Bridging the Age Gap : Fighting fears of the graying of the game, thousands of aficionados--old and young--flock to Pasadena for national tournament.

Of all the manifold human contests by which the world finds amusement, the game of contract bridge may well be the most ubiquitous. The British have their cricket; the French love bicycle racing; the Russians are chess fanatics; the Americans call baseball their national game. But all nationalities play bridge. --The Sports Illustrated Book of Bridge, 1961

Alas, the Queen of Hearts is getting a bit long in the tooth. And there are silver threads among the King’s whiskers.

Three decades ago, an estimated 40 million Americans considered a deftly executed grand slam one of life’s ultimate triumphs. Humphrey Bogart, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Brooklyn Dodgers--bridge buffs all.

But today, the numbers have shrunk to about 20 million, by estimate of the American Contract Bridge League. Worse yet, the average age of the league’s 200,000 members--the nation’s hard-core players--is 58.

In bridge circles, there is ominous talk of “the graying of bridge.”

“The world’s changing,” says league president Joan Levy Gerard. “There are computers and other things that kids are interested in . . . and growing up today is a lot harder than it was when we were kids.”

Still, Gerard is optimistic that the league will be able to, well, bridge the gap. In fact, for the past few years the Memphis, Tenn.-based league has sent outreach programs to high schools. The group is also not taking chances that college students will pick up the game, as they did a generation ago when all-night sessions were a rite of passage.

Since 1987, the league has trained and accredited 2,000 teachers to go forth and proselytize. By doing so, they’re also hoping to say goodby to some “expert” bridge teachers who were in reality everyday players picking up pin money--and turning people off the game.

Gerard is optimistic that in the decade since interest hit a worrisome low, “We really have turned the tide”--reinvigorating a craze that started back in 1925, when Harold S. (Mike) Vanderbilt--one of the Vanderbilts--worked out the theory for modern contract bridge while sailing from Los Angeles to Havana.

This week, in Pasadena, 7,000 players are competing in the Spring North American Bridge Championships at the Convention Center and the Hilton and Doubletree hotels.

It is one of three major annual North American events to which the big guys flock. This isn’t your basic party bridge--a few hands and break for the tuna casserole.

This is duplicate bridge, played with pre-dealt hands. Luck of the deal plays no role; the object is to do better than others dealt the same cards.

That departure from the low-key ambience of social bridge, reflects the seriousness of the stakes. Many of the tournament competitors have played for decades--although here and there one sees signs of the new generation of players, from gung-ho college students to yuppie newcomers.

Most are amateurs, a few are professionals who travel a national circuit of tournaments. In Pasadena, though, the play is mostly for glory and the satisfaction of a grand slam .

Lyle Peak stretches. He doesn’t look like your average bridge player, in his wide-brimmed black hat, fringed black leather jacket and black pants with glittery side stripes.

“In bridge, I’m known as the rhinestone cowboy,” he explains. “I’ve always had a flair for dressing well.”

Peak, who lives in Los Angeles, is not here just to have fun. He teaches bridge and plays professionally--”My partners usually pay me to play with them.” This day, his partner is Dorothy Arrilla of Santa Maria, also in black with fringe and glitter.

Dawn Kowalski of Venice and her 13-year-old son, Ross, are in the novice event. Ross has been playing for a year. “I needed a partner,” Dawn explains, “so I dragged him out.” She also has taught the game to her 10-year-old daughter. “My husband plays,” she says, “but he’s worse than the children.”

Compared to some of their older opponents, Jonathan Pepper, 31, and partner Louis Hirsch, 33, both of West L.A., seem like youngsters. “It’s really perceived as an old people’s game,” says Hirsch, who’s in the lighting business.

Pepper, who is “between positions” professionally, learned to play the old-fashioned way--in college, at Cal State Northridge. He’s wearing a ponytail, baseball cap, and dangling from his left ear is a blue and silver earring. Will that distract his opponents?

Pepper grins. “I hope so.”

He’s only kidding. The league’s code of ethics stipulates that there be no verbal abuse (“You idiot! You just trumped my ace!”), no intimidation.

Dan Boye, 40, a financial consultant from Syracuse, N.Y., has been playing for 15 years. “Fortunately for me,” he says, “no one taught me as a freshman (at Syracuse University). Bridge is an extremely addictive game.”

As he describes the thrills of bridge, he uses such words as guile and table feel, stamina, mental toughness. At the table, he adds, “You need a killer instinct. You need to not only beat the opponents, you need to pound them.”

