What I know about bridge can just about fill the rest of this sentence: it’s a card game and I think you play with a partner? Maybe more than one partner? I don’t know. I mostly know it as a syndicated column in my sports section that I never read, and, as it turns out, was probably written by one of the Dallas Aces, the squad that Dallas businessman Ira Corn put together in the 1960s to finally defeat Italy’s Blue Team, which I understand to be something like the 1990s UNLV Runnin’ Rebels of bridge. Dominant, seemingly impossible to overcome, featuring Larry Johnson from Skyline.
Anyway, I didn’t know about any of this until I got an email from a writer named Mike Piellucci. I was not familiar with the Dallas Aces, or Italy’s Blue Team, or that people once cared a lot — like A LOT a lot — about bridge. The Aces were on the cover of Time! Omar Sharif hosted a traveling bridge tour! It’s all very surprising and delightful, and all that and much more is in the piece Mike wrote for us. It is my favorite kind of magazine story, one that pulls a scrapbook from out of nowhere and shows you snapshot after snapshot of a world that is completely unknown to you.
