More Fun Than The Watusi

"That first tournament was so funny and spontaneous there was never any question but that it would be an annual event," said Mrs. Zellerbach, who was hostess at the first and has served at all of them. The second year there were 176 teams entered. Last year there were 198 teams, and since expenses came to only $3,775 (with the San Francisco Chronicle providing publicity and the prizes being donated), the Hunters Point Boys' Club received $16,025 of the $19,800 paid in by the entrants.

By 1964 there were benefit domino tournaments for other causes going on all the time: the East Bay Women's Championship, with 46 teams entered; the Palo Alto tournament for a children's health fund, in which 100 teams paid $100 a team and which Tennessee Ernie Ford unexpectedly entered and nearly won; the De Young Museum Tournament, run by the top social women's auxiliary of the museum, with 80 teams competing; the Marin Symphony Guild tournament, a husband-and-wife affair costing $100 a couple; a mixed-doubles tournament for the Merola Memorial Fund, which gives scholarships to needy opera singers; a charity tournament staged by Mrs. Samuel F. B. Morse at Pebble Beach. So many of these were held and in such posh surroundings—the St. Francis Yacht Club or outdoors at the Meadow Club—that the officials of the Hunters Point Boys' Club, who had started it all, were wondering early this year if public interest might not be exhausted.

Not at all. A total of 200 teams signed up, and there could have been twice that many if there had been room for them. Unfortunately, the Commercial Club could accommodate only 400 players. It did not pass unnoticed that San Francisco now had a 400-member domino aristocracy, fixed at that number the way Ward McAllister once limited New York society to 400 members because Mrs. Astor's ballroom could hold no more.

Just as the championship tournament started, a further question was raised concerning its exclusivity. William Kent III, the chairman, received an indignant telegram from Carnegie, Okla., a town of 1,500 people on the Washita River, protesting that the winners of San Francisco's aristocratic event had no right to be called the world champions. The real world champion domino team was, as had been the case for 21 years, the winner of the annual domino tournament held at Carnegie. "We have no age limit and no entry fee," said Roy McCurley, the editor of the Carnegie Herald. "We provide free refreshments, consisting of sandwiches, pies and coffee all day to all contestants."

William Kent III, who is an agitated-appearing but pleasant-mannered young executive, immediately invited the winner at Carnegie to come to San Francisco and play. The time of the tournament made this impossible; the Oklahoma affair, with 184 contestants from Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas playing all day, would still be going on when the San Francisco tournament got under way. In addition, a different kind of dominoes is played in the Southwest, a seven-domino game known as 42, or moon. Four hours before Baker and Blum were victorious in the world domino championship in San Francisco, the veterans in Carnegie let it be known that the real championship had been won by two farmers from Fredericks, Okla.

By that time the Commercial Club scene was like a crisis day at an old stock exchange where the quotations were posted in chalk. The scorekeepers hurried from the tables to the scoreboard to put up the last scores of the hopelessly defeated; the possible contenders in the finals stood by with folded arms watching their rivals' totals; the empty glasses accumulated. After 10 rounds of play (two games an hour), the 32 teams with the highest scores moved into a special roped-off area where they met on a match-play basis with no time limit.

But it is what the losers did that somehow set this event apart from other sporting championships. They did not stay to watch the final matches, but neither did they leave the area of action in the manner of the vanquished the world around. Instead, they settled down again at tables all over the room and began playing dominoes. Such dedication to the game has resulted in there being two schools of thought as to what is going to come out of the city's domino craze. One school, led by Armanino, holds that the world is on the edge of a great domino boom. These people point out that President Johnson was photographed playing dominoes at his Texas ranch during the campaign. They keep track of famous people who play the game, such as Al Lopez, the White Sox manager, a top-ranking domino star—almost a professional—who plays with the cigarmakers of Ybor City in Tampa. They are filled with encyclopedic information about places where the game is played (among them Nacogdoches, Texas, Colorado Springs, Colo. and innumerable Latin-American and West Indian towns where games have been going on almost constantly for years), and they can tell you the stakes at such places as the Bankers Club in Mexico City ($100 a game). They are also familiar with melodramatic happenings connected with dominoes. In Houston last January 20, nine shots were fired, one man was killed and another wounded during an argument over a domino game in a caf�. Even the Russians have recently given this school of thought encouragement. They took a survey of leisure-time activities of Red soldiers and sailors and found that they were all playing dominoes. "The life of a person without interest is bleak and empty," ran a newspaper editorial on the subject. "Who of us has not seen such people loafing in a free moment, with nothing to do and no purpose? These are the ones who, oblivious of everything else, hammer away at dominoes...." Also widely printed was a letter from Seaman First Class V. Garadzhi: "Dominoes are a real evil in our unit. Oh, how I hate them, even though I myself frequently join in. As soon as we have any free time, our sailors begin to slap down the black tiles.... Even certain of our officers do not lag behind the sailors, and spend their free time just as purposelessly, to the knock of the dominoes."

The other school of thought holds that San Francisco's interest in dominoes comes from the fact that it is a local game, and these people do not want it to spread to other towns. "Old Dommie believes that dominoes will improve the breed," said one of his friends, referring to Armanino's crusade. "He is always discovering some professor or first-grade teacher who says the game is an aid in teaching arithmetic. But the real appeal of dominoes is that it is of no use whatever." According to these people, dominoes is more of a release than any other gambling game because there is something childlike about it. There is enough skill in the sequence of plays and in deducing where the unplayed dominoes are to make it interesting ("you can't think about anything else while you're playing") but it requires less concentration than bridge. These defenders of dominoes say that it is unique in another childlike respect: it is possible to concoct a logical, sensible defense of any play that one makes, win or lose. And dominoes are noisy. They snap, knock, crack, rattle, clink and clank all the time, a noise that seems compounded of the sounds of all the games of chance on earth—the rattle of dice, the click of poker chips, the flutter of cards, the whir of roulette. The players shuffle their dominoes with their fingers outstretched, arms moving in opposite directions, rather like a baker mixing the ingredients of some large piece of pastry, and the movement, the noise, the mock-melodramatic muttered appeals to fortune make a domino tournament seem the embodiment of chance itself, suffused with a busy purposelessness and a half-ironic intensity.

"Why, it's just a children's game," exclaimed one visitor to the San Francisco world championship, "and look what they've done with it." True, but who is to say that children's games aren't the best games of all—especially if adult gamblers can master them.