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Paul Soloway

kenrexford

By kenrexford
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barmar

barmar

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At least he went out on top. Although he wasn't able to play in the Bermuda Bowl, he was on the winning team in the Spingold in the summer. And this month's Bridge Bulletin reported that he went over the 65,000 masterpoint, solidifying his lead as the all-time masterpoint leader (2nd place, Mike Passel, is over 6,000 masterpoints away, so it's likely to be 4-5 years before his record is broken).
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Trysalot

Trysalot

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A friend of mine forwarded this email to me the night after Paul Soloway died. It is an email letter from his wife. I in turn left in only the identity of the original senders to those who passed it on to many others and, because I don't like showing addresses to people from different groups in my directory who don't know each other, I sent it to one of my alternate email addresses and blind copied a bunch of bridge players. For posting it here I am just giving the letter itself which did not include an email address for sympathy notes.

 

Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 7:07 PM

Subject: Fw: Fw: SAD NEWS - Paul Soloway passes on

 

----- Original Message -----

From: bj

To: ________; _______; ________; _______; ________; _______;

_______; ________; _______; ________; _______; ________;

_______; ________; _______; ________; _______; ________;

_______; ________; _______; ________; _______; ________;

_______; ________; _______; ________; _______; ________;

_______; ________; _______; ________; _______; ________;

_______; ________; _______; ________; _______; ________;

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: APJ

To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;

Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 2:01 PM

Subject: SAD NEWS - Paul Soloway passes on

 

You may already be aware of this, but the letter is very touching and very real.

 

I received this from a friend, who received it from a friend . and so I take part in sharing this news, however sad, with my bridge friends.

____________________________________

 

Paul passed away last night. I was hoping when I got up this morning, the last 48 days would be just a nightmare. That Paul and I could get back to packing for Shanghai. I mean, it had to be a nightmare didn't it?

Unfortunately no. Paul is really gone.

 

Yesterday, a CAT scan of his head showed massive irreversible brain damage. It was the result of the two cardiac arrests he sustained on Saturday The mind of the Paul Soloway we loved and who loved us, was probably gone then. He never felt a thing. Three separate doctors reviewed the films. I also discussed the situation with Paul's cousin, Mark, who is a surgeon. All agreed the situation was hopeless.

 

I immediately contacted Paul's sister. We put the telephone next to Paul's ear so she could say good bye. (Some doctors believe the patient can hear all the way until the end.)

 

Paul's absolute favorite nurse, Karen, and I dressed him in his favorite

sloppy blue sweats. I had the catheters and tubes removed that he hated but had tolerated for so long. Then I got him a grape popsicle -- his last and favorite fluid source before his swallowing problems developed. I took him into my arms and told him about a new antibiotic that was going to beat the infections. All Paul had to do was relax, go to sleep and let us do our work. When he woke up, all the pain would be gone and he would still have time to recover for the Reissinger.

 

Paul went very peaceably but not without a fight. His heart kept beating

and his blood pressure stayed up for a few minutes more than we expected. He never took another breath when we removed him from the ventilator. He never stressed. I just kept reminding him to relax and that I loved him and he had nothing to worry about because Karen his favorite nurse and I were there. Paul left his mortal pains behind and moved on at 7:28 pm. He looked just like he was sleeping at the bridge table ... with his mouth slightly open and eyes half shut. It was as if he was resting between hands.

 

I need to see what he specified in his will. Paul definitely opposed a

memorial service. I don't think he precluded a "celebration of life."

 

Paul has requested cremation.

 

A good friend of ours sent me the following quotation. I have no idea if it is accurate but it certainly fits the situation: "It is important to

remember his deeds, for in the future, those who were not privileged to know him will doubt such a man every existed. (Einstein's comments on the death of Gandhi)

 

I feel so lost right now. Like my best friend is moving on and we aren't

going to be best friends any more. My best friend who was so honest and strong, so loyal to his friends, never a gossip, a sportsman at all costs, a fierce competitor, the ultimate team player yet in so many ways an innocent in the world around him.

 

I'll have more details later. We may have a memorial service for him in San Francisco. I'm sure he would want donations to the NW Kidney Center in lieu of flowers. I'll have the address later.

 

Thanks to everyone for caring about this remarkable human being.

 

Pam

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PeterGill

PeterGill

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I met Paul Soloway only once, but to me what distinguished him from many of the world's greatest players was that even in just that one brief meeting, to me he set a shining example of just how a bridge great should behave.

