David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 39 years.
The commotion this week over whether The Times’s chess column was being discontinued or might survive was a reminder of how many people follow our chess and bridge coverage. Close readers have been rewarded with some astonishing moments over the years.
The bridge editor Alan Truscott, who died in 2005, was known for beginning his columns “with a digression that put the reader in a comfortable chair in someone’s living room,” Michael Pollak wrote in Mr. Truscott’s obituary.
Imagine his followers’ surprise when they began reading the column of April 25, 1985: “The older generation of players will be saddened by the news of the death of Florence Osborn, who wrote the daily bridge column for The New York Herald Tribune from 1936 until its closing in 1966. Mrs. Osborn, 74 years old, was found dead in her home in Mount Carmel, Conn., on Sunday, the victim of a stab wound to the neck, the police said. Her husband, Harold, 69, was charged in his wife’s death.”
Where a Metro reporter might have tried to reconstruct the Osborns’ lives together from friends and neighbors, or ask the police to describe the scene in detail, Mr. Truscott revisited a deal from Mrs. Osborn’s book, “How’s Your Bridge Game” — complete with diagram.
“Bidding styles have changed considerably since the book was written, in 1948,” Mr. Truscott wrote. “Today South would not be likely to open one heart, partly because of the trend toward five-card majors and partly because a two no-trump bid would be likely.”
Mr. Truscott was among those at the 1965 world championship tournament in Buenos Aires who observed the finger signals used by a pair of competitors, Boris Schapiro and J. Terence Reese, to indicate how many hearts each held.
“Officials found Reese and Schapiro guilty, but were hesitant about releasing the news,” John Willig wrote in his review of Mr. Truscott’s book, “The Great Bridge Scandal” (1969). “There was the effect on the bridge world to consider, the legal questions involved and the fact that nothing like it had ever happened before. Even for Truscott it was a case of the reluctant reporter. The only representative of an individual newspaper covering the event, he sat on the news until he was beaten on his world scoop by a local Argentine stringer.”
With that, Mr. Truscott reported the explosive development. In his column, of course, and quietly.