Don’t be fooled by the image of bridge as a genteel card game, played with decks and score pads in a matching feminine decor, of ladies clubs where the play is accompanied by coffee in delicate cups followed by dessert.
When the world’s best bridge players lay down their cards, testosterone flies in a ruthlessly competitive, highly charged and almost exclusively male universe.
All this explains why Rose Meltzer has attracted so much attention.
Late last year, she became the first female to win an international championship in an “open” field – that is, one that allows either sex to play. By winning the Bermuda Bowl in Paris, described by bridge aficionados as the Wimbledon, Super Bowl and World Series combined, Meltzer became the queen of bridge.
“People really believe that women don’t play as well as men,” said Meltzer, 59, a charming woman with an aggressive bridge game who refuses to accept the prevailing belief.
A graduate of The Juilliard School (piano) and Columbia University (chemistry), the mother of two adult sons, and the wife of a Silicon Valley executive, Meltzer decided to hone her bridge game in 1997. That was the year that she and her husband moved from New York to California, where she had just one friend, Rita Shugart, who is also the wife of a Silicon Valley executive, also a bridge fiend and also one of the few women playing in the “open” leagues with success. Meltzer immediately understood that the open events were considered “the real, top-quality events,” while the female ones were dismissed as “only women playing women.”
“I’m telling you, it’s always a man’s world, and bridge is no exception,”said Meltzer, with a defiant toss of her auburn hair. She was sitting in her palatial home — tucked into a peak of the Santa Cruz Mountains — where she generally plays bridge by computer.
In the rarefied world of competitive duplicate bridge, there seem to be only four reasons why a man plays with a woman:
1. He is married to her.
2. He is dating her, or having some personal relationship with her.
3. The rules require him to play with her, as in a “mixed pairs” event, which is by definition an event of men and women.
4. She is paying him.
“Women have always been acknowledged as second-class citizens in the bridge world,” said Steve Garner, a 46-year-old Northfield, Ill., stock options trader, who was a member of the bridge team (all-male) that recently won the Reisinger tournament, a prestigious national event, in Las Vegas, and who is familiar with the unwritten rules of play between the sexes, which he does not endorse.
“I’m just telling you like it is,” he said. Having played with the opposite sex — though he insists for none of the above four reasons — he speaks from authority when he says, “People don’t look down on you if you play with a girl, but most people think, `It’s nice he’s going to play with her.’ Like you’re doing her a favor.”
Men and women say competition in the open events is much more challenging than the competition in the women-only events. Any list of the world’s or nation’s best bridge players is dominated by men, and rarely includes women. Even the basic primer, “Bridge for Dummies,” in listing the 10 best bridge players of all time, includes only one woman, Helen Sobel Smith, who has been dead for 32 years. It gives her measured accolades that suggest the chasm between the sexes. “The male bridge experts of her day considered her to be at least their equal,” the book says.
The man-woman metaphor is commonplace in describing one’s playing prowess.
Once, when Meltzer was playing with Peter Weichsel, her coach, mentor, and one of her five male teammates, she so aggressively bid the game that he gave her zesty praise indeed, saying, “God, Rose, you bid that just like a man!”
“And he’s not a chauvinist,” Meltzer noted.
Entertainment industry lawyer Jill Meyers, who is considered one of the strongest women players, occasionally teams up with Garner. When the Santa Monica, Calif., attorney plays a hand poorly, Garner will admonish her in a particular way. “He’ll tease me saying I played bridge like a girl on that hand,” Meyers said.
Learned game as a teen
Meltzer, who grew up in a New York City suburb, first learned bridge as a teenager, when she was drafted to fill in for someone who didn’t show for her mother’s bridge club. She played more bridge in college, quickly discovering why her classmates were staying up all night with a game she still loves for its competitiveness, its mental challenge and its social aspects.
In fact, the game has often been Meltzer’s savior. When she was a young mother with two small children, she treated herself to a night of duplicate bridge (a tournament form of contract bridge) once a week for the mental stimulation and the social outlet. When she was divorced, bridge was the way she met Cliff Meltzer, a man who shared her passion for bridge and became her second husband (though not her bridge partner). And when she retired from her work in human resources, leaving the East Coast for the West, bridge was the way she made new friends.
“I went to the local bridge club, and I said, `I’m from New York. Help me,’ and they took me in like I was a waif,” she said with a laugh.
