Rummy for a Gin Game

by Jack Sheehan

Ten years ago this month I lost my dad, Dr. Norman Sheehan. With his passing I also lost my favorite golf and gin rummy partner. At the time of his death, from gin rummy alone, I owed him more than $40K. He knew he’d never collect a penny of it, but he kept track of it as carefully as though he were being audited by the IRS.

Gin rummy goes with golf like peanut butter with jelly. When Dad gave me my first set of golf clubs, at age 10, he offered this advice: “Jackie, if you’re going to be a golfer, there are two things you should know. First, learn to hold the club with an overlapping grip, even though it feels awful and makes no sense. And second, learn to play gin rummy. It’s the best way to win back what you lost on the golf course.” Other than his lecture on how to conduct myself in the backseat of a car, it was the best advice he ever gave me.

I spent 12 weeks caddying on the PGA Tour in the early 1970s for a former college teammate, Dave Glenz, and I’m convinced the only reason he tolerated me was that I liked to play gin. We’d play before the round, after the round, and from the minute our plane left the tarmac until we landed in the next city. Dave said gin rummy took his mind off golf, that it relaxed him, but I never quite bought that. He was every bit as intense playing three-across for quarters as he was standing over a $10,000 putt. And far more emotional. Many of our games ended with a session of 52-card pickup. When I’d go down quickly (the move is called “dumping”), and I’d catch him “holding the store,” his response came in one of two five-word bursts: either, “Luckiest (fill in a highly insulting polysyllabic word here) I’ve ever seen!” or “You gotta be s%@*in’ me!”

In fact, that’s the standard response. As far as I can tell from my meticulous research on the subject, no one has ever lost a hand of gin rummy simply because he played poorly.

If I had to report at the Pearly Gates on the net result of my gin rummy marathons with Glenz, I’d say without blinking that I beat him like a red-headed stepchild. But if you asked Dave, I’m certain he’d tell you it was no contest the other way. That’s true of all gin players. They lie more than golfers.

Legend has it that in the 1950s and ’60s, PGA Tour stars Doug Sanders and Al Besselink made more money playing gin rummy than golf. They made such a practice of fleecing country club members and corporate mucky-mucks that Tour officials banned the pros from playing gin at the host courses. Sponsors and bluebloods don’t mind taking lessons on the course, but getting drawn and quartered at gin rummy was an overdose of humility. Shortly after his Tour career ended, Besselink moved to Las Vegas and worked in the casino business. That might tell you something.

A friend in the Pacific Northwest told me his first marriage broke up over his wife’s poor gin rummy tactics in partnership tournaments. “That woman was a notorious art collector,” he said. “She’d hang on to her face cards more than halfway through the deck. I tried to tell her the game was just like basketball, that a certain amount of offense was great, but championships were always won with defense. She never got the drift. She’d invariably lose 60 points to a late gin because of all the Rembrandts she was caught with. And she’d always whine, ‘But Honey, if I’d only drawn the king of spades, he’d have been history.’”

But why did such a seemingly minor flaw — the inability to master the subtleties of a card game — end their marriage?
“We got in an argument one night after we’d lost two hundred dollars in a couples game,” he said. “I told her unless she could lighten up on the face cards, and occasionally cook an edible meal, I was gonna put her on waivers. She filed for divorce the next day.”

According to the late expert Oswald Jacoby, gin rummy is the only popular card game with a club history. It was introduced in 1910 at the Knickerbocker Whist Club in New York City by Elwood Baker, who demanded another sort of contest while he was cut out of a bridge game. He called it gin because the game from which it was derived — Knock Rummy — was named after another popular alcoholic drink. The fact that the game was spawned by an outcast and took on the name of two alcoholic beverages probably says more about the true nature of gin rummy than any anecdotes.
You won’t find a lot of gin rummy in the lockers room of the PGA Tour these days. Players are either in the fitness trailer or meditating with their golf psychologist.

It’s a damn shame, if you ask me. FG