The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

Over the next two years, the team of Brogeland, Lindqvist, Fisher, Schwartz, Graves, and Schwartz won a string of championships: the 2014 Spingold, the 2014 Reisinger, the 2015 Jacoby Swiss. During that time, says Brogeland, he regularly checked Bridge Base Online, a website that archives tournament hands, so he could monitor how his new teammates were behaving when playing at the table adjacent to him. He saw “maybe five or six” suspicious-looking hands, he says, “but nowhere near enough to say, ‘You’re cheating.’ ” Nevertheless, he says he was relieved when, in the summer of 2015, the pair was lured away by the deep-pocketed sponsor Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of the defunct investment house Bear Stearns. “When they changed teams,” Brogeland says, “I didn’t have to be faced with this kind of environment where you’re not sure—you feel something is strange but you can’t really tell.”

  Fisher, meanwhile, was enjoying his position at the top of the game, where the lives of many successful young pros more closely resemble those of well-heeled, globe-hopping rock musicians than what might be conjured by the term “bridge player.” Convening nightly at a hotel bar in whatever city is holding the competition—Biarritz, Chennai, Chicago—they drink until the small hours, rising late the next day, since tournament organizers mercifully schedule the first matches for one in the afternoon. Fisher, hailed as the “wonder boy of Israeli bridge,” was a fixture of the bar scene. Charismatic, and darkly handsome, with a widow’s peak and heavy brows, he posted Instagram photos of himself posing in well-cut suits in five-star hotels, behind the wheel of luxury cars, or partying with an array of young people—spoils of his status in a game where, for three years, he had been drawing an almost unbroken string of wins that brought bonuses amounting to six figures. There was only one problem: the persistent rumors that he was a cheater. Many people were whispering about it, according to Steve Weinstein, a top American player who writes for the website Bridgewinners.com. “But it’s an unwritten rule that you not publicly accuse anyone—even if you’re sure,” Weinstein says. It was a Catch-22 that Fisher seemed to delight in flaunting, shrugging off questions about his suspicious play as if daring anyone to openly accuse him. “He had the Nietzschean superman personality,” says Fred Gitelman, a former champion and cofounder of Bridge Base Online. “He just thought he was in a different league.”

  Champs and Cheats

  Contract bridge is built on the rules of the 18th-century British game whist: a deck of cards is dealt to four people, who play in two-person partnerships, sitting opposite each other at a table. The player to the left of the dealer leads with a card of any suit—heart, diamond, club, or spade—and each player in succession plays a card of the suit led; the highest card wins the trick. It’s a deceptively simple game only slightly complicated by the existence of the trump: a card in a suit that overrules all others. In whist, trump is determined randomly, before the start of each hand. In auction bridge, a game popularized in England in 1904, trump is determined in each hand’s opening “auction,” when the teams, communicating solely by way of spoken bids (“Three spades,” “Two hearts,” “Three no trump”), establish which (if any) suit will be trump and how many tricks they think they can take. Pairs who take more tricks than contracted for are awarded extra points for those tricks. The pair with the most points, after all 13 tricks are played, wins the hand.

  Contract bridge emerged from devilish refinements introduced, in 1925, by the American railroad magnate Harold S. Vanderbilt. While on a cruise through the Panama Canal, he sought to goose up a game of dull auction bridge by awarding escalating bonus points to pairs who took the greatest risk in the opening auction, and imposed steep point deductions on pairs who failed to make the tricks contracted for. Thus did a polite and mannerly British parlor game take on some of the brash, hypercompetitive, sweaty-palmed excitement of the big-money trading Vanderbilt was familiar with from Wall Street.

  The game became a craze during the Great Depression, when an evening’s entertainment for two couples could be had for the price of a deck of cards. How-to manuals, written by actual bridge celebrities, like the publicity genius and Romanian immigrant Ely Culbertson, sat atop best-seller lists; bridge hands were analyzed on the radio; millions of bridge fans nationwide followed the 1931 murder trial of Kansas City housewife Myrtle Bennett, who gunned down her husband after a spat in which she called him “a bum bridge player.” (She was acquitted.) After the Second World War, bridge took on a new sheen of glamour and exclusivity, joining baccarat and casino poker in the array of upper-class pastimes enjoyed by that emblem of postwar suavity, James Bond. In the 1955 novel Moonraker, Bond (in one of the most thrilling scenes Ian Fleming ever wrote) faces off, at M’s club, in a game of high-stakes bridge against arch-villain Sir Hugo Drax, whom Bond coolly unmasks as a cheater. (“And don’t forget that cheating at cards can still smash a man,” M tells Bond.)

