Juggernaut - The tough Jacobs squad qualifies
for the Olympiad at the ITT

By Paul Linxwiler

The tale of the 2000 International Team Trials, held in Memphis June 4-12, is very much a story in two parts. The purpose of the 2000 ITT was to select a team to represent the United States at the World Bridge Olympiad in Maastricht, the Netherlands from August 26th - September 9th. The squad of George Jacobs, Ralph Katz, Steve Garner, Howard Weinstein, Larry Cohen and David Berkowitz won the contest by making it through two round-robin qualifiers, and then by ploughing through some of the toughest teams in the U.S. in a series of knockout matches.

The performance of the Jacobs team in the latter stages of the event was impressive. In the quarter-final round they defeated the veteran squad of Jimmy Cayne, Chuck Burger, Mike Passell, Michael Seamon, Mark Lair and Ron Smith. Next, they took out the reigning world championship team of Nick Nickell, Richard Freeman, Jeff Meckstroth, Eric Rodwell, Bob Hamman and Paul Soloway. For an encore, they beat the team of Richard Schwartz, Drew Casen, Zia Mahmood, Michael Rosenberg, Steve Weinstein and Robert Levin in the final.

But there is another part to this story, and it occurred early in the contest. A squad of Junior players, all 21 or younger, was given permission to enter the event based on the quality of their recent play at other high-level tournaments. The five young men - Kent Mignocchi (21), John Hurd (21), Joel Wooldridge (20), Joe Grue (18) and John Kranyak (16) - started slowly but then gathered momentum. They so dominated the round robin phase of the event, and so narrowly missed defeating their quarterfinal opponents (the powerful Schwartz team), that players and pundits alike were shaking their heads in astonishment at their performance. Even more remarkable was the unmistakable sense that everyone in the event (even opponents) was rooting for this team to succeed.

Round Robin I

Fourteen teams participated in the first round robin. In addition to Jacobs, Cayne and the Juniors, the other 11 teams were Steve Robinson (Peter Boyd, Kit Woolsey, Fred Stewart, Michael Becker and Michael Kamil), Seymon Deutsch (Bobby Wolff, Sam Lev, John Mohan, Bart Bramley and Sidney Lazard), Rose Johnson-Meltzer (Kyle Larsen, Peter Weichsel, Alan Sontag, Chip Martel and Lew Stansby), Russ Ekeblad (John Sutherlin, Marc Jacobus, Grant Baze, John Solodar and Mark Feldman), Barnet Shenkin (Peter Na