 I do not know whether my fellow international players feel the same about the publicity one gets from the press and otherwise, but I enjoyed it. Somehow all this attention gives an ego-boost. I kept clippings of articles in which my plays or bids were praised (soon it turned out I had two sets, since my mother did likewise).
To the outside world I pretended not to care, but in reality…
Once when I was at the pinnacle of my ‘fame’ we played an exhibition match during the Deauville bridge festival. Six national teams competed during the evening hours. The matches were shown on a giant screen in a big hall.
Nowadays one logs in on the internet but those days things were different in Deauville. On the screen there were four times thirteen sections, each section covered with a transparent plastic sheet showing a card and behind it a lamp.
This way the audience saw the whole deal. When a card was played the lamp behind it was switched off.
(Indeed a classic rama. Since long ramas have been replaced by vuegraphs, in which the deals are projected on a screen. In the early vuegraph years an overhead projector was used, the deals were written (later printed) on plastic sheets, played cards were crossed out with a felt-tip pen. Since about 15 years computer screen images are projected by means of a beamer. By the way, strange they still used a rama in Deauville, since it was not that long ago...).
We played very well and won the round robin by a big margin. This meant we were to play the final against a strong Polish team, the runners up.
The final was close but in the end we lost narrowly as a result of some unfortunate deals. We played in a hotel room, from where the results were relayed to the rama hall via a microphone. No video images were being made, so the audience did not see the players during the play.
We played the last set against Martens–Szymanowski and finished before the players in the other room. On entering the rama hall we were invited on stage by the vuegraph/rama-commentators and introduced to the audience. There I stood, beaming and proud, next to my partner Louk Verhees and two Polish masters. At the moment we did not know who had won the match, since the play was still on at the other table. I felt on top of the world. At that very moment a fellow Dutchman approached me. He showed a broad grin and asked: ‘Have you heard the remark of that commentator about your 4♣ bid on that penultimate board?’
‘No.’
‘He said it was the worst bid he had seen in his entire bridge career!’ Suddenly I found myself standing quite differently on that podium in front of that full house… |