 

It was the 1997 Cavendish in Las Vegas, when I was an unknown Aussie visitor. After each short match, outside the playing room players asked each other what they'd done on the most interesting hands, and Paul was one of the few who took the time and effort to ask me what we'd done, treating us Aussies as equals to the many great players.

 

Once he came up to me and said that everyone he'd asked had gone done in 3NT on Bd xx, as had his partner. "I made 3NT," I piped up, "aided by misdefence." Lesser humans would have left it at that - misdefence is not very interesting - but being Paul, he asked how I'd played it. Well, I won the opening lead and, with xxx in dummy opposite AJxx and nine tricks looking far away, I decided to play ace and another diamond, for something to do. "Nobody else did that," Paul said, and I beamed.

 

I went through my play. Paul pointed out that quite apart from the misdefence, the defence could have broken up the squeeze which I was setting up, which I thought was interesting. "However, if you duck a diamond at Trick 2 and duck another diamond next time you're on play, keeping a major tenace in diamonds because RHO had Qxxx, the hand can genuinely be made, because the key entry to dummy is retained." 'Wow', I said, 'it's so simple yet none of us thought of playing it that way.' Such was his love of the game that Paul raced off to check if anyone in the whole field had found the winning play. Later he told me that nobody had. For the first time in my life, I felt like a participant in the inner sanctum of bridge at the very top.

 

The actual hand is lost in the mists of time, but the fact that Paul Soloway chatted to me, and was genuinely interested in how I'd played a hand, was so exciting.

 

Those were the days before Deep Finesse when we never knew if contracts had been makeable, adding to the mystery and neverending magic of bridge, which Paul seemed to appreciate more than most.

 

For me, that was a magic moment, a bit like last weekend when I was commentating on BBO on Versace - Lauria in the ECC Qualifying match against the Poznan team, and Michael Rosenberg was privately sending me some astonishing insight on Bd 19, which I was able to present to the audience. Such a buzz. The super-experts are actually real people, prepared to share their thoughts with the rest of us.

 

The following year at the World Championships in Lille, when a kid aged about 13 named Justin Lall (playing in the side event) said to me something like: "How come you, who are playing in the Final of the World Pairs, are chatting to me between rounds when I'm just a kid? I've been to lots of fairly big American tournaments and none of the top American players ever chats to me, except my dad." My reply was that I was coming only 58th in that Final ... I'm so happy that Justin, via his website and posts, has the same common touch that Paul Soloway had.

 

Another example was that when Joe Grue and Crutis Cheek won their first Reisinger a year ago, only about 20 people waited around for the trophy to be presented to the winners in the playing area. One such person, who waited for 30 minutes with little to do, was Bob Hamman, who went up to the winners and said something to them straight after the presentation. It's no wonder that Hemant Lall

(via a post by Justin) in this Forum commented after the Spingold that the team dynamic of team Nickell was better than any other team he'd ever played in.

A team with humanity is too classy for a team without.

 

Peter Gill

Sydney Australia

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bid_em_up

bid_em_up

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This was in my inbox this morning, I thought I would pass it along:

 

Published: Saturday, November 17, 2007

Mill Creek man won renown as 'Babe Ruth of Bridge'

Paul Soloway was so good, people paid to play with him

By Kaitlin Manry, Herald Writer

 

 

MILL CREEK -- Paul Soloway was cremated with a deck of world championship bridge cards in his right hand.

 

His ashes will eternally rest in two of his coveted Vanderbilt bridge trophies.

 

Considered the best bridge player in North America for nearly two decades, Soloway lived a fairly anonymous life in a pleasant Mill Creek cul-de-sac. In the bridge world, however, he was a giant -- known to everyone and admired by many.

 

"You could call him the Babe Ruth of bridge," said Brent Manley, editor of the Bridge Bulletin. "Babe Ruth had the home run record for a long, long time and he was kind of a larger than life character. Paul was the same way. Everyone knew his face. He won so many things."

 

Since 1991, Soloway had been the top-ranked bridge player in North America by the American Contract Bridge League. When he died in Seattle on Nov. 5, he had 65,511.92 masterpoints, the system used to rank players. He was more than 6,000 points ahead of the second placed player. Many players spend their whole lives trying to rack up the 300 points needed to be considered a "life master."

