Backgammon Today

No Real Rift in Backgammon Community as Mangy Lion Fades Away Noisily
by Ramses

In a better world, the great game of Backgammon would guard its gates. It would allow into its fertile fields of play only those consenting sportspersons who see the game both as a catalyst for intellectual growth and an encourager of mental agility. As well, of course, as an invigorating way to spend those spare moments we all find ourselves with on bullet trains and ski gondolas. Sadly, ours is not yet a better world. How keenly I feel this now. And how pained I am to find myself in the position of having to write what I have to write here. So it is from a sense of duty that I scrape my pen across the paper of today, which is a screen, and the pen is a cursor.

But what happens to a sore left unlanced and undrained? Why it festers and reddens, like the person I’m referring to, until the dead skin is torn away and the whole mess is irrigated with a stinging rinse of honest truth and then bandaged with forgiveness. Let’s just say it plainly: A certain-undeniably-once-great backgammon columnist is putting up pointless and somewhat embarrassing resistance to an ancient fact – viz. that the old must make way for the new.

Nowhere was this maxim more in evidence than at last year’s Parliament Filters Cup in Cape Town. I’m usually impatient with the resort tourneys – or, more accurately, with the scene at the resort tourneys, i.e. entitled emphysemics in pee-stained seersucker trousers who mainline gin and jabber ceaselessly about their school ties. But as luck would have it, I had just come off a week of bow-hunting in the Transvaal, and “the Filters” was within easy reach of my fractionally-owned jet. That’s how I came to be sitting tableside in Cape Town when an easily-settled dispute (over the Crawford Rule, of all things) led to the much reported fracas, which of course devolved quickly into the incident in which I was briefly implicated.

The course of the game, of course, came as a surprise to no one. (Well, almost no one, apparently.) Was there ever any doubt that Raj Parekh, the Houdini of the Hindu Kush, would take Roderick Macintosh absolutely to pieces with his heady, relentless, post-9/11 game? Or that Parekh’s midboard acrobatics would leave the musclebound Macintosh hemorrhaging points and scrimping out pips? But who knew that the ‘dark horse’ Macintosh — flogged constantly by the pricey PR machine that only a desperate-but-still-connected sports diarist could muster — would turn out to be a dim Glaswegian the size of a horse goosing his pieces around the board with fingers like carrots? And who could have predicted the swift and public unraveling of the vanquished Roderick?

Let’s see: No. No. Me. And, oh, Me.

If there were doubt in anyone’s mind that the Macintosh has had the heavy and invisible hand of a certain once-influential columnist paving his way up the tournament ladder… well, the piece of melodrama indulged in by that that no-longer-important board-game commentator erased it. Why was a man the age of this declining scribe demanding entry to a player’s dressing room after that player had been escorted there by IBGA officials after actually upsetting the board after judges rightly ruled for Parekh in the Crawford thing?

To see, up close, the unraveling of a man is no easy hay ride in the park. Nor do I deny that Macintosh’s play had a certain savage grace that will be missed when it is fled from the scene. But his bizarre collapse and apparent psychotic break should be proof enough that players can’t be churned out of some aging hack’s backgammon factory. Just because a man “has the glutes for the endgame” — as the tired mimeographer who backs Macintosh was heard to say of his brawny protégé — does not mean that he can be made to compete at a competitive level. According to some in his retinue, a year ago Macintosh was a rage-filled sous-barista and intinerant underwear model, hustling checkers in Glasgow’s infamous local, The Gilded Filbert.

Tragically, it is Macintosh who will pay the price for the pride of his puppetmaster. The young man is reportedly a quivering husk of his former self. Whatever prospects he may have had in other areas of the sports and gaming world have been irretrievably dimmed.
(I know, I know: that may seem generous. But Macintosh might have been a great player of another game — one which rewards mulish persistence and upper body strength, like Battleship or Hungry Hungry Hippos.)

So it was concern for the welfare of a young player, as well as an abiding interest in protecting the good name and public face of backgammon that were motivating me when I placed myself in the doorway between the Main Playing Area and the West Players Lounge. As a recognized member of the fourth estate, I thought it my duty both to dispense information and, if necessary, to establish a secure perimeter. The second did indeed become necessary — what had begun as a knot of gawkers quickly grew to a stir of angry partisans and threatened to become a heedless mob. So yes I stood my ground; my arms were indeed akimbo.

The Fog of War? Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird? I don’t know, but I know that when I heard that Simon Northcote-Greene was considering charging me with elder abuse, and had in fact already involved the South African authorities, I laughed so hard I almost mis-steered my cigarette boat. Then I quit laughing, though, because the claim is also actionably libelous.

I mean really: who would want to abuse Simon Northcote-Greene? Certainly not I. My posture was entirely defensive, my maneuvers phrophylactic. Any injuries Mr. Northcote-Greene sustained opposing me would by definition be of his own doing.

Lions in the wild on TV will sometimes kill one of their own troop or whatever if he is very old and is causing a lot of trouble. Now, some in Northcote-Greene’s camp will probably take that as a threat, unaccustomed as they are to the robust idiom of virile competition. But nothing could be farther from the truth. We are more than brutes, (Mr. SNG, to be sure, is quite clearly a homo sapiens) and as any backgammoner will tell you, reason and guile will always get you farther than force. I’m just saying I saw it on TV once and I think we can learn something from animals, which, though brutish, are also noble.