  In the 1960s, international tournament bridge took on some of the swashbuckling heroics associated with downhill skiing and Grand Prix racing, with legends like the powerhouse Italian “Blue Team” winning 16 world titles between 1957 and 1975 and heartthrob Egyptian actor Omar Sharif (a professional player who ranked in the game’s top 50) telling an interviewer, “The real question is why I spend so much time making movies when I could be playing bridge.” Meanwhile, the game, which draws on innate gifts of logic, problem solving, planning, and risk assessment, became particularly popular among Wall Street traders (who rely on those skills professionally) and, to this day, counts as its most devoted fans many highly successful CEOs and entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

  In the popular imagination, however, bridge has all but vanished. Last year, the New York Times dropped its long-running bridge column, and today the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), the game’s governing body in North America, lists only 168,000 members, with a median age, despite the hotel-bar set, of 71. Yet the professional, tournament game has only increased as a serious, moneymaking pursuit, with rich bridge addicts assembling stables of top players, paying them ever-rising retainers and bonuses—all for the privilege of playing hands with the pros in important tournaments. (The first American “dream team,” the Dallas Aces, was put together in 1968 by businessman Ira Corn to challenge Italy’s Blue Team.) “It’s like paying to play a few games of doubles at Wimbledon with Federer or Djokovic,” says Christopher Rivera, a game director at Manhattan’s Honors Bridge Club.

  Except that the top sponsors today also happen to be very strong players. Cayne, now 82, was a bridge professional before joining Bear Stearns in 1969. His obsession with the game has even been cited as a contributing cause of Bear Stearns’s demise. As the firm spiraled in 2007 during the subprime mortgage crisis, CEO Cayne was reportedly at bridge tournaments, distracted and unreachable. Pierre Zimmermann, a Monaco-based real-estate multimillionaire who sponsored the Monaco team on which Fantoni and Nunes played, took up bridge in his thirties and is one of the game’s strongest players. Both men reportedly pay up to half a million dollars annually to individual members of their five-man teams—when they win. Gail Greenberg, one of the game’s greatest women champions, says that such paydays have fueled cheating by players hoping to be recruited by deep-pocketed sponsors, or to hang on to the one they’ve got. Chris Willenken, a leading American professional, says, “There is definitely enough money involved that it’s easy to understand why not everybody might be honest.”

  And then there’s the sheer ease of cheating. Pairs are forbidden to say what high cards they hold or in what suit they might be strong—except by way of the koan-like bids (“Two no trump”) they make in a hand’s opening auction. Any other communication is outlawed by Rule 73.b.2 of the ACBL’s Laws of Duplicate Bridge: “The gravest possible offence is for a partnership to exchange information through prearranged methods . . .” In one of the game’s biggest scandals, British champion J. Terence Reese and his partner Boris Schapiro, at the 1965 Bermuda Bowl, in Buenos Aires, were discovered using finger signals—clutching their c
ards variously with two, three, or four fingers, with an array of odd spacings between the digits—to communicate the number of hearts they held. The scandal exploded in newspapers around the world.

  Tournament organizers would eventually respond by erecting screens to block partners’ view of each other. “It limits the channels of communication under some circumstances,” says Bob Hamman, an original member of the Dallas Aces. “But no method of this nature is an adequate defense against a determined adversary.” When players were discovered communicating via footsie (two members of the Italian Blue Team were among those accused of engaging in this type of cheating at the 1975 Bermuda Bowl), barriers were installed under tables. In 2013, the “coughing doctors”—German physicians Michael Elinescu and Entscho Wladow—were caught using coded throat clearings at the D’Orsi World Senior Bowl, in Bali, and banned from playing bridge together for life. (They denied the charges, with Wladow blaming the coughing on his asthma.) Pairs can come under suspicion even when no signaling is detected—simply through illogical play. “In bridge at the highest level,” says Willenken, “the best players play in a relentlessly logical fashion, so when something illogical happens, other good players notice it. And if that illogical thing is consistently winning, suspicions can be aroused.” Even variations in the speed of play, which to professionals has a particular pace and rhythm, can raise alarms.

