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| Moreover / Playing her cards right |
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| By Gal Karniel |
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| World bridge champion Migry Zur-Campanile
explains the secret of her success. |
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Saturday morning, Ra'anana: Cards.
Through a smoke-filled foyer, the 40 or so best bridge players in
Israel entered the unimposing hall of the Israel Bridge Club in
Ra'anana. Now they are sitting around 10 tables according to a
compass card: north, south, east and west. A board divides the table
diagonally and prevents the partners from making eye contact. It's
pouring rain outside. Inside there is an expectant
buzz.
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| At one end sits
the only female player in this set. She has red frizzy hair and
bright eyes and wears a soft angora sweater with a cat applique.
Migry Zur-Campanile, world champion, is smoothly making her way into
the Israeli team to the next world bridge championships, to he held
this June in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. The board
lifts halfway. The hands exchange cards across the table. The calls
of "1 diamond," "2 clubs" are the only way to know what's happening
with your partner. The board descends and the game begins, the cards
passed from side to side on a small tray.
"It's a wonderful
game because it poses a challenge, it's smart, it has intellectual
interest and it's also sociable," Zur-Campanile says.
Late
the next evening, in a course for competition players of the Kikar
Hamedina Bridge Club in Tel Aviv, she stands next to a blackboard
and tries to teach the language of the game to about 80 people, most
of them women toting designer bags and sporting platinum hairstyles.
One of the people in the class is her father. "I learned to play
bridge at home, from my parents," she says. "I played from the age
of 14, but I was told that I had to go to school, too."
She
forsook the game for a guy with a motorcycle. Then they were
married, they left Romania and immigrated to Israel, but here the
motoric charm wore off and with it the marriage, and Migry went back
to the game. "It's a combination of qualities to be a good player.
It's not just that I am terribly smart. I'm smart, but there's more
to it than that. There's also memory, analytical ability, a little
psychology."
She won her first Israeli championship in 1981.
In 1996 she won the world championship for individuals at Corsica
and in 2000 the world championship for mixed teams. There are no
monetary prizes, but the Israeli national anthem is played. "In
Britain, the woman who won the championship got an invitation from
the queen and was awarded a title. Here in Israel I got invited to
the President's Residence and we received bourekas and juice, had
our pictures taken and went home."
These days she plays a lot
via the Internet, which is how she met Pietro Campanile, her third
husband, an Italian who lived in Britain and moved to Israel,
because of the sun in the streets of Tel Aviv and because of the
difficulty in bringing her cat Ricard into Britain, under whose name
a popular column appears in the magazine "Bridge
News."
Ricard came to Migry as a gift from a young man who
replaced her second husband, a computer man by profession. "I
decided to keep his surname, Zur, and anyway Migry Campanile sounds
like the name of a Romanian worker." She has no children. It's all a
matter of order of priorities. "The day-to-day satisfaction this
game gives me lasts forever. I'm lucky - I get up in the morning and
ask myself what am I doing today, and
smile."
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| Zur-Campanile. Smart, but there's more to it than
that. (Daniel Tchetchik) |
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