never was

Back in the 1970s, I wrote a weekly bridge column for the Toronto Star.  Since they were already paying for a daily syndicated column from the Goren organization, they wanted me to concentrate on local stuff, and preferably to write articles that had little or no bridge in them.  They wanted names, dates and places, basically.

Nevertheless, I managed to slip in the occasional deal of interest.  That, of course, was when the gremlins would strike.  I wasn’t allowed to write the headlines, which were made up by a non-bridge-player, who often misunderstood the article and put something completely inappropriate at the top of it.  They constantly screwed up the hand diagrams, on one famous occasion omitting the deal completely to save space, while retaining the narrative.

I’ve recently been retrieving all those articles from the Star archives, and some of them are actually still worth reading.  The last one I ever submitted was royally screwed up though, since they didn’t bother changing the hand diagram from the one that appeared the previous week (you can imagine the typesetters chortling about that one!).  As it was the last one, I never got the chance to correct it — until now.

The deal occurred at the 1978 World Championships in New Orleans, and involved four Canadians all of whom I know very well.  It came up in the ‘never-ending Swiss’ to which teams that lost early in the Rosenblum Cup were banished — after days and days of play, a small number made it back into the main event via a ‘repechage’.  While the player I asked couldn’t recall the details (although he did remember the incident), the deal was spectacular enough to have made it into the World Championship book, and I was able to find it last night.  I had been given the story by another of the participants, but when I saw the actual deal and read the write-up I came to the conclusion that he had given me the wrong layout, the wrong auction and the wrong opening lead.  The rest was fine 🙂

Anyway, 32 years later, here is the real story behind the Column that Never Was.

Dealer: East Vul: Neither	North ♠ AKQJ76 ♥ KQ9763 ♦ — ♣ 3
West ♠ 5 ♥ 105 ♦ K987 ♣ AQ10876		East ♠ 982 ♥ 4 ♦ AQJ1065 ♣ KJ9
	South ♠ 1043 ♥ AJ82 ♦ 432 ♣  542

North was Bill Milgram, and South, Irving Litvack, a partnership that had a great deal of success in the mid-1970s.  Bill tried everything he could to get some kind of preference out of his partner, without success.  While you might argue that Irving could and should have bid hearts earlier, faced with a partner who was asking him to pick a major at the six-level, it is hard to blame him for bidding the grand.  Now West had a lead problem.  His clues included a partner who had doubled diamonds for the lead and raised clubs freely, suggesting at least four of them.  Unsuspecting, he decided on a diamond, and that was 1510.

At the other table, Roy Dalton and Roy Hughes sat East-West, and decided to sell out to Six Hearts rather than take the cheap save.  Perhaps they were nervous about being able to defeat the grand — correctly so.  The net was 11 IMPs to the Litvack team, which finished 11th in the event.