The Best American Sports Writing 2017 by Glenn Stout

Author:Glenn Stout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

JOHN COLAPINTO

Some Very Dirty Tricks

from vanity fair

On August 22, 2015, seven days after his loss at the Spingold, an annual week-long bridge championship held last year at the Chicago Hilton, Boye Brogeland posted a teasing comment to the website Bridgewinners.com. “Very soon there will come out mind boggling stuff that would even make a Hollywood movie surreal,” wrote Brogeland, a 43-year-old Norwegian bridge player who is ranked 77th in the world. “It will give us a tremendous momentum to clean the game up, from the bottom to the very top.” He followed this, two days later, with another comment advising players what to do if they have cheaters on their team, and announced that he and his teammates Richie Schwartz, Allan Graves, and Espen Lindqvist were relinquishing all the titles they had won in the previous two years. He made no mention of the pair with whom the six-man team had won those titles, Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz (no relation to Richie)—a deliberate omission, Brogeland says, to spare Bridge Winners any potential legal liability.

But two days later, Brogeland launched his own website, Bridgecheaters.com. The welcome page featured a huge photo of Fisher and Schwartz, a young Israeli duo who, since breaking into the international ranks in 2011, while still in their early twenties, had stunned the bridge world by snapping up the game’s top trophies. Grinning, arms around each other’s shoulders, they appeared under the tagline “The Greatest Scam in the History of Bridge!” Brogeland described an altercation he’d had with Fisher at the Spin­gold over a phantom trick (Fisher claimed 11 tricks in one hand when, in fact, he’d held the cards for 10), and posted examples of what he claimed to be suspiciously illogical hands played by the pair. He also included a “Cheating History”—information he had dug up from the Israel Bridge Federation and had translated from the original Hebrew. Brogeland said it laid out a pattern of alleged cheating and bad sportsmanship going back to when Fisher and Schwartz were in their midteens: in 2003, Fisher was suspended for a year for forging results and for unsportsmanlike conduct in the final of the Israeli championships; at the 2004 Tel Aviv International Bridge Festival, he was suspended for a month for calling another player a “faggot”; in July 2004, he and Schwartz were investigated for suspicious hands after winning the three-day Shaufel Cup; a year later, Schwartz was suspended for forging match results.

The site, in its first 24 hours, received more than 100,000 hits. For the game of contract bridge, the technical name for a 91-year-old pastime that also happens to be a multimillion-dollar business, it was an earthquake equal to the jolt that shook international cycling when Lance Armstrong was banned from competition for doping. Before going public with his accusations, Brogeland, aware that he was taking on powerful interests (at the professional level, the game runs on the sponsorships of CEOs and multimillionaires), consulted the Norwegian police, who, Brogeland says, advised, “When you blow the whistle, do not be at your home address.

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