Before 1997, she occasionally competed in a local tournament, and played a social hand once a month. But since then, bridge has blossomed from a hobby to a passion. Meltzer now plays in a tournament of one kind or another practically every month. She has regular practice sessions with Weichsel, which are conducted by computer, since they live in different regions of California. And once a year, her whole team convenes at her house for an intensive training session of a week to 10 days, to practice bidding and playing techniques (with only a half-hour break for lunch).
Meltzer’s five male teammates include three professional bridge players — Weichsel, of Encinitas, Calif.; Kyle Larsen, of San Francisco; and Alan Sontag, of Gaithersburg, Md. — and two non-professionals, Chip Martel, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis; and Lew Stansby, an options trader from Castro Valley, Calif.
Eccentricities part of game
Like every competitive bridge player, Meltzer has her eccentricities. In a tense moment, she twirls her hair. Before every bidding session, she takes a ritual series of deep breaths. And for any tournament she carries her lucky medallion, a memento of the first of the championships her team has won, a gift from teammate Weichsel.
Women have long had a presence in the bridge world, but the women’s movement has not. Feminism didn’t surface in this exclusive universe until 1984, when Jill Levin sued the American Contract Bridge League because she felt her play was degraded by her being limited to the women’s category. At that time, men played in men’s events; women played in women’s events; and both sexes played in “mixed pairs” events.
“I was being excluded from playing in the superior events solely because I am a woman,” said Levin, a 40-year-old professional bridge player in New York City. “It was offensive to me that I couldn’t play against the best bridge players. If I had a penis I could play and if I didn’t I couldn’t play.”
“They (the American Contract Bridge League) thought it was funny that I was saying this, but I told them I thought it was illegal.”
The suit dragged on for many years until the parties reached a settlement in 1990, which resulted in men’s competitions being made open events. (No man has ever sued, or requested, to participate in the women’s events. “No man wants to play in the women’s events,” Weichsel said.)
But by the time the changes were made, Levin wasn’t playing in the open events anymore.
“I would never play in a woman’s event if I wasn’t getting paid, but my personal circumstances have changed,” said Levin, who is divorced. “I now have to play bridge for money, not for a hobby,” she said, noting that her sponsor helps pay her bills.
Not enough respect
It is a predicament that Meltzer can well understand. She believes the best women players are the equal of men but don’t get respect from males because they play in women’s tournaments, largely because of the financial realities of bridge. “Most of the topnotch women players play in women’s events because that’s where they are paid to play,” she says.
Which brings us to the delicate subject of money, a subject no one in the bridge world likes to talk about, but which is central to the way the bridge world operates. In Europe, some teams are sponsored by companies, but in the United States almost all bridge teams are sponsored by individuals, usually someone playing on the team.
And that — Rule No. 4 (see previous) — is how Meltzer came to her crown. She is her team’s patron.
Now, to an outsider, her Bermuda Bowl crown might seem a bit tarnished, in that her feat required five teammates whom she pays to play with her — about $50,000 per tournament by her own estimate. But this is shrugged off by observers and game participants as irrelevant.
No amount of money, they insist, can buy the world’s best bridge team. Money is necessary, of course, since bridge players don’t play for cash prizes the way pro golfers or tennis players do. They are vying for Masterpoints, a score that is a measure of one’s skill and success in major tournament play. But even the richest patron could not get championship-level players to team up with her if she were just a mediocre player.
Bridge is trying to raise its profile at present, with a movement afoot to make bridge tournaments into major sporting events with cash prizes. There is a problem, however, as is readily conceded by Brent Manley, executive editor of the Bridge Bulletin, the American Contract Bridge League publication. “Unless you’re knowledgeable about the game, it’s not a good spectator sport,” he admits.
The other movement underway is to make bridge an Olympic sport. In February, bridge tournaments will be held in the days leading up to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The World Bridge Federation will also hold an exhibition.
If bridge were to make the leap into the Olympiad, it would probably do nothing to decrease the divide between the sexes, because, as in all Olympic sport, there are (and will be in February’s bridge exhibition) separate teams for men and women.
Putting a team together
A bridge team can cost about $100,000 to put together for a single tournament, with more bonuses for winning, this according to an insider who put dollar figures on the team costs only with the condition that his name not be used.