 

Soloway, 66, won five Bermuda Bowl world-team titles, the Olympics of bridge. He played with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and traveled around the world playing the game he loved professionally. Soloway was so good, people paid him to play with them.

 

Bridge was Soloway's oxygen, according to his wife of 30 years, Pam Pruitt.

 

"If he couldn't play bridge, he didn't want to live," she said tearfully. "It was everything. It doesn't mean that I wasn't important, but I was secondary."

 

In recent years, as his health deteriorated from diabetes, heart problems and related illnesses, Soloway played through pain. He began competing to win his fourth world championship 28 days after undergoing open heart surgery. In order to play in a national tournament in Cincinnati while undergoing treatment for a serious infection, every day he checked himself in – and out – of a nearby hospital.

 

"Paul would spend two-thirds of the day in the hospital and a third of the day at the bridge table," said his longtime partner Bob Hamman of Dallas . "We just glued him back together and sent him into battle. That's the way he was. He was a guy who only knew one way to play and that was all out."

 

Soloway spent his final month in a Seattle hospital, dealing with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which is a drug-resistant staph infection; kidney trouble; and, eventually, a heart attack. Doctors amputated both his feet and a finger and stuck a tube down his throat to help him eat, but Soloway expected to get better and be back at the bridge table soon. His last phone call was to Hamman to let him know that he planned to play at a national tournament in November with their team. Since he couldn't keep his body upright, he planned to play in a wheelchair with straps holding him to the chair, Pruitt said.

 

Propped up in a hospital bed, he played bridge on a laptop computer. Too weak to press the keys, Soloway directed his wife to push them for him. Toward the end, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, he mumbled about bridge.

 

Throughout his illnesses, bridge was what kept him going, said Pruitt, 55, a stock trader and former Mill Creek mayor. For the last year and a half, as he flew around the world playing bridge, she went with him. At night, she'd connect him to a portable dialysis machine and help him through his medical regimen.

 

Regardless of how poorly he felt, when it was time to play, he'd get on his red scooter and lose himself in the game.

 

"He was like a fish being released into water," Pruitt said. "He was back in his world."

 

Soloway grew up in Beverly Hills and learned bridge from his parents. While studying business at San Fernando Valley State College, he frequently skipped class to play bridge. After six months at a "real job," he quit and traveled the country playing bridge, hustling in bowling alleys and betting on sports games, Pruitt said.

 

In 1962, he joined the American Contract Bridge League. Fascinated by the numbers and puzzles of the game, he quickly earned his first masterpoints. For the rest of his life, he carried the card noting those first points in his wallet. He'd sometimes show it to beginners to inspire them and prove that everyone starts on the bottom.

 

"The No. 1 thing that distinguished him from a lot of people who were really great was that he was very approachable and very much a regular guy -- as opposed to how isolated some of the great players were," said Bill Hagen of Seattle, who played with Soloway in the '80s. "He would respond to a question from a great player or one of the people who approached him at a tournament equally. He was just a good guy."

 

Soloway met Pruitt at a bridge tournament in Eugene , Ore. , in 1977. They married a short time later and he moved to Mill Creek to join her.

 

After playing a few times in the shadow of her husband, Pruitt quit bridge, but never stopped admiring her husband's skill and passion for the game.

 

They never had children, but Soloway loved his dogs, naming several after bridge terms.

 

In addition to Pruitt, he is survived by his sister Alison Greenberg of Los Angeles . Soloway's family requests that donations in his memory be made to the peritoneal unit of the Northwest Kidney Center in Seattle .

 

Soloway didn't want a memorial service, but he didn't rule out a celebration of life, Pruitt said. She scheduled the event to coincide with the North American Bridge Championships on Nov. 24 in San Francisco .

 

"The bridge world has lost something," Manley said. "There just won't be anybody like him. There's never been another Babe Ruth since he quit playing and died. There won't be another Paul Soloway."

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BillHiggin

BillHiggin

Posted
Posted
This was in my inbox this morning, I thought I would pass it along:

 

Published: Saturday, November 17, 2007

Mill Creek man won renown as 'Babe Ruth of Bridge'

Paul Soloway was so good, people paid to play with him

By Kaitlin Manry, Herald Writer

I saw the actual newspaper (Everett Herald is a daily paper, but overshadowed by the Seattle dailies).

 

That story ran on the front page!

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