Word: goren
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...Rough Edges. Just as bridgedom's envious experts now call Goren's hard-earned credentials into question, so a younger, hungrier Charles Goren sniped at Ely Culbertson. Ely, cried Goren in the early days, was all through-and had never been really great anyhow. The inner drive that carried Charlie Goren past Culbertson was sharpened by the rough edges of poverty in his Philadelphia childhood. The son of Russian-born Jewish immigrants, he grew up in a brawling district of "Jews, Irish and Irish." Charlie made up for small size with pugnacity, endurance, and indifference to pain. Recalls...
...That ended any small remaining doubt about whether Culbertson was the U.S.'s No. 1 bridge authority. He and his system reigned supreme from 1932 until the late 1940s, when he was pushed off the throne by a new man with a new system. The man: Charles Goren. His system: point-count bidding...
...Charlie Goren was a very bright boy. He stayed at or near the top of his class all through school, earned pocket money in high school by tutoring less brainy kids in Latin and Greek. "We all thought he was going to be famous," a high school classmate recalls. "We figured he'd be a great lawyer or politician." After high school, Charlie worked as a department-store furniture salesman until a prosperous older cousin, living in Montreal, insisted that gifted Goren go to college. Charlie moved in with the cousin, enrolled at McGill University law school. After finishing...
...Last Laugh. They laughed when he first sat down to play. Goren acutely recalls a day at McGill when a girl friend asked him if he played bridge. "I knew that girls play bridge in the afternoon," says Goren, "and I didn't see why I couldn't. I sat down to play and made a complete ass out of myself." Goren's girl laughed at him-and thin-skinned Charlie Goren, late of Philadelphia's slums, was no man to be laughed at. "It was like putting a knife through me," he says...
...Goren never played bridge again with his old girl friend-but the next time he did sit down at a bridge table, nobody laughed. He was soon winning local tournaments and rounding out his skimpy law income with bridge winnings. But as soon as he could afford to, Goren gave up playing for money. He saw that the road to bridgedom's peak lay in teaching and writing-and that a gambler's reputation could be harmful. Today he plays for money only when he feels it would be rude to refuse, and the most he has ever...