It almost goes without saying that Boye does not waste his time playing social bridge. He’s on the circuit. “People sometimes look at me like I’m nuts. They say, ‘You’re going to Hawaii, or to Las Vegas, to sit in a room for 10 days playing bridge?’ ”

They are an eclectic group, these bridge fanatics: retirees, playwrights, attorneys and options traders. The average income of league members is $58,000. About 90% are college-educated. California and Florida are bridge-playing strongholds.

Amid the hard-core veterans are a few ingenues:

Denise Morgan, a mortgage company officer from Diamond Bar, and Toni Brown, an aerospace manager from San Dimas, are playing for the first time in the big time.

Indeed, they had neither met nor played until two weeks ago. “I’ve had five lessons,” Morgan says, “and she’s had seven.”

They appear undaunted by the fact that some serious players are stalking these halls, people who may receive $500 a day to play with a partner who wants to win.

In her suite at the Doubletree, Joan Gerard lights a cigarette and addresses the question: Does she ever tire of playing bridge? “Never, absolutely never.” Though she spends the equivalent of three months a year playing, she has yet to win a major national title.

Gerard, of White Plains, N.Y., graduated from Smith College in 1956 and has been a teacher, a camp director and in hotel sales and management. The league presidency is strictly a labor of love.

Her father used to play with the legendary Charles Goren. She met her husband, Ron, a major player, at a tournament. But neither her daughter nor her son, both in their 30s, plays. “That was the group we missed,” she says. “One thing that kept them away was smoking. These were literally smoke-filled rooms then.” (Today, smoking is banned at major tournaments.)

Bridge remains the most popular card game in North America, but, Gerard says, all card games are endangered by shrinking leisure time and the numbers of suburban housewives who now work in urban offices.

She heads the nation’s largest bridge group at a time when the game is in transition: Some league-sanctioned events now offer cash purses--for instance, $200,000 in prizes in Atlantic City, N.J., last year.

Gerard says members have “mixed” feelings about this. Some resist change; others fear an undesirable element will infiltrate. “Personally,” she says, “I see no problem with it.”

Some worry that the professionals are driving the amateurs, the mom-and-pop players, away. Not Gerard: “It’s one of the only sports where you can compete against the experts.”

Bob Hamman, 58, of Dallas has nothing against play-for-pay. “If I had my druthers,” he says, “there’d be a high-stakes pro bridge tour.” Why would he want this? He smiles. “Greed.”

Hamman, a Pasadena native, has been on a world championship team eight times. In real life, he is in the contingent prize business, which has something to do with figuring out such things as which frog is going to jump the farthest at Calavares County.

Bridge is his kind of sport: You win or you lose, and no judges decide that. He says it’s not like sports in which “you have to sit there and watch and you can’t do anything to make them play worse.” In bridge, there is skill--and there is psychology.

The current darling of the circuit is Zia Mahmood, a Pakistani who also lives in New York and London. He took home $40,000 for winning the Omar Sharif tournament in Atlantic City last year and was the league’s player of the year.

Tall and dapper, Mahmood has been playing for about 20 years, since he was 25: “I was having an affair with a woman who went to play bridge. I went to meet her there.”

Ever since, he has been “wandering around the world, looking for a perfect hand. I’m still looking.”

Mahmood, who is single, adds, “I am a romantic. All great romance is tragedy. Bridge is the most tragic game in the world.” He shrugs. “It sometimes becomes a substitute for love.”

It is, he adds, “the only thing that absolutely never bored me. It is not kind of a mundane game for old people.”

He vaguely alludes to a family business that includes real estate and newspaper publishing, and to playing bridge to “supplement my income.”

It is not a living, he emphasizes. “I live in Trump Tower. Bridge gets you to a Holiday Inn somewhere.”

Bridge legends abound. Some can recall the five-week “Bridge Battle of the Century” in 1931, from which Ely Culbertson emerged as the game’s real-life king. Journalists reporting the play-by-play from a New York hotel included Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, H. Allen Smith and Robert Benchley.

Writing his “unholy history” of contract bridge in 1965, Rex Mackey, a top Irish player, told a classic story, one to which any wretched beginner who’s been wrist-slapped for a misplay can relate:

At a major tournament, a kibitzer was asked by a hapless contestant, “How should I have played that last hand?”

To which the onlooker replied, “Under an assumed name.”

Long live the king, queen, jack and ace.

Basics of the Game

Bridge is a card game for four players in teams of two. Each player is dealt 13 cards and, starting with the dealer, they bid to establish a trump suit and a contract (an agreement to win a certain number of tricks).

The object is to reach game by scoring 100 points and taking the bid number of tricks. A trick is a play of four cards based on trumps and suits. Suits are ranked, with spades highest, clubs lowest.