Bridge Team Goes for Gold

So what if the Harvard men's hockey team finished its post-championship season with a 13-14-1 record? Or if the basketball team failed once again to capture its first Ivy league title?

True lovers of sport need not despair. The Harvard bridge team still has a shot at the gold.

For the third consecutive year, the team has been chosen to represent the Atlantic Conference in the annual North American Collegiate Bridge Championship. In its previous appearances, Harvard has made it to the final round of the contest, but failed to capture the national title.

"Being a senior I'm looking forward to winning," said James C. Colen '90, a Mather House resident and the president of the bridge club. "I think that this year our team is stronger than it's ever been. It'll be a lot of fun in any case."

Colen said that the club owes its success primarily to to the efforts of team member William D. Cole, who played the game professionally for a year after graduating from Columbia University.

"We all basically knew the rules before, but he taught us how to play well," Colen said. "He's clearly the best player on the team."

"Bill Cole is an amazing bridge player," said Franco M. Baseggio '92, another member of the team. "He is orders of magnitude better than anyone I know. I don't think the team would have been good enough to qualify without him."

Team members said they had already removed one major roadblock to the national championship by arranging with the ACBL to have their fourth member, Michael D. Mitzenmacher '91, flown in from Spain for the tournament. Mitzenmacher is currently taking a leave of absence from Harvard to study abroad.

"Mike is the best undergraduate player at Harvard," said Cole. "Substituting for him could be the difference between losing and winning."

Also represented by teams at the March 16 and 17 tournament will be Brown University, Rice University, the University of Illinois, the University of Virginia and the California Institute of Technology.

Organizers of the four-year-old tournament hailed it as an important indicator of a coming "renaissance" in the sport of contract bridge. Mastering the game requires a complex combination of mental abilities, which appeals in particular to analytical minds, said Edward J. Goldfarb, communications director of the American Contract Bridge League.

"There are a lot of skills used in business and in studying that are used in bridge, like risk evaluation, negotiation, judgement, processes of reason, logic and thought, and powers of concentration," Goldfarb said.

"Bridge is not a game," he added. "It is a cerebral sport."