Talk
to people from Rochester and they have well defined impressions of Buffalo.
They follow our sports teams. They come to our concerts. They know their way in
and out.
Talk
to people from Buffalo about Rochester, however, and you enter terra incognita.
Sure, we recognize that it’s the place where the Sabres have a farm team, where
the Bills hold their pre-season practice, the birthplace of Kodak and Xerox and Bausch &
Lomb, but not much else. Even I, knowing
Rochester reasonably well from having friends and music business
dealings there for the past 30-odd years, can get confused by that city’s version
of Elmwood Avenue, which because it’s a diagonal street, shows up in the most
bewildering places.
Same
phenomenon is in effect for the sectional bridge tournaments. This year,
Buffalo’s spring sectional took place just one week ahead of Rochester’s, and
the reciprocity – or rather, the lack of it – is stunning.
While
Canadians were by far the largest group of out-of-towners among the 174 players
who earned points at the Buffalo sectional, there were nine from the Rochester
area. On the following weekend, of the 129 players who scratched in the Webster
Recreation Center outside Rochester, only half a dozen were from Buffalo. Four
of them – Saleh Fetouh, Jay Levy, Donna Steffan and Jay Costello, most likely a
Sunday Swiss team – were tied for 75th place with 1.04 points. Our other
representatives? Thomas Koralewski and Davis Heussler, tied for 88th with 0.84
of a point.
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