Sport: King of the Aces

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The onetime Philadelphia lawyer seemed strangely out of place among the fierce-eyed, quick-fingered, nerve-torn bridge experts competing for the Life Masters Pair Gold Cup at Miami Beach's Americana Hotel. In a game whose fascinating frustrations can bring out the worst of man's nature, he remained bland and smiling. In a game where a peek can be worth two finesses, he carelessly held his hand within easy view of roving eyes. He actually treated kibitzers as humans ("I might as well love them. I'm married to them"), and he went out of his way to describe his partner, a perky strawberry blonde named Helen Sobel, as one of the world's greatest bridge players—which she is. As the tournament neared its end, with tensions and tempers rising, he occasionally took advantage of being dummy to rest his eyes, almost as if snoozing. He was obviously out of his element in one of the most competitive of all pastimes.

Yet when the final point-standing was tabulated, Charles Henry Goren, 57, brilliantly aided and abetted by Helen Sobel, had again won one of bridge's most coveted titles. And last week, reflecting on that victory, he finally permitted himself to show the hard competitive instinct that lies close beneath his amiable surface. "I gave my rivals a good swift kick in the stomach," said Charles Goren, "and they hated it."

On the Pinnacle. That same competitive instinct took Charlie Goren, driven by poverty and a desperate desire for recognition, to the very top of the world's bridge players, and it has kept him there for years. Whether measured by master points awarded in tournaments (5,791), trophies (some 2,000), income (about $150,000 a year, more than any other five bridge experts combined), fame (he is a household word wherever bridge is played) or influence (his bidding system is used around the world), Bachelor Goren is the king of the bridge aces. "If I stopped playing today," he gloatingly says of his master-point total, "nobody could catch up with me for five years—at least."

Goren's bridge books have sold 3,500,000 copies in the U.S. alone, have been translated into eight foreign languages. His seven-days-a-week bridge column appears in 194 U.S. newspapers with a combined circulation of 26 million, and in foreign papers from Manila to Johannesburg. Of the U.S.'s 1,000 fulltime professional bridge teachers, more than 90% teach the Goren system of bidding.

On his towering pinnacle of bridge success, Charlie Goren has plenty to keep him busy, aside from playing bridge: his syndicated column (he writes it himself, in longhand), a regular department in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, trips abroad as a sort of U.S. ambassador to overseas bridgedom, 10,000 letters a year from bridge fans (many include ticklish bridge problems, but with the help of his staff he answers them all), and a venture called Goren Enterprises, which licenses manufacture of such items as a card-table cover with rules of the game printed on it and cocktail napkins decorated with cartoons and useful bridge hints from the master.