Toledo Blade – 11 Dic 1960
Some people play bridge for fun, others play it for keeps. Some play the game for the thrill of executing a difficult contract, others for keeping abreast of the neighborhood gossip. Whatever the reason, most bridge players are addicts and there is no known cure. The following article is in excerpt from «The Mad World of Bridge» by Jack Olsen, published by HoIt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
Mrs JAMES THOMPSON of Detroit was playing bridge at a neighbor’s home one wintry night some years ago when friends rushed in to tell her that her house was on fire. Mrs. Thompson expressed concern, but sat down and said, «Come on, let’s finish the rubber.»
An hour later, while she was playing a one-no-trump bid, a reporter burst in and asked her what she had to say about the fire.
«I don’t know anything about it,»‘ Mrs. Thompson answered testily.
«The house is on fire, as you can plainly see, but we are luckily on the outside and that’s all there is to it.»
She slammed down the queen of diamonds and went on with the game.
Mrs. Thompson, you might say, was clearly hooked by the game which has been described as a psychosis lying somewhere between schizophrenia and paranoia and combining some of the better features of each. Bridge has hundreds of thousands of addicts, but no cure has ever been invented. Reformed alcoholics we hear about, but who knows of a reformed bridge player ?
AS MRS. Thompson and countless divorcees and a few widows can attest, the game of bridge has a grip of steel on its victims. And this despite its hazards. Mrs. Marianne Elkins once picked up a hand containing 13 diamonds and went into a contract of six no trump. When she was set 12 tricks, her husband hit her with a cut-glass howl.
Mrs. Hazel Bowen of Seattle got a divorce and a 510,000 property settlement when she testified that her husband, George, assaulted her after she failed to take him out of a take-out double.
So why do so many people play bridge? The answer is simple: Because it’s fun; because it’s an intellectual challenge; a way of communing with the Joneses; a way of taking the old mind off the old job for a while, and a way of this and a way of that. Right? Wrong! At least these ideas are wrong, according to the many experts who have plumbed the depths of the national psyche to find out where the steam of bridge is hollered.
Bridge, it turns out, is not fun : it’s a chore, a way of evading life, a means of ventilating deep hostilities and supercharging dull, unrewarding lives with phony stimulation. «Most people,» said psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, «play bridge to waste time.»
To which the late Ely Culbertson, ever ready to defend bridge and his $500.000 income to the death, replied: «The argument is a half-truth.» And then he caroled poetically, «A well-built slam bid or a squeeze play contains the same divine spark of superior intelligence and is stamped with the same subtle and profound inferences as the creation of a Gothic cathedral with its soaring towers, a well-written sonnet or a bookkeeping machine.»