March 2020 - 10

Paragon of Fairness
Becky Rogers is Honorary Member of the Year

ecky Rogers has been contributing to bridge in many ways for
over 60 years. A longtime tournament director, she became the second
woman to achieve the rank of national
tournament director in 1979. She acted
as the ACBL's director of operations
from 1987 to 1991, and was general
manager of the World Bridge Federation from 1992 to 1999. More recently,
she served on the District 17 board
and Las Vegas unit board from 2015 to
2019. Even now, at 80, she's still an active member of the Laws Commission.
Rogers has been an innovator. She
helped create the Standard American
Yellow Card and the ACBL's Code of
Disciplinary Regulations, and she
implemented seeding points for the
first team trials. She worked to make
bridge a timed event in the days when
it wasn't.
"I think she was the one who invented stratification," said Patty Holmes,
a longtime tournament director. "It's
hard to know how much she's done
because she never took credit for anything."
For all these contributions and more,
Rogers has been selected by the Board
of Directors as the ACBL's Honorary
Member of the Year for 2020. It is her
70th year as an ACBL member - she
joined in 1950 at age 11 while growing
up in Topeka KS.
"It's a good choice," said Jeff Meckstroth, with whom Rogers won the
World Mixed Pairs in 2002 in Montreal. "She's a bright, gifted player and a
really good person."
A Grand Life Master with more than
20,000 masterpoints, Rogers won the
Keohane North American Swiss Teams
in 2005 and the Senior Mixed Pairs in
2018 with her brother John Grantham,
who called her "the best sis ever!"
when a day was named for her during
the Spring 2017 NABC in Kansas City.

10 Bridge Bulletin March 2020

Rogers started directing in the late
'60s. "She was an excellent director, very committed to fairness," said
Charlie MacCracken, whom Rogers considers a mentor. "She worked
extremely hard to make the ACBL a
more perfect place," he said, recalling
that she would bring work with her to
the club in Memphis during her time at
Headquarters.
Once, while working a sectional in
Phoenix, MacCracken recalls, Rogers
had gone on a cleaning spree before
packing up and driving home. She was
about halfway to Tucson when she
realized she had put all the entry fees
from the tournament in a Big Gulp cup
that was among the things thrown out.
"So at 1 a.m., she was back in Phoenix
in a dumpster looking for a Big Gulp
cup."
Holmes started directing in May
1986 at the same tournament that
Rogers had intended to be her last.
Holmes considers her a mentor. "She
was player-, player-, player-oriented,"
Holmes said. "She's patient. She
listens. She delivers the right ruling.
Everyone who's worked with her or
under her - they all said they learned
the most from her."
Matt Smith is one who credits
Rogers with helping him become a
better director when he was learning
the ropes, and later she became the
first person he would seek out for
an appeals committee. Even better,
he said, was when she was on a
conduct committee. "She has a way
of disarming people and getting to
the truth better than anyone I have
ever seen. She would smile and nicely
ask the miscreants questions about
what had happened in such a way that
I saw more than one of them bury
themselves by saying damning things
in an attempt to please the nice lady
asking the questions."

BY CHIP DOMBROWSKI
Photo by Jonathan Steinberg

Holmes describes Rogers as someone who broke up the old boys club and
always stood up for what was right.
She certainly ruffled feathers along the
way.
"She was an iconoclast. She saw
things in black and white," said Chris
Compton, who came to respect Rogers
despite receiving penalties from her as
a young player in the early '70s. "She's
done everything for bridge."
Rogers worked with Bobby Wolff on
developing Active Ethics and the recorder system and worked on developing the old convention charts. During
her time at the WBF, Rogers oversaw
the first World Junior Championships
in Ann Arbor MI in 1991 and the World
Bridge Series in Albuquerque NM in
1994. While it's unusual for a world
championship to turn a profit, that one
did, Wolff said, and she was a major
factor in its success.
"She has had a lifetime of strongly
contributing to our game," Wolff said.
"I do not think you could make a better
choice."
As for the invention of stratification,
Rogers clarifies that stratified scoring
was already being used by clubs when
she introduced it to NABCs in St. Louis
in 1987. "What a chore it was to do
stratified scoring by hand pre-computers," she said. "We typed all the names
using carbon paper to have three copies
of the results, entered scores in pencil
and scored in red pencil. It was tough
on the TDs, but players loved it."
It was her more recent work on
behalf of District 17 that prompted former district president, Jerry Ranney,
to nominate her for Honorary Member.
"I was very impressed she was
willing to step up and help out," said
District 17 Director Bonnie Bagley.
"She had done so much already. She
was at a point where she could just
play. It can be frustrating to be involved

March 2020

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