COMMENTARY
‘Bridging the gap’ with a card game favorite When he was young, Jack Feagin had no use for bridge. It was the card game his parents played. Back then, in the 1960s, he thought the game “ridiculous.” But after he went off to college, things changed. One night, when he thinks he probably should have been studying for exams, somebody got up a bridge game in his dorm and convinced Feagin to play a few hands. He suddenly realized he needed to know how to play this game. “It became an obsession,” the Sandy Springs lawyer said. “You can get addicted to bridge. Each hand is different. It’s so challenging. Then there’s the competition of it. You meet lots of interesting people...” He wasn’t the only one who got hooked on bridge. When Patty Tucker was growing up a few years later, she had quite a different feeling about the card game she watched her parents play with their friends. She thought it looked cool.
about once a decade. Tucker ran a portion of the tournament for players aged 19 and younger, the Youth North American Bridge AROuND ChampiTOWN onship. She also taught Joe eaRle a course in how to learn bridge in a day. Both, of course, planned to play in the tournament. “I like the game too much [not to play],” Feagin said recently during a chat over coffee at a Sandy Springs restaurant. Tucker, too. Now she teaches others the card game she learned to love as a child. She wants to see bridge survive the sea changes in how people spend their leisure time. “Think about how our culture has changed in the last 30 years,” she said. “It used to be, when bridge was in its heyday, you didn’t Joe eArle have hundreds Left, Jack Feagin chairs the host committee for the North of stations on TV. There was, I American Bridge Championship in Atlanta this month. Bridge teacher Patty Tucker, right, also will participate. think, a lot more social interaction by having people “I’d hear them talking about hands at over to your house.” breakfast the next morning... how they After all, when visitors came, hosts should have played differently, how the had to find some way to entertain them. opening lead changed the hand,” she Bridge offered a natural answer. “There’s said. “It just seemed so complex, with so only so much time you can spend talkmany parts to it, so many intricacies.” ing,” Tucker said. “It’s good to have a She took to the game early, when buffer, like a bridge game.” she was just 11. “I’ve played bridge ever Decades after Feagin and Tucksince. I love it,” said Tucker, who now er watched their parents socialize over lives in Dunwoody. “Everyone should bridge tables, the game stilll plays a big play bridge.” part in their lives. They play often. Both During the first 11 days of this married people they met playing bridge. month, there were parts of metro At“Seeing people playing bridge tells lanta where it may have seemed everyyou a lot about them. It’s the same as one does play bridge, or at least wants tennis. [It shows] the way they handle to. Thousands of players from around themselves ...,” Tucker said. “Bridge is the world planned to gather at a downgoing to make you look stupid. If you’re town hotel during the period from Aug. a smart person, you don’t want to be 1 through 11 for the North American laughed at. The way you handle that says Bridge Championship, one of the top a lot about you.” competitions in the bridge world. In fact, she says she and her husband Feagin and Tucker, now rated as life worried that getting married might masters of the complicated card game, break up a perfectly good bridge partwere in the thick of things during plannership. “I think that’s why we waited so ning for the international gathering. long to get married,” she said one recent Feagin chaired the local host commitmorning at a Dunwoody coffee shop. tee for the event, the fourth time he has “We had a good bridge partnership.” headed the committee for the nationStill do. Like Jack Feagin and his al competition, which comes to Atlanta wife, they’re still partners playing bridge.
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