“People don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “One sponsor doesn’t want the other pros to know what he’s paying.
“But it’s not like free agency in baseball, where the best players go to the highest bidders. Team chemistry is important.”
But the fact that Meltzer is the team’s — well — owner, more or less, does not seem to take away from the victory to those in the know.
“I think it’s a huge accomplishment, a major accomplishment,” Manley said. “I don’t think anyone, including Rose, would consider her the equal of her frontline teammates, but you cannot win at this level without playing well.
So-called Butler rankings, compiled to assess each pair’s contribution in the Bermuda Bowl, show that of the three pairs on Meltzer’s team, the two male-only pairs had higher rankings. But at the same time, the team overcame a huge deficit in that tournament, one of three it has won with Meltzer in the lineup. “You can’t say that she didn’t carry her own weight,” Manley said.
And, Meltzer and Weichsel tied for second place in this year’s race for the American Contract Bridge League player of the year, an honor bestowed on the player who wins the most points in the high-level competitions.
Even Levin said, “I couldn’t be more proud of her. I feel my own sense of vindication from it.”
“I’ve won two women’s world championships,” she said ruefully, “so we are [considered] the best women, and we are [still considered] inferior to the men.”
Bridge tournament play requires extraordinary concentration and an ability to deal with considerable tension, and long-time players such as Manley have seen it all: players who go into a long, long study to play a card, spending 15 minutes to make a choice, only to have it wind up wrong. He has seen players walk out in the middle of the game, fling the boards, as the trays that hold the cards are called, at fellow players or the wall, or use the boards, which used to be made of aluminum, to knock a partner on the head. (There is the non-tournament story of the infamous Kansas City case in which a woman killed her husband after their unsuccessful bridge game, and was acquitted, but that is another story.)
The potential for cheating has led the tournaments to use a bidding system in which the partners can neither see nor hear one another. Bidding is done with partners divided by a screen. Cards stating the bid and convention being used are laid in a tray, so that coughs, the lie of a pencil or the manner of holding one’s cards in hand will not be used as signals about, say, how many cards of a certain suit are in the hand.
The debate in the bridge world does not center on whether the women are as good as the men, but on why the women are not as good as the men.
Robert Hammond, a Texan who has been the world’s highest-ranking player since 1985, says he believes it’s because of the distractions men have managed to avoid that let them focus on bridge, or chess or backgammon to the exclusion of life.
“If a guy goes off and wastes his life playing cards . . . guys are more likely to be able to pull that off than women,” he said. “If a woman were a total dropout, which might be necessary to get good at these things, it’s harder. That’s just reality. That’s society.”
A competitive nature
Meyers has her theories too. “I think men tend to be more competitive by nature. This is an extremely competitive sport. Women traditionally take the roles that they don’t compete against men.
“I think women are a little bit afraid to be competitive, because they want people to like them,” she said.
Adding to the mix, she said, is men’s attitude toward women’s capabilities.
“It’s very hard for a woman to get a good male partner,” she said. “The men will nurture the good male bridge players, and they won’t have anything to do with the women.”
Weichsel, a top-ranked professional bridge player, said the gap “probably has something to do with abstract thinking.” Though he believes women are as intelligent as men, he said he thinks men seem to excel in the abstract thinking that is a necessary characteristic of the game when it is played at the highest levels.
“You need to envision bridge hands,” he said. “At trick one you have to envision what will happen in trick nine or 10. That has a little to do with what separates men from women.
Also, he said he believes men are more competitive by nature. “You have to have an innate desire to win, to be a little ruthless in your desire to win.”
Levin, who brought the suit that made Meltzer’s victory possible, said, “It’s definitely still true that for every great woman player there are 10 to 20 great men players.”
The reasons? The way boys are raised, the way they handle math and other abstract studies, and the way they conduct their lives, she said. “My husband, who is also a world champion bridge player, he has a life that allows him to stay totally focused on one thing, because he knows I’m going to take care of all the details. My life doesn’t allow me to do that. I have to keep a thousand details in my mind. It’s not that great when you need to concentrate on one task, bridge.”
On one point, however, her view has changed slightly since she filed her lawsuit. She is now the mother of three boys. “I watch them, and they’re having a good time beating the crap out of one another.”
As a result, she said, “I’m not completely willing to rule out biology as a minuscule factor in it.”