  Getting the game’s governing bodies to act quickly on charges of cheating is another matter. Given the potential for lawsuits, the organizing bodies necessarily have to work carefully to collect evidence, which can take time. Jeff Meckstroth was in the finals of the 2014 Vanderbilt—an annual seven-day tournament—in Dallas against Fantoni and Nunes when he says he believed his opponents were placing their discarded tricks on the table in a suspicious manner. Meckstroth was convinced they were signaling. “They turned the trick the wrong way to say, ‘I don’t have anything in dummy’s weak suit,’ ” he says. He reported Fantoni and Nunes to the ACBL—then badgered the organization for more than a year to do something. “They just put their head in the sand,” he says. (The ACBL says that, in fact, it did begin monitoring the pair.) Fantoni and Nunes continued to compete—even after an incident at the 2015 Italian championships, when Nunes played an ace-of-diamonds lead so wildly illogical (yet successful) that his only defense, when questioned by the Federation of Italian Bridge, was to claim that he “had a mental blackout” in midplay. Even this opera buffa moment was not enough to get them banned from the game. (An investigation by the Italian federation led to an acquittal when the two judges hearing the case couldn’t agree.)

  By the summer of 2015, the grumbling about cheaters had reached critical mass. “Last June, I was at the European championships, in Norway,” Meckstroth says. “I was with a group of top players and they were all complaining: ‘What are we going to do? These guys are cheating.’ I threw up my hands and said, ‘I’ve been trying for 18 months and met with nothing but frustration.’ ”

  That all changed three months later, when Brogeland—defying the game’s governing bodies, ignoring the unwritten rule that players never accuse one another, and risking his own expulsion if unable to prove the charges—went public. “It’s a perfect example of civil disobedience,” says Willenken. “There’s this wall of silence because of the rules about accusing other people. And everybody is seeing that the system—that whole paradigm—is breaking down. It’s not allowing for an honest game. Boye comes along and says, ‘I don’t care what the rules are. I don’t care what they do to me. I’m going to come out and say all this stuff.’ ”

  “I did this because I love the game,” Brogeland says. “I asked, ‘What would my parents do? My grandparents?’ It was clear. I just wanted to focus on what was right.”

  Less than a month after Cayne had lured Fisher and Schwartz away from Richie Schwartz’s team, Brogeland met the pair again—this time as opponents, in the quarter-final of the 2015 Spingold, at the Hilton hotel in Chicago. It was a match that would change bridge forever.

  Brogeland’s team was the clear underdog. Team captain Richie Schwartz and his partner, Allan Graves (a septuagenarian with a friendly, philosophical temperament), faced off against the suspect pair at one table, while Brogeland and his regular partner, fellow Norwegian Espen Lindqvist (a soft-spoken 28-year-old with spiky blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses), played Cayne and Alfredo Versace at a neighboring table. In a more than eight-hour battle, Brogeland’s team won, in an upset, by the slimmest margin possible: a single point.

  Or seemed to. Fisher immediately contested the result on a technicality. After a nearly two-hour arbitration that stretched until 1:30 a.m., the win was overturned: Brogeland’s team had now lost by one point and been knocked out of the tournament—a crushing defeat compounded by Brogeland’s seeing Lotan Fisher run from the committee room punching the air and screaming in triumph.

  “If we had won that match,” Brogeland admits, “I would have gone to bed and tried to get as much sleep as I could, to try to win the semifinal the next day. I might have said, ‘Maybe they cheat, but I don’t want to put my life and career on the line . . .’ ”

  But as things stood, Brogeland could not sleep. After tossing and turning all night, he rose at 7:00 a.m., went to his laptop, and opened Bridge Base Online. “I checked the BBO files to see how we lost,” Brogeland says. He claims he immediately noticed something odd at the neighboring table. Ron Schwartz had opened a hand by playing a club lead. Yet, as Brogeland now believed, Schwartz’s hand indicated that a heart lead was the obvious play. “I wondered, ‘How could he not lead a heart?’ ” Brogeland says. “All top players that I know would have led that suit. But he didn’t. If it was wrong for him not to do it, then okay. But of course it was right for him not to lead it. I think, ‘Wow, this is strange.’ ”

  Then, he says, he saw something even stranger.

