Big Crowds Not In The Cards For Cribbage

Spokane has certainly arrived as a sports mecca.

One weekend we get Olympic wrestlers. The next weekend it’s world-class ice skaters.

And on Sunday, had you a mind to, you could have gone to the smoky Valley Eagles hall to watch some true legends of the game slug it out in the finals of a nationally ranked tournament.

Not many did. Unfortunately, we’re talking cribbage here.

“This isn’t much of a spectator’s sport,” concedes Milwaukee’s Bob Julian, the 1994 national cribbage champ who is on a card-playing romp to recapture the title this year.

“I was in one final where the only people left in the room was me and the person I was playing for the championship.”

Dating back to 17th-century England, cribbage is a card game where players try to be first to hop their pegs 121 holes around a board. Most people learned to play with their grandparents or on rainy days at summer camp.

Tournament-tough members who compete in the American Cribbage Congress, however, pursue the game with the unbridled devotion of sports professionals.

Julian, for example, travels to 35 tournaments a year. He has either won or nailed the runner-up spot in the last three tournaments, especially amazing considering the retired business executive is 76 years old.

On Sunday, the snow-haired, affable man furthered his reputation and national points lead with a second at the Greater Spokane Open, the city’s first national cribbage contest.

But let’s be honest. The public won’t be racing to see Spokane’s second national cribbage contest, either.

If only Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back while adding up his crib, instead of holding aces and eights, the game would have stolen some of the romance and mythology of poker.

As it stands, however, there’d have to be an ESPN 17 before cribbage players get TV coverage.

There’s not even much money in it. Other than the Reno tournament, which pays $10,000 for first place, the cash prizes at cribbage contests are generally pretty sparse.

So what motivates these people to give up their lives week after week for so little glory or payoff?

“It’s an obsession, I guess,” says DeLynn Colvert, 64. “It would have to be. This is the toughest sport in America with the thinnest profit margin.”

Two-time national champ, seven-time All-American, the nation’s highest-ranked player and member of the Cribbage Hall of Fame, Missoula’s Colvert is the Mickey Mantle of his game.

He edits Cribbage World magazine and has sold 14,000 copies of “Play Winning Cribbage,” the book he wrote in 1980, when he began traveling the tournament circuit.

Since then, the technical illustrator has put 600,000 miles on his cars getting from match to match. One part of Colvert’s schedule this summer will see him drive coast to coast in four days.

“These things have pegged a million holes,” he says, holding up two well-worn cribbage pegs.

Pool sharks carry custom cues in long leather cases. Cribbage sharks keep their teensy custom pegs in pouches small enough to tuck in a pocket.

Julian says the camaraderie and friendships he’s made around the country keep him going. “Everybody wants to be good at something and I found out I was pretty good at this,” adds the man whose father and uncle taught him to play at age 8.

Perhaps if cribbage had more of a dark, seamy reputation - like pool or shooting craps - it would attract wider interest.

Trouble is, it’s just too darn wholesome. “Never even seen a fistfight,” says Colvert.

It’s a safe bet Tom Cruise will never make a movie about a cribbage hustler.

, DataTimes