Experiment in a Garden

Michael Strauss ("Mike") Jacobs is a fat, pink-shirted promoter who started his business career selling newspapers on a tough and highly competitive corner in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Later he became a peanut & popcorn peddler on Coney Island excursion boats, a venture which ended by his owning the boats. He is now Broadway's No. 1 ticket speculator. As body & soul of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, with Fisticuffer Joe Louis under exclusive contract, he has virtually a strangle hold on the U. S. prizefight business. Last week Mike Jacobs entered a new field. Amid a gale of sarcastic laughter from sportswriters, he set out to remove the game of contract bridge from the nation's drawing rooms to the nation's hippodrome.

Associated with Mr. Jacobs was a small, extravagantly mustached press agent named Benjamin Sonnenberg, whose tasks in the past have included making Mrs. Roosevelt a shoe saleswoman on the radio, promoting Trader Horn and the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, urging socialites to play billiards. Promoter Jacobs and Press Agent Sonnenberg last week met five bridge players from France when they landed in Manhattan. Having beaten the masters of twelve nations at Brussels last June, the French team imagined that it and the Four Aces, winner of the Spingold, Vanderbilt and a dozen other U. S. trophies, would settle down in some metropolitan hotel room and play competitive bridge for a week or ten days.

Before they could say "One No Trump," the Frenchmen were shot up to a large chamber in Essex House which was arranged as if for bearbaiting. There, in two pits with 250 kibitzers mounted in circles behind them, the Frenchmen were told that they would begin play this week for THE CONTRACT BRIDGE CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE WORLD. In an adjoining room, 800 more spectators will observe the play on an electric board. "What is this," asked Baron Robert de Nexon, team captain, "a circus?" The French nobleman who manages Pierre Wertheimer's famed racing stud is not unsophisticated. But he had seen nothing yet. The show that Mike Jacobs cooked up for the tenth and last night of the tournament will be held before 15,000 people in Madison Square Garden. The players will be closeted in soundproof glass booths. On a table top 100 ft. square, 52 sandwich men will act as cards, running out as they are played, falling down and being "swept up" when a trick is won. The victorious team will receive a new bridge cup, the International Challenge Trophy. What Mike Jacobs will receive is problematical.

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