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.
Gino was known for his ability to complicate the game, and Paul Magriel considered him as perhaps the world’s best player on either side of a backgame. While reporting for the New York Times on Gino’s win at the 1978 Clermont Club tournament, Magriel commented:
“Scalamandre is known for his imaginative and daring style of play, which often borders on recklessness. Nevertheless, he is unsurpassed in his ability to struggle in difficult positions and so to give himself maximum winning opportunities. According to Scalamandre, this expertise has developed because he finds himself in such positions more than anyone else!”
A memorial gathering for Gino was held a week ago in Miami. His old English friend and fellow backgammon veteran Lewis Deyong was asked to give a few remarks, and here’s what he said. (One note before reading on. The English style in eulogies is much more tongue in cheek – with plenty of irony and humor – than is the American style. Gino would have loved this.)
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We have sat here quietly and heard a lot of really nice things about Gino. My name is Lewis Deyong and as I gambled with Gino over 60 years this seems the right moment to lift the curtain and take a glance at Gino’s other life. This is “Gino Confidential: The Inside Story”.
When we first met I was living in New York, by chance around the corner from the Scalamandre Showroom on 59th Street, where Gino was running the wallpaper department and leading what seemed to be an exemplary business life. This included client lunches so numerous that his long-suffering papa was heard to remark “By now he should have papered half of Manhattan!”
But if you imagine some gourmet feasts at Chauveron or maybe 21, think again — how about a pepperoni pizza with a Bud Light to go at my apartment, which Gino treated as a bolt hole for his real business – college basketball.
I put in two phone lines for Gino, who was frantically trading on both at once. Believe me, Harry the Horse had nothing on that! He was glued to the phones while at the other end waited a gang of gnomes who seemed to exist solely in a netherworld of nicknames and jargon. It sounded something like this: “Hey Fruitcake … yeah Nutcake … last night … I know, 66 … tonight Harvard 24 … two dimes … Ohio State 6” – (other phone rings) – “Hey Muggsy … oh … Sonny yeah … 104 … well I know … but Sonny I promised Rocco next Monday … OK?”
As Sonny hung up Gino went straight back to college, stopping at every game in America until finishing up with a final two dimes on UCLA (-12).
Incidentally while all this was going down we were also playing backgammon. I’m sure you get the picture. But, alas, it couldn’t last. All too soon came down the axe (wielded by the sinister Sonny) and on bended knee a chastened Gino swore to change his life forever. To help him on the path of righteousness the family even retained a noted shrink. If you had asked me, this case was probably beyond the powers of Sigmund Freud himself, but nevertheless off to the couch trotted a now dutiful Gino.
Sigmund Clone, however, had a fondness for games of skill and chance, and soon enough their dialogue turned to – poker. Sigmund remarked “Ja, vell you know I like poker alzo …” and quick as lightning came Gino’s response: “Doc, do you like two-handed?” Poor Sigmund then sealed his fate with the words “Two handed? Ja, ja, I love it!”
It was thus that Gino wrote a whole new chapter in the annals of psychology – the first case where a shrink actually quit on a paying patient. (Gino offered a rebate on losses, but too late.) Sigmund at least did learn something – that Gino was an ace poker player, as he was at all such games: poker, gin, bridge, and of course backgammon.
I might add here that his golf attained scratch, and he won a few pro-am tennis tournaments at the Queen’s Club in London where he spent a lot of years.
About then he and Katie got together and not before long her influence was immediate. Out went Nutcake and Fruitcake, and out went those so-called vacation weekends at Caesar’s Palace and the like, now replaced by Katie’s beautiful property in Saratoga. Peace at last? Not a bit of it.
But if you think this saga ends with a summer idyll, think again. Before you could say ‘Tom Brady’ Gino had restored one room, which then emerged as a sports bar. Out went the Alfred Munnings oils and in came multiscreens, multiphones, and Nutcake and Fruitcake on 24-hour call. As a concession Katie was allowed, grudgingly, to watch her soap operas on one screen – but only at halftime.
Of course for the numerous house guests in the life (like me) it was a vacation in Eden. At this point, on behalf of all such guests I would like to thank Katie for her patience and general good nature putting up with our crowd. And on the subject of thanks, who can say enough about the attention, care, and love she devoted to our friend in his final months.
We have all lost a great character, a unique character from our lives, most of all Katie and Gino’s three boys, of whom he was always intensely proud. I will conclude (you will be glad to hear) with a beautiful line from the Poet’s greatest play – “May flights of angels hie thee to thy rest.”
Well, I won’t exactly compare Gino to Hamlet, but the flight of angels is a different story. I see them now, Crawford and Jacoby, John Aspinall and John Lucan, Tim Holland, Walter Cooke and the rest crowding around to greet Gino stepping out of the clouds – “Hurry up Gino, we’ve been waiting for you, the game is just starting.”
So let’s believe, just for a moment, his game goes on.
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My own sharpest memory of Gino came from a Monte Carlo tournament in the mid-1980s. My matches for the day were done and I was prowling around the tournament room looking for an interesting game to watch. I saw Gino in a corner of the room talking to a small crowd and wandered over. Knowing Gino, I figured this was going to be a hard-luck story – “This is for the match and it should be all done but here I rolled 5-4 and then he rolled … etc etc.”
When I got to the board it was set up in this position, a busted ace-deuce back game. Gino was Black.
Black – Pips 168 (+112)
Black on roll.
Gino looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and asked “Do you believe I won this position?”
I looked at the board again. It was hard to win but certainly not impossible. I said something like “OK, he leaves a shot, you hit, hit a few more times in the outfield, he stays on the bar a while, what’s the big deal?”
Gino replied, “He never left a shot.”
And then added “I won the race.”
Best good-luck story I ever heard.
