Jacobs Week

When his Contract Bridge Match for the "Championship of the World'' started in Manhattan last month Promoter Michael Strauss Jacobs proudly announced that, on its last evening, the event would be moved into Madison Square Garden, with 52 sandwich men impersonating a pack of cards so that 15,000 spectators could follow the play. True to his word, Promoter Jacobs last week moved the Four Aces, representing the U. S., and their French opponents, captained by Baron Robert de Nexon, into two cubicles at one end of the Garden. At the other end, on a huge platform, sandwich men lined up to represent the hands as dealt to the players. They walked to the centre of the rostrum, dropped their signs as the corresponding cards were played. Only defect in this unique spectacle, from the point of view of Promoter Jacobs, was the number of spectators who watched the Four Aces win by a final score of 97,250-94,440. Of the 800 on hand not more than half had paid for their tickets.

To mitigate his disappointment at the failure of contract bridge as a profitable public spectacle, Promoter Jacobs last week had only the left-handed satisfaction of realizing that it was the less disastrous of two unhappy experiments which he had attempted simultaneously. Few hours before the Bridge Match ended. Promoter Jacobs arrived in New York from Cuba, where he had gone intending to complete arrangements for a Havana fight between Negro Joe Louis and Spaniard Isidore Gastanaga. Instead of completing arrangements for the fight, Promoter Jacobs took a hurried glance at what he later described as "a bodyguard of six machine-gunners" sent to meet his plane, promptly decided that conditions in Cuba were too unsettled for major prizefight ventures, postponed Louis v. Gastanaga indefinitely, returned to New York. The Cuban Tourist Commission termed his statements "outrageous," threatened to bring them to the attention of the U. S. Secretary of State. The Cuban Boxing Commission suspended Promoter Jacobs for six months, fined him $500. Havana Promoter Samuel Tolon, who was to have been his partner, promised to sue Promoter Jacobs for $20,000.

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