Dallas Is Home to the Paul Mccartney of Bridge

,ITTI[1[0WUM\W\PM8I]T 5K+IZ\VMaWN *ZQLOM BY JASON HEID Cutting into the stack of issues of the New Yorker on my nightstand that never seems to get shorter, I read David Owen’s recent piece about a cheating scandal in the world of professional bridge and unexpectedly came across this Dallas cameo: The first American full-time professional bridge team, called the Dallas Aces, was formed in 1968 by Ira G. Corn, Jr., a Texas businessman. The pay wasn’t spectacular: a thousand dollars a month for married players, somewhat less for bachelors, plus travel and tournament expenses. Corn assembled his team because he was upset that, for more than a decade, the game had been dominated by a group of Italian players known as the Blue Team. The Dallas Aces won good player, but the other three were essentially the World Teams Championship in 1970, and from central casting.” He conjectured that the again the following year. Those victories were Italians used a number of illicit signals, involving all the more impressive because the Aces were things like hand gestures and the positioning of convinced that the Blue Team was cheating, their cigarettes. In 1975, two members of a later although no members of the team were ever version of the Blue Team were caught signalling formally charged. Bob Hamman, who played under the table with their feet; they’ve been on the Aces and now, in his late seventies, is known ever since as the Italian Foot Soldiers. universally considered to have been one of the best bridge players ever, told me, “The Blue Team had two outstanding players and one very Which led me to want to learn more about the Dallas Indeed, he’s so much a rock star that SCA’s Aces. The team apparently disbanded after Corn’s chief operating officer, Hemant Lall, ultimately death in 1982. Hamman actually stuck around in joined the company through a bridge Dallas, however, founding a company called SCA connection. “I first read about Bob when I Promotions that insures companies for prizes and was 16 years old, going to college in India, promotions they offer — like if a golf course offers and I read about the Dallas Aces,” Lall says. a bunch of cash for a hole-in-one. You may have The Aces were a professional team formed heard of SCA’s refusal to pay Lance Armstrong a by the late Ira Corn to win world bridge bonus he was owed for winning the Tour de France in championships. 2004, which led to a years-long dispute and eventual settlement after the rider publicly admitted to what “I got accepted at places like Stanford, but I SCA had suspected, that Armstrong was cheating. came to … [Southern Methodist University] because it was in Dallas, and I wanted to be D CEO profiled Hamman in 2010, and that article near the Dallas Aces,” Lall says. He never explains further just what a big deal he is in the bridge became part of the Aces, but Lall himself has world: won five national championships—all, he said, while partnering either with Bob Hamman or Jeff Tillotson, the attorney who represented his wife, Petra Hamman. SCA in the Armstrong arbitration, tells this story: I took a gander at the World Bridge Federation rankings, and the septuagenarian is still doing pretty “I’ve never played bridge, despite Bob’s well for himself: efforts. I was on a holiday with my wife, a cruise. They had bridge lessons and asked us to join,” Tillotson recalls. “I declined, but said, ‘I have a friend who plays—a guy named Bob Hamman.’ It was like telling a group of girls in the ’60s that I knew Paul McCartney,” he says. “Bob is a rock star in that world.” So maybe comparing Hamman to McCartney isn’t sufficient. When’s the last time McCartney topped the charts?.

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