A few weeks ago Malcolm Davis sadly passed away, in his late 80s. Malcolm was one of the true giants of the game, a top player for more than 40 years, a fixture at practically every major tournament, and a member of the Backgammon Hall of Fame. The capstone of his tournament career came in 1996, when he won the fifth World Cup, defeating Kit Woolsey in a best-of-five 13-point match final.

In many respects Malcolm was well ahead of his time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when pure play ruled the day, Malcolm was one of a few players who sought a more sensible, balanced approach to the game. His excellent tournament results were for a time dismissed as simply good luck. But when Jellyfish and Snowie arrived on the scene, players began to understand that Malcolm and some other “lucky” players had been on the right track all along.

I always enjoyed running into Malcolm at tournaments. He had a wide range of interests and a ton of good stories to share. (Playing him wasn’t that much fun since he beat me like a drum.) Here are a few stories from Malcolm’s life.

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Stuck indoors in these trying times? Cabin fever starting to close in? Getting uncomfortable watching The Andromeda Strain and too scared to watch the market?

For a change of pace with a backgammon theme, try watch a little-known but unexpectedly charming film called The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner. If you can’t find it on a streaming service, Amazon usually has it in stock. You won’t regret it.

Phillip grew up in England, attended Sherborne School, spent three years as an officer in the British Army, serving in Germany, and finished his education at Lincoln College, Oxford. During those years “Phil” became an excellent Rugby player, representing his county, Cornwall, and capped by the Greyhounds, the Oxford University second fifteen – for those interested he played fullback. Further in that vein he also became an excellent skier, and did in fact live for some years in Switzerland.

Post university Phillip Martyn began to travel, Europe first and then the USA, eventually living in New York City. It was there and then, in the early to mid-1960s, that he (and I) learned backgammon, and swiftly got hooked. Phil struck up a camaraderie with Ted Bassett a smooth and amiable golf and backgammon expert, whose own year divided into segments — Palm Beach, St Moritz, Monte Carlo, Biarritz and the airports between. Phil saw nothing wrong with that and so for the next three decades his lifestyle was set.

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Gino Scalamandre passed away last month at the age of 87. Gino was a member of the very first group of backgammon giants who dominated the game in the 1960s and 1970s, along with players like Tim Holland, Oswald Jacoby, and Joe Dwek. Gino was a fixture at all the big international tournaments of that era and won many. In the first ‘unofficial’ listing of the world’s best players in a 1972 issue of Harper’s, Gino was securely in the top 10.

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The interview with Paul continues with a discussion of tournaments and tournament strategy.

Zelman: Do you dream of backgammon, do you dream of games in your sleep? Do you ever come home afterwards and sit down and think where you went wrong?

PM: In tournaments sometimes you get knocked out and you just can’t get a certain roll out of your mind. It’s like a nightmare and you just go over and over it.

Zelman: Do you have video equipment to tape all your games when you play people in tournaments?

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In the fall of 1975 Paul Magriel was living in New York and putting the finishing touches on the book he and his wife Renee were writing. The working title was The Complete Book of Backgammon, but it would be changed to simply Backgammon when it finally appeared in November of 1976. Sometime that fall he consented to an interview with Aubrey Zelman, who was creating a new magazine called Backgammon Illustrated. The one and only issue appeared in April, 1976, priced at $1.95.

The highlight of the issue was the interview with Paul, which ran for 18 pages. Paul gave very few interviews for magazines, and what appeared about him in the press was generally brief and uninformative. This interview was very different.

The Zelman interview gave some great insights into how Paul thought about the game at that time, and conveyed a real sense of what talking with Paul was like. Paul would often start a conversation with very brief, sometimes monosyllabic comments. But once the conversation moved to an area where he had real interest, his whole face and manner would change and he’d start talking with enormous energy and enthusiasm. You’ll get a sense of that here, as well as a sense of how exciting the whole backgammon scene was in the mid-1970s.

I’ve broken the interview into two parts because of its length. Part 2 will follow in a couple of weeks. From time to time I’ve added some brief comments in brackets to make Paul’s meaning clearer to a modern player.

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