  In one of the final hands, Fisher had claimed 11 tricks—giving his team the winning edge. Except Fisher, as BBO showed, held the cards for just 10 tricks. “I say, ‘Fuck, what is this?’ ” Brogeland recalls. Dumbfounded, he gathered with his teammates and asked what had happened on that hand. Graves recounted to Brogeland how Fisher, claiming to have made all 11 tricks he’d contracted for, had briskly stuffed his cards into the slotted board at the center of the table where cards are returned after a hand. Bridge players usually go by an honor system when a player says he has made all of his tricks. But Graves made a point of asking to see Fisher’s cards. Fisher yanked them from the board, showed them to his opponents, then shoved them back into the slot. Eleven tricks were duly entered on the scorecard. Brogeland now wondered if Fisher had pulled the oldest scam in bridge: hiding a losing card behind the others. In any event, the miscount could not be corrected: challenges must be raised within a half-hour of a match. The loss would stand.

  Brogeland went in search of Fisher. He found him by the hotel elevators. Brogeland says Fisher admitted to miscounting the hand, but claimed it was unintentional. “I made a mistake,” he said. “It happens.”

  “No, Lotan,” said Brogeland. “You never make these kinds of mistakes.”

  Fisher went on the attack. “Do you call me a cheater?”

  “No,” Brogeland said. “But this does not look good.”

  A Grand Coup

  Brogeland spent the next two days at the tournament scouring BBO and comparing notes with other players. By the time he flew back to Norway (after watching Fisher and Schwartz win the Spingold in a final that carried moments that seemed suspicious to Brogeland and those he was watching with), he was convinced the pair were cheating. And he was determined to expose them.

  He knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Although he felt certain that they were signaling to each other, Brogeland had no idea how. Still, he believed that if he amassed enough illogical hands, he could make a convincing case—however circumstantial—to present to the game’s governing bodies.

  For the next week, he hunkered over his c
omputer in Flekke­fjord, working all day collecting suspicious hands on BBO and sleeping only three hours a night. “I was going on pure adrenaline,” he says. He phoned trusted players around the world—Ishmael Del’Monte in Australia, Per-Ola Cullin in Sweden, Brad Moss in the United States—to canvass for other suspect hands. Thomas Bessis, a French champion who had played as a junior with Fisher, had been keeping a folder of suspicious hands on the pair for years.

  Brogeland contacted governing bodies on both sides of the Atlantic, including the European Bridge League and the ACBL. An official at the EBL told Brogeland to submit an official complaint, in writing, so that the organization could consider whether to initiate a formal investigation. “He said, ‘No, this is going to take too long a time,’ ” recalls the EBL official to whom Brogeland spoke. Brogeland also pressed the ACBL for immediate action. When he gave suspect hands to ACBL officials, he was told to supply more hands. Brogeland grew frustrated. “They had plenty of hands,” he says. “Fifty, 60 hands. I said, ‘How many do you need? One hundred? Two hundred? Please, do something!’ ”

  ACBL CEO Robert Hartman—a tall, dark-haired man who had previously worked as general manager of a Thoroughbred racetrack in the Bay Area—declines to discuss specifics of ongoing investigations, but admits that the process for reviewing cheating is lengthy, and is frustrating for players who can feel, he says, as if their complaints “have gone into space.” The process ordinarily begins when a player, directly after a match, files a memo detailing specific claims against an opponent. “The memo is sent to ACBL headquarters, in Horn Lake, Mississippi, where it is submitted to a five-step process of review and appeals,” says Hartman. The process can take a year or longer to play out.

  Brogeland had no intention of waiting that long. He wanted the pair out of the game before the upcoming Bermuda Bowl—a month away. He would have to bypass official channels and go public. He weighed the risks to his career and reputation—which included possible charges of unseemly self-interest in pursuing a pair whom he played alongside, for two years, and accused only after an infuriating loss at the Spingold. He dismissed the worry. “Does anyone really think I would risk my career and livelihood because of a single match?” he says. “I publish a bridge magazine, I play professional bridge—this is what I do. This is my life. If I was wrong here, I would just have been more or less out of bridge.”